December 5, 2023 • 42 mins
As we continue to explore satire we had the opportunity to sit down with Oscar Winer Adam McKay to discuss its importance. The interview was recorded on May 15th, 2023 in the height of the writers strike and before the actors strike.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Welcome to Creating Dangerously.
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Our name is taken from the Albert Camus 1957 lecture, Create Dangerously, where he said,
To create today is to create dangerously.
Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passion of an age that forgives
nothing.
In creating dangerously, we look back at those who have created dangerously to those who
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continue to do so today in an age that still forgives nothing.
I'm your host Skip Shea, so let's create dangerously.
Now one's allowed to smoke, or tell a dirty joke, and whistling is forbidden.
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If chewing on the chewed, the chewer is pursued, and in the who's cow hidden.
If any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me and it will be prohibited.
I'll put my foot down, so shall it be.
This is the land of the free.
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That was These Are the Laws of my administration from the 1933 classic political satire duck
soup with Groucho Marx singing as Rufus T. Firefly, the leader of Fredonia.
And with some political satire, it still holds true today.
Speaking of political satire today, we're going to bring in Oscar winner Adam McKay
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right now to continue our discussion on satire.
And Adam, you started the big short with a quote by Mark Twain.
So I'm going to start this with another one where Mark Twain said, against the assault
of laughter, nothing can stand.
His quote on the power of satire.
And you started a little bit with the other guys.
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But then with the big short advice and don't look up, you dove in head first with satire.
Can you explain why you decided to go that route?
Yeah, is that is sort of two reasons.
Number one, I think that Mark Twain quote is spot on.
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Laughter is the greatest truth detector.
The example I always give is years ago, 12, 12 years ago, maybe 14 years ago, Fox News
tried to do a late night comedy show.
But it just couldn't work because the jokes were about how billionaires shouldn't be taxed.
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People don't need universal healthcare.
And it's like, when you heard them try and make jokes like that, you realize how ridiculous
it is.
So they canceled it really quickly.
I think it ran like three episodes.
And it's a great example of people just can't laugh at things that don't have truth in them.
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And then the second reason I started playing around with what I was doing and sort of breaking
traditional story forms was I just became clearer and clearer that we're living in very
unusual times, that great change is barreling through civilization.
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And if I'd said that five years ago, people would have been like, calm down, but it's
interesting how I think most people would go, yeah, that's true.
Now so we really try to play with our storytelling structure, surprise audiences blend silly
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comedy with dark tragedy, because I really believe that's sort of how being alive feels
right now, both absurd and scary as hell.
So yeah, it was sort of fairly consciously those two choices were what led to what, you
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know, we're sort of doing now, whether it's with the feature films like Don't Look Up
but Short and Vice or with the shows I directed, Pilots 4 and Help Set Up Like Succession.
And documentaries were producing features like the menu, all sort of filtered through
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that kind of premise that man, do we need to laugh right now.
And we need to laugh about things that are connected to the real world.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think we need more of it.
I mean, I go back for myself to like the Marx Brothers duck soup.
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And they're absurd piece where if you miss it, I mean, but you cut every time Groucho
during the war, you cut back to Groucho, he's wearing a uniform from a different war, to
just show that this continues.
And I think you did the same thing in Vice with the Shakespeare scene.
This is a never ending story of people wanting power.
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But the only thing I messed up on with the Shakespeare scene is that's actually original,
what they're saying.
And everyone kind of assumed it was pulled from some play.
And I was like, shoot, I should have made it clear that it's actually what's in the
movie is about the Chinese.
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I should have had some contemporary references in there.
But otherwise, yes, that was kind of the idea.
It's a tale is old is the hills.
So yeah.
Do you think though that that doing this in the climate today is a dangerous thing.
And I'll go back to 2015 in Paris with the Charlie Hebdo headquarters with the shooting.
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And someone attacking, going to Nancy Pelosi's house and attacking her husband and representative
Conley's office yesterday, I think it was, with somebody went in with a baseball bat.
It seems that if you're not saying what somebody wants to hear, that there is a violent reaction
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to it now.
Well, I experienced I've had has been very different because I think what drives a lot
of this anger, frustration and sometimes outright violence.
In fact, more and more outright violence is that people just can't stand to live in a
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fiction.
And they've actually done studies on this that show that animals need a routine based
in reality and that when the routine becomes random to the animal that they suffer fast
breakdown.
And so with screening our movies for audiences all around the country, it's really remarkable
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how much they embrace them because they can tell we're trying not to bullshit them up
pardon my language.
That's right.
It's such a common term.
I don't even think of it as cursing anymore.
I'll say BS.
So we try very hard not to BS them and they really appreciate it.
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And what I've noticed is that it crosses this fictional red blue divide that we have in
our country, which is really just a lot of people having responses to a ceaseless economic
attack, ceaseless attack on our environment, on our way of life, on our safety.
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And you just see people respond differently.
And the powers that be were like, Oh, well, let's use the truck.
We're putting on people also as a means to divide them.
So we've had some remarkable screenings where it's so heartening where you see very entrenched
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Republicans, corporates, dams, left wingers, actual progressive left wingers, all like
rally around a screening we've just had.
Now, don't get me wrong, you're never going to make a movie that has 100% of the people
on board.
It's just impossible in today's world and probably ever.
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But I have noticed that that is really interesting how these movies play just because we're not
towing the prevailing fiction party line.
And you can really feel people relax and feel less pressured and laugh and sort of agree.
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I mean, we got some good reviews on don't look up from very Republican sides of the
fence, like very conservative sides of the fence.
And then we got some really good reviews from left wing sides of the fence and some really
angry reviews from corporates, centrists, dams.
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So you just kind of never know.
But the central premise is at the root of everything people really do want to connect.
They really do want the world to be better.
Maybe not Wall Street.
That might be the one exception to what I just said.
But for the most part, people really do want things to work.
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They want to connect.
They want to collaborate.
They want to be working towards a common goal.
And we've just been robbed of that for the past 20, 30 years.
Yeah, yeah, probably starts with Reagan and that error.
Yeah, yeah, which also started in the 70s with the Chamber of Commerce moving to Washington,
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D.C., the Kors family, the Koch family, Richard Melonscape, all the big money sort of faces
realizing if they didn't buy Washington, D.C., they were going to keep losing to people
like Ralph Nader and people like to deify Jimmy Carter.
But he played into some of that as well.
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I mean, don't get me wrong.
He's a good guy, but he was kind of the first neoliberal corporate is them.
But I think you come at this from a safe distance.
You're a Democratic socialist.
You're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
And the fact that with Bernie is the fact that I really believe that he literally did
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speak to everyone to the point where they had to figure out a way to get rid of him.
But you don't come from, you're not wearing a blue or a red shirt, I guess is what I'm
saying.
So it's easier to listen to you say these things than I think than other people.
It's kind of true.
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I mean, my operating theory is that the red versus blue fight is professional wrestling.
It's a charade.
And if you really look at the actions of both parties, it's very hard to distinguish them.
Now don't get me wrong.
There are extreme right wing elements that do want to go towards authoritarianism that
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do want violent uprising.
I would just say it's much smaller than the corporate.
Corporate media would have you believe that it's really a very small percentage of the
population.
I mean, the January 6 was terrifying.
But one thing no one ever talks about is there weren't that many people there for that being
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the big event of QAnon in the extreme right.
The turnout wasn't great.
If it had been bigger, it could have turned into a full revolution.
But I really just believe it's a fiction.
It's designed for both parties to accept anything they do because you're afraid of what the
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other party is going to do.
And it's a circular firing squad.
And it's worked fantastically well to enable corruption from big capital.
But yeah, I can't stand the Democratic Party and I can't stand the RNC.
But I do believe in the people behind it.
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I think the people are much smarter than they're given credit for.
They're much more aware.
Their hopelessness is visceral when it comes to government.
And I think slowly people are going to really start to figure out the true power they have.
I hope so.
I mean, I mean, part of my notes here, and I'm laughing as I say this, is like, how did
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you not become a nihilist as you're doing all this?
You have a lot of hope here.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you just look at history.
You know, we're improving.
I mean, people forget we only got rid of monarchies like what, 300 years ago, roughly French
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Revolution.
You know, basically we started waking up to the fact that the king is actually not chosen
by God about 300 years ago, maybe 350.
That's not long.
So this whole idea of democracy, you know, we're still getting outflanked by, you know,
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manipulative media, by big money, but we are learning and growing.
And ultimately, I do think it's going to improve.
The only thing that scares the hack out of me is the climate breakdown, because that
is happening very fast.
And these money, the interest will not allow change to happen.
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I mean, the fact that carbon emissions still went up last year is really should alarm all
of us.
But once again, the good news there is if we can just break this stranglehold of big money,
we do have the science to deal with climate breakdown.
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We really have remarkable science.
It's just big money, government, big money, industry, big money media won't allow any
sort of transformative action.
Yeah.
Well, I think in, in, in don't look up, I mean, that was, that was the original intent
was to, to show the, the, you know, the true existential threat of climate change.
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But then COVID happened and it became a lot of people viewed it as, as a metaphor for
the pandemic as opposed to climate change.
And I remember having conversations with people and I was kind of struck that they, they didn't
know.
Did, how did you, did, did you hear any of that too?
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Or?
Yes.
Yeah.
So that was a really interesting thing because we were already making the movie.
It had already been written and then COVID hit and we had a discussion.
Well, man, oh man, now the movie feels a lot like COVID.
So we decided two things.
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We decided that's okay because the same broken institutions that couldn't handle COVID are
the same broken institutions that are asleep at the wheel on climate breakdown.
So we felt like it was fine that, that really the message we were saying was specifically
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about our corrupted institutions and media and culture.
And then the second thing we decided was that in the press, we were going to surrounding
the movie, we're just going to nakedly say it.
And that actually worked quite well.
They did like data research from Netflix that showed that large portions of the audience
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did get that it was climate and that even when they thought it was for COVID, that was
okay too.
I don't, I don't know if you've caught this, but you're in Massachusetts.
But Max Tagmark from MIT just did an interview where he said, don't look up please as a perfect
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allegory for the threat that AI poses.
Oh yeah.
And yeah, AI, you know, obviously is advancing way faster than once again on our media is
telling us and really the people behind it and the people that are aware of how AI works
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are very worried.
So he did a whole interview where he said that actually, I see don't look up as playing
for AI.
And I kind of realized at that point that really what don't look up is about, it's really
about our broken institutions, our broken collective culture, broken media leaders,
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industry in, and I think that's fine.
Yeah.
Sometimes you make a movie and you kind of learn what it's really about, even though
you've made it once it's released, it takes on a completely different life of its own.
Yeah, someone once said to me, you know, when you create a piece of art, once you put it
out there, you no longer own it.
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And I think that that is true.
So true.
Yeah.
But so you've since started a nonprofit, Yellow Dot Studios, you want to mention that
a little bit?
Yeah, thank you.
It's a nonprofit climate media disruption studio.
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I've got to think of a niftier way to say it than that.
That is very unwieldy.
But essentially what it is, is we're making videos, memes, ads, documentaries, anything
you can think of to take the fight to the oil companies and the profitized media.
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Because for years, they've been beaten the crap out of us with misinformation, delay
on climate.
You know, we could have solved their dealt with the climate crisis 40, 50 years ago,
but the oil companies decided to lie about it and they still are.
And they still have a tremendous hold over our elected officials through lobbying and
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dirty money and our media through advertising dollars.
So yeah, we started this studio to make materials to punch them back.
And it's been great.
It feels so good to have some way to fight back.
So we're releasing videos, memes, shorts, information, connecting with climate activists,
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organizations, scientists around the world, and just generating materials for them to
use for people to see.
And it's a blast.
If anyone wants to check it out, we have a website where you can see our videos.
You can sign up for our weekly media blast, disruptive media blast.
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We're calling it the weather above ground.
Great.
And and obviously we're a non for profit, but we tell people like the billionaires aren't
too crazy about us because we have to kind of deal with wealth inequality.
So we're kind of going the Bernie road where if anyone wants to give five bucks, 10 bucks,
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100 bucks, whatever, you can do it on the website.
And we're across all the social media platforms if anyone wants to follow, check us out.
But yeah, it's been great.
We're in week two.
So we just started.
Yeah, I saw a commercial for big money and I thought that was terrific.
I think that that's that's I mean, you've mentioned it several times and I think that
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that's that's the key is the big money.
And I and I understand that's also what average height and average build is is is tackling
in its own metaphoric way.
True.
Yeah, we're we're hoping I mean, unfortunately, or fortunately, there's a giant writer's
Guild of America strike right that so we were about to come out your way to Boston and surrounding
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the areas and start filming this movie.
But it's on hold right now, but we'll get to it at some point.
But yeah, that whole movie, I mean, it's a comedy.
It's kind of a thriller.
But at its root is showing the system of how big money takes over government and captures
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our country and other countries.
But it's it's a pretty unusual movie.
I don't want to give too much away, but it's it's definitely a comedy, but it's also a
thriller.
It's yeah, it's an interesting one.
Yeah, well, I'm looking for that.
Hopefully, you'll be shooting back in Worcester again, too.
I know you you shot some of don't look up there.
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You did indeed.
I hadn't been back to Worcester.
Oh, my gosh, like in 25 years.
It's a lot different now.
I didn't recognize it.
It was crazy.
I saw like an artisanal bread store.
Yeah, like, I mean, when I was there, there was like liquor store, maybe like black coffee
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and a diner and then some fast food, you know, fried food places.
And that was about it.
And I couldn't believe how different it looked.
I actually we went by my old house and it seems like the town is really doing great
has really found a new gear.
Yeah, it seems to have, although it's mostly, you know, pharmaceutical money.
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But but but but it has it's right.
I've lived in this area my entire life and and it's it's changed dramatically.
I mean, somebody once said to me, if you really wanted to make a gritty 70s New York movie,
shoot it in Worcester.
But you can't say that anymore.
It has a much better feel to it.
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But I want to jump back to to I had to bring the Worcester piece up.
But I wanted to.
Yeah, of course, Worcester strong.
Jump back to the corporate media because and I think this is again, the importance of what
you're doing, because it's at some point the place where everybody got their their news
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was was, you know, on the comedy channels, because you couldn't get any place else where
someone would tell you the truth.
And I'm, you know, referring mostly to John Stuart, he kicked it all off.
Because fighting disinformation when there's that much money behind it with corporate media,
it's a huge challenge.
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I mean, that's me, you know, when I was waffling on nihilism, I'm like, how do you how do you
beat that?
You know, it's it's there's two things.
First off, it's really fun to do because there's so full of it.
It's so exposed that it's actually not hard to kind of flip them and make them look ridiculous.
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And that exposure, the fact that they have to live in a world of BS and fictions and
double speak and attitude over reality means that they really will always lose to ultimately
they can kind of overwhelm you with volume and the sort of cultural consensus, the false
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cultural consensus that our corporate media has created around itself, sort of the cultural
gatekeepers, the pundits, the op ed, I mean, they're all sort of part of that same financial
or that same cultural economy.
So you know, you kind of learn, you know, sometimes early on, I was surprised by how
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thick it was.
And I was surprised by how prevalent it was.
And you just kind of keep learning.
It's also getting much worse.
It was way different 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
And it's it's really someone said that America is the most friend of mine was saying in a
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PC wrote that America is the most propagandized country in the world.
And I think most isn't really the perfect word.
I think it's that we have the best propaganda.
I mean, our propaganda is it's so good that it's almost delicious to be lied to in America.
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I mean, it's everyone knows fast food restaurants are terrible.
Man, their commercials, the colors on the side, the promise they give you is almost
a meal unto itself.
And that's kind of what America has just done across the board.
But the second you touch it or push it or tip it, there's really nothing there.
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And I think that will continue to build momentum.
We'll never do it by ourselves with yellow dot, but we definitely want to be a part of
it.
Yeah, do I do I think you I think you're a big part of it.
I mean, like, you know, again, and I'm going to say you, maybe Sasha Baron Cohen, you know,
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John Stuart are the ones who are who are shining the light right now and through Santa
because I it seems that that comedy and into a lesser extent horror makes it safe for people
to talk about things.
I mean, if you look at like Jordan Peele's work, it shows you something that's happening
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a step removed, where I think people are a little bit more comfortable to and maybe a
little bit more open to discussing it afterwards.
What is actually happening is true.
I mean, you know, we have a podcast called death on the lot that's coming out.
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And it's a sequel to another podcast we call we did called death at the wing.
And basically what we do is we look at a space of deaths that occur around a certain industry
or or society.
And we question like, why did this happen in this small time frame?
So the new season is about there was a period in Hollywood in the 40s, 50s into the early
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60s, where a lot of stars and directors and producers died through various reasons.
And one of the people we look at not because he passed away at an early age, but we look
at Rod Serling, who ran into exactly as you probably know, skip ran into exactly the problem
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we're talking about, he wanted to do a Playhouse 90s style TV show about the lynching of Emmett
Till and the advertisers stepped in.
And it's really one of the first times that the advertisers did this because TV was still
very new in the 1950s.
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And they said, you can't do that.
We won't advertise our products if you go at something like lynching and racism.
And Rod Serling wrote an op ed, I think it was in New York Times saying, Hey, everyone,
this is a problem.
Like this is censorship through, you know, capitalism, through the profanization.
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And you know, of course, people talked about it for half a day and then everyone forgot
about it.
So he realized if he was going to do these stories, he had to turn them into allegories
and he created the Twilight Zone.
So we talk about this in this new podcast we have coming out.
And the question we have is like, wow, that's incredible that Rod Serling did that.
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It's very clever.
It's very resourceful.
But ultimately, is it still a defeat?
Is it still a capitulation?
Because you know, there's a lot of people when you speak in the allegory, you leave
behind.
There's a lot of people that, you know, explicit language has a real power to it.
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I mean, you look at a play like Waiting for Lefty, you look at a movie like A Face in
the Crowd.
You're very explicit stories that were saying what they are.
Or even recently, the Iranian filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, his new movie, No Bears.
Oh my God, it's so good.
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And he toys with explicit, you know, talking about what you're talking about.
And then he kind of mixes some allegory in.
And so that's something with Yellow Dot and a lot of what I've been doing lately where
I take great pleasure.
It feels like a release to just say things nakedly because it's been so long since we've
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collectively done it.
Wow.
That's true.
And are we collectively doing it, I guess, is the question.
I mean, that's the problem, I think.
Or, you know, again, I'm hoping, I'm turning to you for hope, I guess.
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Well, I really think we can each do it.
This is another thing that sort of robbed us of a lot of our power.
You talk to anyone who's in marketing or advertising, big, the high level marketing and advertising.
You know what they all get paid billions and I think it's a $60 billion industry a year
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in the US.
A money be higher now, advertising.
All they're trying to do is replicate word of mouth.
But word of mouth is still the most powerful force for selling a product, a movie, a political
movement.
So I tell people when they're like, God, the climate is so overwhelming.
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It's so overwhelming.
What do I do?
And I was like, honestly, just talk about it.
Like bring it up.
And it's really shocking how much momentum it could cause and how it can take people
to the next step.
So the thing I constantly say is like, look, there's three stories that we're living in
right now is three realities that are kind of affecting everything.
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Number one, you know, big global money, swamped governments all around the world, swamped
media, swamped cultures all around the world.
And number two, the climate is breaking down and a freakish fast pace because of fossil
fuels and greenhouse gas emissions that were not cutting at fast enough pace.
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And then number three, most people are traumatized because they're under constant predatory economic
attack.
Their environment has gotten more violent, less stable.
Basically those three realities.
And if you look at everything through those three realities, it works pretty well.
I mean, there's no way to look at everything in a way that's the same and it works all
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the time, but those three realities.
And so I just try and like talk about those three realities whenever I talk to friends,
family, friends I haven't seen in a while.
And I don't bring it up in a way that's a bummer.
It's just that like, if we're going to live in reality, we have to talk, you know, we
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have to communicate in that reality that we're living in.
And so much of the way we're used to talking from the past 40, 50 years is just a fictional
world that no longer exists.
So yeah, the thing I tell everyone like, what can I do about climate?
What can I do about all this, you know, grotesque money that's corrupted everything?
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And I'm just like, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, bring it up casually, make
a joke about it.
Act like everyone knows.
And it's really, really incredible the difference it can make.
Okay.
Well, I think that's the perfect note to end on to get everyone out there to talk about
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this.
Because that's what we're hopefully we're doing here as well.
Because it's these are daunting times.
And I, you know, I just revisited all of your movies again, you know, before this.
And I even like even the, at the end of vice went when unapologetically Dick Cheney, you
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know, tells us what he thinks.
I still walked away with a sense of hope.
Because it was exposed.
You know, you know, you still have fresh in your mind to the people, the names of the
people that he had tortured.
He didn't do anything to really protect us.
He did things to line his pockets.
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And just walking away from that afterwards, again, I was struck about it how I felt positive
about it.
That here it is here.
The truth is just right there, you know, for all of us to see.
And so I thank you for that.
It is one of your the best stories, Kip.
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So I, you know, we made that movie and it was very divisive.
Some people loved it.
Some people hated it, whatever.
And later Christian Bale told me a story.
He said he had a friend who was at like a big media party in Washington, DC.
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And Dick Cheney was there.
And the friend went up to Dick Cheney and said, Oh, hello, Mr. Vice President.
I'm actually friends with Christian Bale.
Is there anything you want me to tell him?
And Cheney looked at him and he said, you tell that guy, he's a dick.
And the friend of Bale's thought he was kidding because he was saying, Dick, like his name
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and thought he was kind of me.
And then the, so the friend laughed and Dick Cheney looked at him like stone cold and said,
I'm not kidding.
You tell him that.
So Bale told me that story and I was like, we got to him.
We got to him because the real truth of Cheney is everyone will tell you, we did tons of
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research.
He loves his daughter.
He loves his family.
He's a good dad.
He cooks for the family.
Now don't get me wrong.
He does monstrous things outside of it, but that's the center of them.
And that's the justification and the real truth is because of his power, hungry, cold
nature, he broke apart his family.
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His daughters stopped talking to each other and he greatly injured one of his daughters.
And that's the personal tragedy of Dick Cheney that we discovered.
And so I heard that story.
So you're right.
Like, you know, it was a divisive movie, blah, blah, blah.
But when I heard that, I was like, every bit of it was worth it.
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No one gets away.
Everyone has to live with themselves inside and he knows it's true.
Yeah.
No, right.
Yeah, right.
The truth.
Well, I'm glad to know right that the truth got to him outside of, you know, his exterior,
(37:46):
his wealth.
Because it seemed, I mean, it seems that's what all of this is done for.
It's funny when you and I know, I know I said I'd wrap up when you, you said other countries,
it's the same in other countries.
We, my wife and I just bought a tiny little place in Italy, like cheaper than a car.
It's cheaper than a car.
Because we, this was after the circuit where we're in Scandinavia, which is about 35 miles
(38:10):
northeast of Rome.
It's olive oil country.
It's gorgeous.
But you know, as soon as we get there, right, they, they, they'll, they elect prime minister
from Mussolini's old party.
We're like, what the hell?
We're trying to get away from here and it's worse in Italy.
(38:31):
But the Italians seem to roll with it a lot better.
Yeah, I got it.
Last thing it's fun to talk to you, but last thing is so for any of your listeners who
don't know skip how to roll in the other guy's place, a bus driver.
And do you know where I wrote the other guys?
I wrote it in Sienna, Italy, because we had the movie all lined up at Sony and the entire
(38:59):
economy crashed.
It was the housing market crash and all of a sudden Sony got gun shy and started hitting
me with tons of notes.
Well, we had a vacation planned in Italy.
And if this movie was going to happen, I had to do this giant rewrite on our vacation.
So I stayed in a hotel room in Sienna.
(39:22):
We wrote all night, we'd get three hours of sleep, meet my family, and then we go do
our vacation.
And then I repeated that process about two dozen times.
Good news was we got it there.
Got greenlit.
We made the movie.
But yeah, Sienna is a great town too.
If you get a chance.
Oh yeah.
(39:43):
So you're there for the horse race?
No, unfortunately, everyone talked about it.
But it's the same.
But no, it's cool for people who don't know it's a middle ages city that is still functional.
It's not like all tourist stuff.
Like it's a functioning living, breathing middle, you know, ninth century CE city.
(40:09):
It's really, really cool.
Yeah, but one of the churches has the actual head of St. Catherine on display.
It's kind of a creepy place too.
All right, well, Adam, thank you very much for coming on.
I know we overstayed and I really appreciate that.
(40:32):
And I look forward to your future work.
And we absolutely look forward to you coming back and shooting in Massachusetts.
Yeah, well, hopefully we'll see each other when I'm there.
You have to come by, Seth.
And what an enjoyable conversation, Skip.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks.
(40:53):
All right, bye.
Be well.
May I have your attention, please?
I think you all remember the bargain we made about staying all night.
No such luck, Vincent.
It sounds like way too much fun, which has been outlawed by Rufus T. Firefly.
Hail, hail, Fredonia indeed.
(41:18):
Thanks for joining us today, folks.
Our opening and closing themes are by Shane Ivers, creating dangerously a monthly podcast
as a production of the Shawna E. Shay Memorial Foundation Inc.
A 501C3 charitable organization.
All views and opinions expressed in creating dangerously are not necessarily those of the
(41:38):
Shawna Foundation and its affiliates.
Not that we have any.
They are only the opinions of the hosts and the guests.
See you next month.
And remember, keep creating dangerously.
Welcome to Creating Dangerously.
(00:25):
Our name is taken from the Albert Camus 1957 lecture, Create Dangerously, where he said,
To create today is to create dangerously.
Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passion of an age that forgives
nothing.
In creating dangerously, we look back at those who have created dangerously to those who
(00:46):
continue to do so today in an age that still forgives nothing.
I'm your host Skip Shea, so let's create dangerously.
Now one's allowed to smoke, or tell a dirty joke, and whistling is forbidden.
(01:17):
If chewing on the chewed, the chewer is pursued, and in the who's cow hidden.
If any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me and it will be prohibited.
I'll put my foot down, so shall it be.
This is the land of the free.
(01:37):
That was These Are the Laws of my administration from the 1933 classic political satire duck
soup with Groucho Marx singing as Rufus T. Firefly, the leader of Fredonia.
And with some political satire, it still holds true today.
Speaking of political satire today, we're going to bring in Oscar winner Adam McKay
(01:58):
right now to continue our discussion on satire.
And Adam, you started the big short with a quote by Mark Twain.
So I'm going to start this with another one where Mark Twain said, against the assault
of laughter, nothing can stand.
His quote on the power of satire.
And you started a little bit with the other guys.
(02:21):
But then with the big short advice and don't look up, you dove in head first with satire.
Can you explain why you decided to go that route?
Yeah, is that is sort of two reasons.
Number one, I think that Mark Twain quote is spot on.
(02:42):
Laughter is the greatest truth detector.
The example I always give is years ago, 12, 12 years ago, maybe 14 years ago, Fox News
tried to do a late night comedy show.
But it just couldn't work because the jokes were about how billionaires shouldn't be taxed.
(03:11):
People don't need universal healthcare.
And it's like, when you heard them try and make jokes like that, you realize how ridiculous
it is.
So they canceled it really quickly.
I think it ran like three episodes.
And it's a great example of people just can't laugh at things that don't have truth in them.
(03:37):
And then the second reason I started playing around with what I was doing and sort of breaking
traditional story forms was I just became clearer and clearer that we're living in very
unusual times, that great change is barreling through civilization.
(03:59):
And if I'd said that five years ago, people would have been like, calm down, but it's
interesting how I think most people would go, yeah, that's true.
Now so we really try to play with our storytelling structure, surprise audiences blend silly
(04:19):
comedy with dark tragedy, because I really believe that's sort of how being alive feels
right now, both absurd and scary as hell.
So yeah, it was sort of fairly consciously those two choices were what led to what, you
(04:40):
know, we're sort of doing now, whether it's with the feature films like Don't Look Up
but Short and Vice or with the shows I directed, Pilots 4 and Help Set Up Like Succession.
And documentaries were producing features like the menu, all sort of filtered through
(05:02):
that kind of premise that man, do we need to laugh right now.
And we need to laugh about things that are connected to the real world.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I think we need more of it.
I mean, I go back for myself to like the Marx Brothers duck soup.
(05:27):
And they're absurd piece where if you miss it, I mean, but you cut every time Groucho
during the war, you cut back to Groucho, he's wearing a uniform from a different war, to
just show that this continues.
And I think you did the same thing in Vice with the Shakespeare scene.
This is a never ending story of people wanting power.
(05:51):
But the only thing I messed up on with the Shakespeare scene is that's actually original,
what they're saying.
And everyone kind of assumed it was pulled from some play.
And I was like, shoot, I should have made it clear that it's actually what's in the
movie is about the Chinese.
(06:13):
I should have had some contemporary references in there.
But otherwise, yes, that was kind of the idea.
It's a tale is old is the hills.
So yeah.
Do you think though that that doing this in the climate today is a dangerous thing.
And I'll go back to 2015 in Paris with the Charlie Hebdo headquarters with the shooting.
(06:39):
And someone attacking, going to Nancy Pelosi's house and attacking her husband and representative
Conley's office yesterday, I think it was, with somebody went in with a baseball bat.
It seems that if you're not saying what somebody wants to hear, that there is a violent reaction
(06:59):
to it now.
Well, I experienced I've had has been very different because I think what drives a lot
of this anger, frustration and sometimes outright violence.
In fact, more and more outright violence is that people just can't stand to live in a
(07:24):
fiction.
And they've actually done studies on this that show that animals need a routine based
in reality and that when the routine becomes random to the animal that they suffer fast
breakdown.
And so with screening our movies for audiences all around the country, it's really remarkable
(07:50):
how much they embrace them because they can tell we're trying not to bullshit them up
pardon my language.
That's right.
It's such a common term.
I don't even think of it as cursing anymore.
I'll say BS.
So we try very hard not to BS them and they really appreciate it.
(08:13):
And what I've noticed is that it crosses this fictional red blue divide that we have in
our country, which is really just a lot of people having responses to a ceaseless economic
attack, ceaseless attack on our environment, on our way of life, on our safety.
(08:36):
And you just see people respond differently.
And the powers that be were like, Oh, well, let's use the truck.
We're putting on people also as a means to divide them.
So we've had some remarkable screenings where it's so heartening where you see very entrenched
(08:56):
Republicans, corporates, dams, left wingers, actual progressive left wingers, all like
rally around a screening we've just had.
Now, don't get me wrong, you're never going to make a movie that has 100% of the people
on board.
It's just impossible in today's world and probably ever.
(09:20):
But I have noticed that that is really interesting how these movies play just because we're not
towing the prevailing fiction party line.
And you can really feel people relax and feel less pressured and laugh and sort of agree.
(09:42):
I mean, we got some good reviews on don't look up from very Republican sides of the
fence, like very conservative sides of the fence.
And then we got some really good reviews from left wing sides of the fence and some really
angry reviews from corporates, centrists, dams.
(10:05):
So you just kind of never know.
But the central premise is at the root of everything people really do want to connect.
They really do want the world to be better.
Maybe not Wall Street.
That might be the one exception to what I just said.
But for the most part, people really do want things to work.
(10:29):
They want to connect.
They want to collaborate.
They want to be working towards a common goal.
And we've just been robbed of that for the past 20, 30 years.
Yeah, yeah, probably starts with Reagan and that error.
Yeah, yeah, which also started in the 70s with the Chamber of Commerce moving to Washington,
(10:55):
D.C., the Kors family, the Koch family, Richard Melonscape, all the big money sort of faces
realizing if they didn't buy Washington, D.C., they were going to keep losing to people
like Ralph Nader and people like to deify Jimmy Carter.
But he played into some of that as well.
(11:17):
I mean, don't get me wrong.
He's a good guy, but he was kind of the first neoliberal corporate is them.
But I think you come at this from a safe distance.
You're a Democratic socialist.
You're a Bernie Sanders supporter.
And the fact that with Bernie is the fact that I really believe that he literally did
(11:40):
speak to everyone to the point where they had to figure out a way to get rid of him.
But you don't come from, you're not wearing a blue or a red shirt, I guess is what I'm
saying.
So it's easier to listen to you say these things than I think than other people.
It's kind of true.
(12:01):
I mean, my operating theory is that the red versus blue fight is professional wrestling.
It's a charade.
And if you really look at the actions of both parties, it's very hard to distinguish them.
Now don't get me wrong.
There are extreme right wing elements that do want to go towards authoritarianism that
(12:28):
do want violent uprising.
I would just say it's much smaller than the corporate.
Corporate media would have you believe that it's really a very small percentage of the
population.
I mean, the January 6 was terrifying.
But one thing no one ever talks about is there weren't that many people there for that being
(12:51):
the big event of QAnon in the extreme right.
The turnout wasn't great.
If it had been bigger, it could have turned into a full revolution.
But I really just believe it's a fiction.
It's designed for both parties to accept anything they do because you're afraid of what the
(13:13):
other party is going to do.
And it's a circular firing squad.
And it's worked fantastically well to enable corruption from big capital.
But yeah, I can't stand the Democratic Party and I can't stand the RNC.
But I do believe in the people behind it.
(13:34):
I think the people are much smarter than they're given credit for.
They're much more aware.
Their hopelessness is visceral when it comes to government.
And I think slowly people are going to really start to figure out the true power they have.
I hope so.
I mean, I mean, part of my notes here, and I'm laughing as I say this, is like, how did
(13:58):
you not become a nihilist as you're doing all this?
You have a lot of hope here.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you just look at history.
You know, we're improving.
I mean, people forget we only got rid of monarchies like what, 300 years ago, roughly French
(14:18):
Revolution.
You know, basically we started waking up to the fact that the king is actually not chosen
by God about 300 years ago, maybe 350.
That's not long.
So this whole idea of democracy, you know, we're still getting outflanked by, you know,
(14:39):
manipulative media, by big money, but we are learning and growing.
And ultimately, I do think it's going to improve.
The only thing that scares the hack out of me is the climate breakdown, because that
is happening very fast.
And these money, the interest will not allow change to happen.
(14:59):
I mean, the fact that carbon emissions still went up last year is really should alarm all
of us.
But once again, the good news there is if we can just break this stranglehold of big money,
we do have the science to deal with climate breakdown.
(15:20):
We really have remarkable science.
It's just big money, government, big money, industry, big money media won't allow any
sort of transformative action.
Yeah.
Well, I think in, in, in don't look up, I mean, that was, that was the original intent
was to, to show the, the, you know, the true existential threat of climate change.
(15:45):
But then COVID happened and it became a lot of people viewed it as, as a metaphor for
the pandemic as opposed to climate change.
And I remember having conversations with people and I was kind of struck that they, they didn't
know.
Did, how did you, did, did you hear any of that too?
(16:05):
Or?
Yes.
Yeah.
So that was a really interesting thing because we were already making the movie.
It had already been written and then COVID hit and we had a discussion.
Well, man, oh man, now the movie feels a lot like COVID.
So we decided two things.
(16:26):
We decided that's okay because the same broken institutions that couldn't handle COVID are
the same broken institutions that are asleep at the wheel on climate breakdown.
So we felt like it was fine that, that really the message we were saying was specifically
(16:47):
about our corrupted institutions and media and culture.
And then the second thing we decided was that in the press, we were going to surrounding
the movie, we're just going to nakedly say it.
And that actually worked quite well.
They did like data research from Netflix that showed that large portions of the audience
(17:09):
did get that it was climate and that even when they thought it was for COVID, that was
okay too.
I don't, I don't know if you've caught this, but you're in Massachusetts.
But Max Tagmark from MIT just did an interview where he said, don't look up please as a perfect
(17:29):
allegory for the threat that AI poses.
Oh yeah.
And yeah, AI, you know, obviously is advancing way faster than once again on our media is
telling us and really the people behind it and the people that are aware of how AI works
(17:52):
are very worried.
So he did a whole interview where he said that actually, I see don't look up as playing
for AI.
And I kind of realized at that point that really what don't look up is about, it's really
about our broken institutions, our broken collective culture, broken media leaders,
(18:12):
industry in, and I think that's fine.
Yeah.
Sometimes you make a movie and you kind of learn what it's really about, even though
you've made it once it's released, it takes on a completely different life of its own.
Yeah, someone once said to me, you know, when you create a piece of art, once you put it
out there, you no longer own it.
(18:34):
And I think that that is true.
So true.
Yeah.
But so you've since started a nonprofit, Yellow Dot Studios, you want to mention that
a little bit?
Yeah, thank you.
It's a nonprofit climate media disruption studio.
(18:58):
I've got to think of a niftier way to say it than that.
That is very unwieldy.
But essentially what it is, is we're making videos, memes, ads, documentaries, anything
you can think of to take the fight to the oil companies and the profitized media.
(19:18):
Because for years, they've been beaten the crap out of us with misinformation, delay
on climate.
You know, we could have solved their dealt with the climate crisis 40, 50 years ago,
but the oil companies decided to lie about it and they still are.
And they still have a tremendous hold over our elected officials through lobbying and
(19:43):
dirty money and our media through advertising dollars.
So yeah, we started this studio to make materials to punch them back.
And it's been great.
It feels so good to have some way to fight back.
So we're releasing videos, memes, shorts, information, connecting with climate activists,
(20:09):
organizations, scientists around the world, and just generating materials for them to
use for people to see.
And it's a blast.
If anyone wants to check it out, we have a website where you can see our videos.
You can sign up for our weekly media blast, disruptive media blast.
(20:32):
We're calling it the weather above ground.
Great.
And and obviously we're a non for profit, but we tell people like the billionaires aren't
too crazy about us because we have to kind of deal with wealth inequality.
So we're kind of going the Bernie road where if anyone wants to give five bucks, 10 bucks,
(20:54):
100 bucks, whatever, you can do it on the website.
And we're across all the social media platforms if anyone wants to follow, check us out.
But yeah, it's been great.
We're in week two.
So we just started.
Yeah, I saw a commercial for big money and I thought that was terrific.
I think that that's that's I mean, you've mentioned it several times and I think that
(21:20):
that's that's the key is the big money.
And I and I understand that's also what average height and average build is is is tackling
in its own metaphoric way.
True.
Yeah, we're we're hoping I mean, unfortunately, or fortunately, there's a giant writer's
Guild of America strike right that so we were about to come out your way to Boston and surrounding
(21:47):
the areas and start filming this movie.
But it's on hold right now, but we'll get to it at some point.
But yeah, that whole movie, I mean, it's a comedy.
It's kind of a thriller.
But at its root is showing the system of how big money takes over government and captures
(22:10):
our country and other countries.
But it's it's a pretty unusual movie.
I don't want to give too much away, but it's it's definitely a comedy, but it's also a
thriller.
It's yeah, it's an interesting one.
Yeah, well, I'm looking for that.
Hopefully, you'll be shooting back in Worcester again, too.
I know you you shot some of don't look up there.
(22:31):
You did indeed.
I hadn't been back to Worcester.
Oh, my gosh, like in 25 years.
It's a lot different now.
I didn't recognize it.
It was crazy.
I saw like an artisanal bread store.
Yeah, like, I mean, when I was there, there was like liquor store, maybe like black coffee
(22:57):
and a diner and then some fast food, you know, fried food places.
And that was about it.
And I couldn't believe how different it looked.
I actually we went by my old house and it seems like the town is really doing great
has really found a new gear.
Yeah, it seems to have, although it's mostly, you know, pharmaceutical money.
(23:20):
But but but but it has it's right.
I've lived in this area my entire life and and it's it's changed dramatically.
I mean, somebody once said to me, if you really wanted to make a gritty 70s New York movie,
shoot it in Worcester.
But you can't say that anymore.
It has a much better feel to it.
(23:43):
But I want to jump back to to I had to bring the Worcester piece up.
But I wanted to.
Yeah, of course, Worcester strong.
Jump back to the corporate media because and I think this is again, the importance of what
you're doing, because it's at some point the place where everybody got their their news
(24:04):
was was, you know, on the comedy channels, because you couldn't get any place else where
someone would tell you the truth.
And I'm, you know, referring mostly to John Stuart, he kicked it all off.
Because fighting disinformation when there's that much money behind it with corporate media,
it's a huge challenge.
(24:25):
I mean, that's me, you know, when I was waffling on nihilism, I'm like, how do you how do you
beat that?
You know, it's it's there's two things.
First off, it's really fun to do because there's so full of it.
It's so exposed that it's actually not hard to kind of flip them and make them look ridiculous.
(24:50):
And that exposure, the fact that they have to live in a world of BS and fictions and
double speak and attitude over reality means that they really will always lose to ultimately
they can kind of overwhelm you with volume and the sort of cultural consensus, the false
(25:17):
cultural consensus that our corporate media has created around itself, sort of the cultural
gatekeepers, the pundits, the op ed, I mean, they're all sort of part of that same financial
or that same cultural economy.
So you know, you kind of learn, you know, sometimes early on, I was surprised by how
(25:43):
thick it was.
And I was surprised by how prevalent it was.
And you just kind of keep learning.
It's also getting much worse.
It was way different 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
And it's it's really someone said that America is the most friend of mine was saying in a
(26:03):
PC wrote that America is the most propagandized country in the world.
And I think most isn't really the perfect word.
I think it's that we have the best propaganda.
I mean, our propaganda is it's so good that it's almost delicious to be lied to in America.
(26:26):
I mean, it's everyone knows fast food restaurants are terrible.
Man, their commercials, the colors on the side, the promise they give you is almost
a meal unto itself.
And that's kind of what America has just done across the board.
But the second you touch it or push it or tip it, there's really nothing there.
(26:50):
And I think that will continue to build momentum.
We'll never do it by ourselves with yellow dot, but we definitely want to be a part of
it.
Yeah, do I do I think you I think you're a big part of it.
I mean, like, you know, again, and I'm going to say you, maybe Sasha Baron Cohen, you know,
(27:11):
John Stuart are the ones who are who are shining the light right now and through Santa
because I it seems that that comedy and into a lesser extent horror makes it safe for people
to talk about things.
I mean, if you look at like Jordan Peele's work, it shows you something that's happening
(27:35):
a step removed, where I think people are a little bit more comfortable to and maybe a
little bit more open to discussing it afterwards.
What is actually happening is true.
I mean, you know, we have a podcast called death on the lot that's coming out.
(27:56):
And it's a sequel to another podcast we call we did called death at the wing.
And basically what we do is we look at a space of deaths that occur around a certain industry
or or society.
And we question like, why did this happen in this small time frame?
So the new season is about there was a period in Hollywood in the 40s, 50s into the early
(28:25):
60s, where a lot of stars and directors and producers died through various reasons.
And one of the people we look at not because he passed away at an early age, but we look
at Rod Serling, who ran into exactly as you probably know, skip ran into exactly the problem
(28:47):
we're talking about, he wanted to do a Playhouse 90s style TV show about the lynching of Emmett
Till and the advertisers stepped in.
And it's really one of the first times that the advertisers did this because TV was still
very new in the 1950s.
(29:09):
And they said, you can't do that.
We won't advertise our products if you go at something like lynching and racism.
And Rod Serling wrote an op ed, I think it was in New York Times saying, Hey, everyone,
this is a problem.
Like this is censorship through, you know, capitalism, through the profanization.
(29:32):
And you know, of course, people talked about it for half a day and then everyone forgot
about it.
So he realized if he was going to do these stories, he had to turn them into allegories
and he created the Twilight Zone.
So we talk about this in this new podcast we have coming out.
And the question we have is like, wow, that's incredible that Rod Serling did that.
(29:56):
It's very clever.
It's very resourceful.
But ultimately, is it still a defeat?
Is it still a capitulation?
Because you know, there's a lot of people when you speak in the allegory, you leave
behind.
There's a lot of people that, you know, explicit language has a real power to it.
(30:19):
I mean, you look at a play like Waiting for Lefty, you look at a movie like A Face in
the Crowd.
You're very explicit stories that were saying what they are.
Or even recently, the Iranian filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, his new movie, No Bears.
Oh my God, it's so good.
(30:40):
And he toys with explicit, you know, talking about what you're talking about.
And then he kind of mixes some allegory in.
And so that's something with Yellow Dot and a lot of what I've been doing lately where
I take great pleasure.
It feels like a release to just say things nakedly because it's been so long since we've
(31:03):
collectively done it.
Wow.
That's true.
And are we collectively doing it, I guess, is the question.
I mean, that's the problem, I think.
Or, you know, again, I'm hoping, I'm turning to you for hope, I guess.
(31:26):
Well, I really think we can each do it.
This is another thing that sort of robbed us of a lot of our power.
You talk to anyone who's in marketing or advertising, big, the high level marketing and advertising.
You know what they all get paid billions and I think it's a $60 billion industry a year
(31:46):
in the US.
A money be higher now, advertising.
All they're trying to do is replicate word of mouth.
But word of mouth is still the most powerful force for selling a product, a movie, a political
movement.
So I tell people when they're like, God, the climate is so overwhelming.
(32:07):
It's so overwhelming.
What do I do?
And I was like, honestly, just talk about it.
Like bring it up.
And it's really shocking how much momentum it could cause and how it can take people
to the next step.
So the thing I constantly say is like, look, there's three stories that we're living in
right now is three realities that are kind of affecting everything.
(32:30):
Number one, you know, big global money, swamped governments all around the world, swamped
media, swamped cultures all around the world.
And number two, the climate is breaking down and a freakish fast pace because of fossil
fuels and greenhouse gas emissions that were not cutting at fast enough pace.
(32:56):
And then number three, most people are traumatized because they're under constant predatory economic
attack.
Their environment has gotten more violent, less stable.
Basically those three realities.
And if you look at everything through those three realities, it works pretty well.
I mean, there's no way to look at everything in a way that's the same and it works all
(33:21):
the time, but those three realities.
And so I just try and like talk about those three realities whenever I talk to friends,
family, friends I haven't seen in a while.
And I don't bring it up in a way that's a bummer.
It's just that like, if we're going to live in reality, we have to talk, you know, we
(33:42):
have to communicate in that reality that we're living in.
And so much of the way we're used to talking from the past 40, 50 years is just a fictional
world that no longer exists.
So yeah, the thing I tell everyone like, what can I do about climate?
What can I do about all this, you know, grotesque money that's corrupted everything?
(34:02):
And I'm just like, talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, bring it up casually, make
a joke about it.
Act like everyone knows.
And it's really, really incredible the difference it can make.
Okay.
Well, I think that's the perfect note to end on to get everyone out there to talk about
(34:26):
this.
Because that's what we're hopefully we're doing here as well.
Because it's these are daunting times.
And I, you know, I just revisited all of your movies again, you know, before this.
And I even like even the, at the end of vice went when unapologetically Dick Cheney, you
(34:51):
know, tells us what he thinks.
I still walked away with a sense of hope.
Because it was exposed.
You know, you know, you still have fresh in your mind to the people, the names of the
people that he had tortured.
He didn't do anything to really protect us.
He did things to line his pockets.
(35:12):
And just walking away from that afterwards, again, I was struck about it how I felt positive
about it.
That here it is here.
The truth is just right there, you know, for all of us to see.
And so I thank you for that.
It is one of your the best stories, Kip.
(35:32):
So I, you know, we made that movie and it was very divisive.
Some people loved it.
Some people hated it, whatever.
And later Christian Bale told me a story.
He said he had a friend who was at like a big media party in Washington, DC.
(35:53):
And Dick Cheney was there.
And the friend went up to Dick Cheney and said, Oh, hello, Mr. Vice President.
I'm actually friends with Christian Bale.
Is there anything you want me to tell him?
And Cheney looked at him and he said, you tell that guy, he's a dick.
And the friend of Bale's thought he was kidding because he was saying, Dick, like his name
(36:17):
and thought he was kind of me.
And then the, so the friend laughed and Dick Cheney looked at him like stone cold and said,
I'm not kidding.
You tell him that.
So Bale told me that story and I was like, we got to him.
We got to him because the real truth of Cheney is everyone will tell you, we did tons of
(36:40):
research.
He loves his daughter.
He loves his family.
He's a good dad.
He cooks for the family.
Now don't get me wrong.
He does monstrous things outside of it, but that's the center of them.
And that's the justification and the real truth is because of his power, hungry, cold
nature, he broke apart his family.
(37:02):
His daughters stopped talking to each other and he greatly injured one of his daughters.
And that's the personal tragedy of Dick Cheney that we discovered.
And so I heard that story.
So you're right.
Like, you know, it was a divisive movie, blah, blah, blah.
But when I heard that, I was like, every bit of it was worth it.
(37:25):
No one gets away.
Everyone has to live with themselves inside and he knows it's true.
Yeah.
No, right.
Yeah, right.
The truth.
Well, I'm glad to know right that the truth got to him outside of, you know, his exterior,
(37:46):
his wealth.
Because it seemed, I mean, it seems that's what all of this is done for.
It's funny when you and I know, I know I said I'd wrap up when you, you said other countries,
it's the same in other countries.
We, my wife and I just bought a tiny little place in Italy, like cheaper than a car.
It's cheaper than a car.
Because we, this was after the circuit where we're in Scandinavia, which is about 35 miles
(38:10):
northeast of Rome.
It's olive oil country.
It's gorgeous.
But you know, as soon as we get there, right, they, they, they'll, they elect prime minister
from Mussolini's old party.
We're like, what the hell?
We're trying to get away from here and it's worse in Italy.
(38:31):
But the Italians seem to roll with it a lot better.
Yeah, I got it.
Last thing it's fun to talk to you, but last thing is so for any of your listeners who
don't know skip how to roll in the other guy's place, a bus driver.
And do you know where I wrote the other guys?
I wrote it in Sienna, Italy, because we had the movie all lined up at Sony and the entire
(38:59):
economy crashed.
It was the housing market crash and all of a sudden Sony got gun shy and started hitting
me with tons of notes.
Well, we had a vacation planned in Italy.
And if this movie was going to happen, I had to do this giant rewrite on our vacation.
So I stayed in a hotel room in Sienna.
(39:22):
We wrote all night, we'd get three hours of sleep, meet my family, and then we go do
our vacation.
And then I repeated that process about two dozen times.
Good news was we got it there.
Got greenlit.
We made the movie.
But yeah, Sienna is a great town too.
If you get a chance.
Oh yeah.
(39:43):
So you're there for the horse race?
No, unfortunately, everyone talked about it.
But it's the same.
But no, it's cool for people who don't know it's a middle ages city that is still functional.
It's not like all tourist stuff.
Like it's a functioning living, breathing middle, you know, ninth century CE city.
(40:09):
It's really, really cool.
Yeah, but one of the churches has the actual head of St. Catherine on display.
It's kind of a creepy place too.
All right, well, Adam, thank you very much for coming on.
I know we overstayed and I really appreciate that.
(40:32):
And I look forward to your future work.
And we absolutely look forward to you coming back and shooting in Massachusetts.
Yeah, well, hopefully we'll see each other when I'm there.
You have to come by, Seth.
And what an enjoyable conversation, Skip.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thanks.
(40:53):
All right, bye.
Be well.
May I have your attention, please?
I think you all remember the bargain we made about staying all night.
No such luck, Vincent.
It sounds like way too much fun, which has been outlawed by Rufus T. Firefly.
Hail, hail, Fredonia indeed.
(41:18):
Thanks for joining us today, folks.
Our opening and closing themes are by Shane Ivers, creating dangerously a monthly podcast
as a production of the Shawna E. Shay Memorial Foundation Inc.
A 501C3 charitable organization.
All views and opinions expressed in creating dangerously are not necessarily those of the
(41:38):
Shawna Foundation and its affiliates.
Not that we have any.
They are only the opinions of the hosts and the guests.
See you next month.
And remember, keep creating dangerously.
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