CRACKING PEOPLE UP WHILE BEING SERIOUS
A funny thing happened on the way to The Big Short, Adam McKay’s skewering of the global economic fandango of 2007-08. The guiding wit behind Anchorman, Step Brothers and a host of other biting comic entertainments opted to approach the monetarily meltdown as a drama with funny moments, rather than the other way around. He felt no temptation at all to make broad satire out of The Big Short, which is understandable if you consider the grim subject. Adapted from the book by Moneyball’s Michael Lewis and starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Brad Pitt, the movie shows how oddball investors exploited the subprime mortgage debacle that ultimately cost millions of people their homes, jobs and savings. “Initially, I was even more dramatic about it,” McKay recalls in an interview during a recent Toronto visit. “The more I dug into it, the more I started realizing the first half of this story is kind of fun . . . So I just tried to let the story tell me what the tone was and in that sense it was incredibly freeing. I wasn’t going to look for laughs, but I also wasn’t going to fight them if they were there.” McKay talked about finding comedy in misery, teaching arcane terms by insane methods and why anger is like the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”: One thing I really like about The Big Short is that it assumes the audience has a brain. There’s a lot of complicated money talk in it. I love it! These are my favourite kinds of movies. We had some great actors, we had great characters, we certainly had the fall of the economy, and we said, “You know what? Let’s do it. Let’s explain this s--t.” Once I understood it, I suspected that other people could understand it. Because I’m a college dropout English major who knows nothing about economics and I just started researching and I was like, “This isn’t that hard, really!” Once you connect the dots it’s just moving debt and capital around, that’s all it is, and giving it weird names. That’s all we do. Where did the idea come to have Gosling’s character and also celebrity guests explain the more arcane jargon to camera? It was my very first thought when I was done reading the book. The only reason to do this book is you have to explain it to people. All the other Wall Street movies don’t explain it. They just go, “Something’s bad happening, and look what it did to these peoples’ characters!” The book is such a di- vine combination of amazing character storytelling and information. And then I wanted the explainers to be part of the pop culture that had distracted us from this issue. Because I wanted to track what we were thinking about rather than not paying attention to this. Did you feel a sense of anger or righteousness in exposing how the subprime mortgage insanity of 2007 helped cause the global economic turmoil of 2008? It’s kind of impossible not to. It’s sort of like playing a melody line on a guitar, where you don’t really have an emotional feeling at first. But then suddenly the melody line is “Eleanor Rigby.” And you’re like, I feel a little sad! But I actually fought this reaction. I actually tried for this movie to be a little bit more reporting: This is the story, this is what happened, this is all true, what you’re seeing in the movie. And the sheer force of it brings about that anger out of the characters and it really is just the mechanics of it. And yet there are a lot of funny lines and moments in the film. Where you disappointed when you heard people laughing at preview screenings? No, just surprised. We walked out and I was like, “That was interesting!” And my editor was like, “Wow! They were really laughing!” We talked about lines they laughed about and why they were laughing. We screened the movie a lot, and it seemed to be having a conversation with the audience. It was very important to feel that give and take, and then there’d be audiences that wouldn’t laugh as much. We even had one audience that hardly laughed at all, but in the end (on score cards) they liked the movie better than some of the ones that had been laughing. Did this experience teach you anything about comedy? Yes, and it’s something I want to keep pursuing. I was amazed that you could do this cinéma vérité style of shooting and still get laughs, because the rule is you always keep your camera still when you do comedy to let the performer and the logic take over. Boy, didn’t seem to be a problem in this! The interview has been edited and condensed.