File:Don't Look Up.jpg

Don't Look Up

December 2021

Leonardo DiCaprio

Interviewed about his new film "Don't Look Up"

"He (director Adam McKay) is taking a real chance with this film. It’s really a very tough tight rope to manage from a cinematic perspective. I've been looking for a project to do about climate change for decades now. But it's nearly impossible to do something with that narrative and he cracked the code by creating this sense of urgency and tension and seeing the hysteria with all of our characters - these scientists, these politicians, the media - trying to react to what do we do to survive. And he did it within a six-month time period as opposed to a climate movie, which could only be throughout decades."

DiCaprio, speaking of his many years as a climate activist and his work with many scientists on his climate documentaries, says he built on their emotions in portraying Randall Mindy. He mentions Jennifer Lawrence's portrayal of his grad student, Kate Dibiasky, in the film and how she talks 'to the truth' like Greta Thunberg, as climate scientists have difficulties explaining the truths and facts of the science: "Scientists get frustrated when they have to try to articulate their life's work and science and urgency about a certain issue on what's going to happen to all of us. [Adam McKay] had these seeds within the script of him having anxiety, taking Xanax constantly, also becoming a Fauciesque figure that tries to work within this insane political system.... I try to work with the private sector, the powers that be, and sort of lose my way. Whereas Kate's character is more like Greta Thunberg - who just speaks loudly and openly and consistently and tries to penetrate to the truth."

○

A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse

With “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay makes a star-studded allegorical satire that shows the news media whistling past the climate-change graveyard

New York Times Film Review by Ben Smith

December 12, 2021

@benyt / https://twitter.com/benyt

What makes “Don’t Look Up” interesting is that its writer and director, Adam McKay, is putting his money, and his career, where his mouth is.

“Don’t Look Up” has a raft of stars — the president is played by Meryl Streep — and the familiar arc of big-budget disaster flicks like “Armageddon” or “The Day After Tomorrow.” But while all of Mr. McKay’s films have been attuned to the intertwined roles of media and politics...

The new opus shows Mr. McKay as “one of America’s most incisive media critics, even if he’s not necessarily recognized that way,” said David Sirota, a co-producer of the film, who is better known as a combative journalist who advised Senator Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign and now runs The Daily Poster, an investigative news site.

Mr. McKay said he tried five different ideas that would allow him to make a movie about the climate crisis, but nothing worked. “How do you tell this story, the biggest story in 66 million years, without exaggeration, since the Chicxulub comet, bigger than the Black Plague, bigger than Krakatoa?” he said in an interview, describing the question that kept him up at night.

“How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history,” he continued, “but most nights I’m not hearing it talked about — or when it is being talked about, it’s in the fourth block, or the ninth story down?”

He hit on the solution while talking one night in January 2019 with Mr. Sirota, who was venting about the news media’s passive reaction to climate change, saying it was as though a meteor was headed for earth and no one seemed to get it. Soon, the two were texting plot points back and forth.

“Don’t Look Up” is populated by politicians and Silicon Valley madmen denying reality for their own reasons, behaving in ways that are recognizably self-interested and deluded. But the real villain is a news media that is forever chasing after a distracted audience and, as a result, simply … cannot … focus...

When it comes to the climate story, the media’s failings are undeniable, and there is still a wide gap between the urgency and the attention it commands. However, the journalism on the topic has grown more urgent in tone and more widely seen over the last few years. It’s harder-edged, more numerate and more closely connected to the floods, fires and December tornadoes that have upended millions of people’s lives.

But great satire amplifies obvious truths, and there’s no doubt that “Don’t Look Up” contains those moments of recognition. David Roberts, the author of the clean energy newsletter Volts, called it “the first good movie about climate change.”

○

More:

"If the world wasn’t such a careening, shifting, shaking, distorted, bizarre place right now, I would happily go back to making comedies..." -- Adam McKay

Adam McKay Is Tired of Our Climate-Politics Garbage Fire

• https://newrepublic.com/article/164691/adam-mckay-climate-politics-dont-look-up

How Adam McKay’s near-death experience led to ‘Don’t Look Up’

• https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/awards/story/2021-12-14/adam-mckay-the-envelope-podcast

○