'Don't Look Up' director Adam McKay finds a way to laugh at the end of the world

Adam McKay nearly walked away from "Don't Look Up" once the pandemic hit. 

The Oscar-winning writer and director, who helped shape the face of comedy over the last 20 years with his films "Anchorman," "Step Brothers" and later "The Big Short" and "Vice," was finished with his script and ready to start shooting the apocalyptic satire — think of it as "Armageddon" meets "Idiocracy" — before COVID-19 delayed the production's April 2020 start date.

Then as the pandemic played out on the world stage, McKay saw how uncomfortably close his script — which set out to lampoon the reaction to a cataclysmic, world-ending disaster — was to real life events.

"I wasn't even sure we were going to do the movie," says McKay, on the phone last week from New York, just days before the film's gala premiere. "I was home with my wife and two daughters in quarantine, and I was watching large tracks of the movie happen in reality, over and over. And the cast and my producers were texting me saying, 'Oh my God, did you see this just happen? That's right out of the movie!' And then the peak of it was when the president of the United States, regardless of who you voted for, we could all admit it was pretty insane when he floated the idea of ingesting bleach to deal with a virus. So that was where I'm like, 'Oh my God. How do you parody that?'" 

He found a way, and now "Don't Look Up" — which stars a huge ensemble cast that includes Leondardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Tyler Perry, Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande and Ron Perlman — opens in theaters Friday and hits Netflix on Dec. 24. 

The 53-year-old McKay's breakthrough on going forward with the movie came when he looked at the script with new eyes through the lens of what the world had experienced — and continues to experience — during the pandemic.  

"I realized the movie was really about how we've broken our lines of communication through click culture and privatized media, and that's really what it's about," says McKay. "It was cool to pick up the script and read it and see it in a totally different way. And I was like, you know, I think we can do this. The only change I made was I had to cut some stuff — I had a thing about how the comet spending bill had a tax break for the 1% in it, and then, sure enough, through the previous administration, the first COVID spending bill had a tax break for the top one percent — and then make other parts of the script a little crazier." 

In the film, DiCaprio and Lawrence play a pair of Michigan State University astronomers who discover a comet hurtling toward Earth that will end all life in 6½ months. (McKay calls the university's depiction "flattering," and the two Spartys are essentially the heroes of the story.) 

PREVIOUSLY: Sparty on: 'Don't Look Up' director talks 'flattering' use of MSU

When they try to warn the government and the media, their message falls on deaf ears, and the movie becomes a sendup of modern media, today's politics and the way we distract ourselves with meaningless television, memes and bogus conspiracy theories rather than listening to science and taking action. 

The film's initial seeds were planted from McKay's own anxiety about the climate crisis, a looming catastrophe that we're pretending, in large part, isn't happening. While discussing the fact that no one is talking about it, a friend made an offhand remark that a comet could be on a collision course with Earth and no one would care, "and I was like, that's the movie," McKay says. 

For the director, Mike Judge's 2006 film "Idiocracy" — a hilarious yet scathing look at the dumbing down of our culture that has only become more prophetic over the last 15 years — was a major influence. 

"I think the movie is a masterpiece," says McKay, who was among the few who saw "Idiocracy" during its micro release in theaters. (The movie opened in just 130 theaters nationwide and grossed $444,000 at the North American box office, but later found an audience on DVD and from showings on cable.) 

"I think what (Judge) really hit is the cascading quality of a culture and collapse, and how it builds upon itself," he says. "When you start profitizing certain poor behaviors or destructive behaviors, profits build profits build profits, and culture builds cultural builds culture, and I thought he really nailed it with that. And it has been horrifying seeing bits from his movie — which is far more dystopic than 'Don't Look Up' — come true. It's really incredible." 

McKay was born in Colorado but raised in the Boston area, the only child of a waitress mother and a musician father. After college — he attended Penn State and later Temple University — he found his footing in comedy, and in 1990 he was a founding member of the renowned comedy troupe Upright Citizen's Brigade, along with future "Saturday Night Live" stars Amy Poehler and Horatio Sanz.

He eventually became a head writer at "SNL" in the mid-'90s but he's always admired work outside of comedy. He says the first movies that hooked him as a child were "Planet of the Apes" and "The Man Who Would Be King," and he was later thrown for a loop by David Lynch's unsettling neo-noir "Blue Velvet." "David Lynch might be my absolute favorite filmmaker," says the father of two, who has been married to Shira Piven — sister of actor Jeremy Piven — for 22 years.

That appreciation for drama helped him transition from bro comedies (along with "Anchorman" and "Step Brothers," he also helmed "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," "The Other Guys" and 2013's "Anchorman 2") to more serious fare, starting with the mortgage crisis comedy "The Big Short" in 2016 and continuing with 2018's Dick Cheney smackdown "Vice." (Both "The Big Short" and "Vice" earned him Academy Award nominations for writing and directing; he picked up a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the former.) 

Taking on more adult-themed subject matter "didn't feel like a radical transformation," says McKay who, along with his former creative partner Will Ferrell, is an executive producer of HBO's "Succession." "I come from an improv background and Del Close, the famous improv teacher, always pushed to be serious, or to be intelligent, or to be sincere, even when you're doing comedy. Do the best you can, play at the top of your intelligence, even when you're being dumb: that's what he would always say, and that's what I've always gone by. So it felt much more gradual and comfortable than you would think."

"Don't Look Up" continues that path, taking a very serious topic and playing it for laughs. There's even a bit of catharsis in its timing, McKay says, coming as we're still very much in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

"We realized there was something enjoyable about getting laughs after this craziness we've been through, and we all felt like we kind of wanted to process what was happening, and that to do it through comedy would be a really good thing," McKay says.   

Since it was a doomsday scenario that got him thinking about "Don't Look Up" in the first place, how does McKay feel now that the film is behind him?  

"I'm both pessimistic and hopeful," he says. "I think it's going to take a lot more pain, but once the action does kick in, the resources are there. Science is a superpower, we just need to use it." 

And in the meantime, find a way to laugh. 

agraham@detroitnews.com

@grahamorama

'Don't Look Up'

Rated R: for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content

Running time: 1 minutes

In theaters Friday, on Netflix Dec. 24