Volts podcast: "Don't Look Up" director Adam McKay on the challenges of making movies about climate change Volts

In this episode, writer and director Adam McKay reflects on the critical and audience reaction to his movie Don’t Look Up. We also talk about making an emotional connection to climate change, some of the other climate-related projects he’s working on (or at least thinking about), and why he ended the movie the way he did.
Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Adam McKay, January 12, 2022
(PDF version)
David Roberts:
The film Don’t Look Up, available on Netflix as of late last month, has become something of a phenomenon. It has drawn wildly varying, often quite personal and intense, critical responses. Its critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 55 percent.
But climate scientists loved it. I loved it. And the public loved it. Its audience score is 78 percent. In the week of December 27, it broke a Netflix record, with more than 152 million hours of streaming. As of this week, it the second biggest movie ever on the streaming service (just behind Red Notice, just ahead of Bird Box).
Audiences have ignored critics and embraced the film, which is not something you’d necessarily predict for a thinly veiled climate change allegory about the difficulty of grappling with bad news in today’s information environment, especially one with such a (spoiler alert) bleak ending.
It’s not the first successful curveball thrown by its writer and director, Adam McKay. McKay first made a name for himself as head writer on Saturday Night Live. In the early 2000s, he formed a production company with partner Will Ferrell and wrote and directed a string of beloved comedies, from 2004’s Anchorman through 2010’s The Other Guys.
But in 2015, he took a turn, writing and directing an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, about the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. It, too, was an unexpected hit, scoring McKay an Academy Award for adapted screenplay. His 2018 film Vice, about Dick Cheney, scored Oscar nominations for picture, director, and original screenplay.
He has demonstrated that, despite what the chattering class often seems to believe, audiences are hungry to confront real issues. All along, he has wanted to find a way to make a movie about climate change. With Don’t Look Up, he finally figured out how.
I’m delighted to get a chance to talk to him, to hear about what he makes of the movie’s critical reception, what his other ideas for climate movies are, and how he navigates the politics of speaking out on serious issues from inside Hollywood.
Welcome, Adam McKay, to Volts.
Adam McKay:  
Thank you, Mr. Roberts, for having me. I've been an admirer of your work for a long time, an avid reader of your writing, and it is a pleasure to be here.
David Roberts:   
Thanks, I'm an avid watcher of your movies. So we have a mutual fan club here.
[Don’t Look Up] has been out on Netflix for a couple of weeks, so we've had enough time now for you to gather some feedback. Let's start with the fact that this movie has gotten more streams than anything in Netflix history. Did I read that right? 
Adam McKay:  
It's a bit crazy. I was shocked by the response from audiences. Netflix uses viewing hours now as their metric — they used to use accounts that signed on, but viewing hours is a more accurate number — and we had the most amount of viewing hours in any single week of any release Netflix has ever put out. 
I understand we're about to pass Bird Box as the number two all-time movie [on Netflix], and we've got a chance to be number one, who knows. 
David Roberts:
Who's number one?
Adam McKay:
It's a movie called Red Notice that just came out. It stars The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot. If you had told me that our ridiculous-slash-dark climate satire would be contending with Ryan Reynolds, The Rock, and Gal Gadot in an action film, I would have said, “you're nuts.” So it's pretty fantastic. 
More importantly, the moment-to-moment online responses have been incredible — just seeing people excite