Adam McKay is Still Angry About 2008

Pushkin most of two thousand and six. In early two thousand and seven, doctor Michael Barry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an email, he wrote, the partner's closest to me tend to ultimately hate me. This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven't identified what it kills, but it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.

I'm Lydia Dean caught a producer here and against the rules. And what we just heard is an excerpt from The Big Short, a book that Michael Lewis wrote in twenty ten. He's now releasing it for the first time as an audiobook narrated by him.

Yep, and I'm here too, so LJ, I'm gonna tell you what I want you to do.

You're a innocent outsider with no particular interest in the global financial crisis. It is like one of these huge events in American history, and it's really useful to me to hear what you're curious about, and also for me to explain to you why the people who were interviewing are the people we're interviewing, why they matter now?

So I haven't thought about the two thousand and eight financial crisis since it happened, which is when I was in high school, and I'm gonna be honest, I actually didn't even really think about it.

That much when it happened. Why would you, I was thinking about high school.

Why did you want to revisit it? Why look back at it now?

It has never lost its relevance. It has been this slow motion train wreck that comes right from that. The essence of its importance was the feeling of unfairness it generated by how it was dealt with. You had these elites on Wall Street doing things they shouldn't have been doing, getting paid a fortune to do them, and when it all goes wrong and everybody suffers, there's no apparent cost. They get to go about doing their business, they get bailed out by the government. Everybody has to live by

What were the consequences of this event, right.

And here we are, now's the moment.

And you did it by talking to a bunch of people, right, who you thought could answer questions that you had that kind of came to you as you were rereading the book. And correct, the first person was Adam McKay, who is the director of the Big Short movie. How would you characterize your relationship to that.

Movie the same as my relationship to the movies of all my books, is that I had no effect whatsoever on how they made the movie. But they pretended to listen to me. They pretended to care what I thought while they were making the movie. So I developed personal relationships with some of the actors and with the director. To make a movie from a book, you need to break the thing and remake it, and the authors I think uniquely unsuited.

To do that. And the movie was different from the book.

So I wanted to start with McKay because you know, I'm awed by him.

He's a huge talent.

He grappled with the same material, and I wanted to just kind of talk about how he grappled with it. You know, we had never had that conversation when the movie was made.

Well, Adam McKay when he took on the movie right like before that, he had only done straight up comedies Stepbrothers, Talidy, the Knights. Were you anxious about interesting your book to this guy who up until then had only done comedies.

Anxious is not doesn't describe what I felt. What I felt was incredulity. I thought there's no way they're going to turn this book into him, and so I was amazed that it happened. You know, in the first place, I thought, no way they're gonna be able to pull us off, And the fact that he pulled us off is incredible the way he did.

Now, I remember.

Thinking, the only way it works is funny. Like you ask a comedian to be funny, they can be funny, that's their job. When they're supposed to be funny, they're funny.

I find that so hard for me.

I feel like they can only be funny by accident.

That's exactly right.

I'm the same way.

I can be funny by accident, very well put. And you know, I hate to say it. When I'm writing, I laugh at my own stuff. Laughter is like really important to the stuff. If it's not fun I lose interest. I don't think, oh, I'm writing a comedy. I think, oh, there's lots of funny bits in here. It's more like a tragedy the story with lots of funny bits in the middle of it.

But when Kate took it on, I thought, if.

Someone's gonna do it, it has to be wildly entertaining, otherwise nobody will come to the subject matter. So I thought, if anybody can do it, sure the guy who did Talladega, Nites and Anchorman is the guy.

This is the Big Short Companion pod after the Break Michael Lewis's conversation with Adam McKay about how he transformed a wonky book about the two thousand and eight financial crisis into an Oscar winning film.

So I'm gonna ask you a lot of stupid questions, questions and there questions some of them might know kind of the answer to, but mostly don't. And before we get to the Big Short, I want you to tell me about the how you made your first movie, how you became a movie person, a movie director, what it was and how it happened.

So I was head writer at Saturday Night Live. And you know the big advantage I had was I had come out of that Chicago long form scenic improv scene and basically all we did every single night of the week was improvised sketches. So I was very comfortable in that space, and so they made me head writer. I was head writer for three years, but I've always loved movies. So after three years, I was like, you know what, it's time to move on. I wanted to do my

That was it.

I got to make Anchorman.

This is the beginning of your long form career as a film director. Yeah, is Ackerman, I remember you telling me that Anchorman you always had a kind of political objective, a cultural and there was cultural commentary there that maybe the audience didn't fully take on because they were too entertained.

Yeah.

I mean that's the background that I came out of Chicago, Second City. Dell Close. Dell Close, who's the famous long form improv teacher, used to always say, if you aim for art and you miss, you end up with comedy. If you aim for comedy and you miss, you end up with crap. So everything we did, even Anchorman, as silly as it is, if you look at the way we begin it with the shot choices. I mean, we were really trying to play it high stakes. Same thing

That was putting Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain credit to fault swaps. Yeah, yeah, So the banks started filling these bonds with riskier and riskier.

Mortgages, thank you, Benja.

That way they can keep that profit machine churning. Right.

By the way, these risky mortgages are called subprime.

So whenever you hear subprime think shit.

Our friend Michael Bury found out that these mortgage bonds that were supposedly sixty.

Five percent triple A were actually just mostly full of shit. So now he's going to short.

The between stabetic games. Got it. You never adapted a book before, had you?

No?

My wife is a theater director, and she had adapted a lot of stuff. It's kind of her specially. But most importantly, I knew that there are no hard rules, and I also knew from talking to people that they were very confused by the financial language. And I said, we have to time this exactly right, right at the moment where your average audience is like, what are they

When we come back.

I asked Adam McKay how he got so many big stars to sign up for the Big Short.

How did the Volkswagen Beetle go from being Hitler's dream car to a hippie icon. How did a disgruntled center fielder change the business of sports I'm Jacob Goldstein and on Business History, my co host Robert Smith and I dig into the people and companies who created the modern world. Business History is full of innovations and failures and insights into how business works today. At the end of today's episode of Against the Rules, we're going to play a

I'm back with writer and director Adam McKay.

For you.

What were the challenges like taking the book and turning into a script or did it just kind of come naturally?

Well, you know, there was already a script written Charles Charles Randolph had written a script, and I was like, oh, there's some really good stuff in here, but I know exactly what to do, and that rewrite. I think it was turned around pretty quickly. And then Paramount had the script and they have no interest because they're like the guy who did step Brothers with Wall Street, and we

Do you know why your actors said yes? Do you know why Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt all said I want to do I'm.

Gonna say this and it sounds very immodest.

But that was a good script.

Like that was I mean, these actors get, you know, one hundred scripts a year, maybe they read like thirty or forty. That was a good script. And then in every case I met with them before they said yes, so I was able to say, like, I know you know me from X Y Z, but here's how I see this. This will be different. I right away knew that I wanted Barry Ackroyd to be the DP because we had a lot of scenes in offices, and we needed to make the mundane of a phone call have urgency.

Give me an example of how he creates drama from a phone call.

That's this is different.

So what he does is his background is as a documentary filmmaker. So we started with long lens in the corner of the room, don't look at me, and crazy stuff going on. And through the years of doing that, he learned how to look for the right light, how to find the artistic shot. And by the time I met him and he was at full peak ability and the only thing I told him was occasionally, I'm going to want to do traditional Dolly, big Hollywood shots. I wanted to be a blend. And he was totally cool

But you know what, you know what that sounds like. It sounds like a visual a rhyme with how you approach the words. You are so open, you're holding your script so loosely, and you're letting things happen sometimes that aren't in the script, always so that you don't know what's going to happen. That if everybody was sort of like roped to the words on.

The page, I actually think, see what you think of this, Michael. I think this hyper capitalist end result culture we're now in eradicates discovery. So if you're gonna sell a book or you're going to write an article, you have to tell them the conclusion. And I'm old enough to remember the early eighties the late seventies, people would go into movies and have no idea where it was gonna end up.

You see that.

I think our lower budget helped us a lot with the big short. You know, the executives could have missed on it, and once we got those big stars, they had cover for the boardroom. Like if the boardroom asked them, why did you give thirty five million dollars to the guy who did Step Brothers. They could just say, we have Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and on and on.

I am at my best, and the best things happen when I have a very loose notion and I don't know what's going to happen. I love that that feeling of like being on a ride you're not quite sure where it's going. So the actors gave you cover. How did you decide who was going to play who? Let's take one. How did you.

Pick Christian Bale to play Michael Berry?

He's just.

One of the ten greatest film actors ever. And I would just say, if you're gonna like create that list of people that are chameleons, people that are really artists. I started doing all this stuff in nineteen ninety, which is crazy, and so I've met a lot of actors. We had a lot of hosts at Saturday Night Live.

I was watching it.

I was thinking, oh my god, that's Michael Berry on the screen.

I've always been more comfortable alone.

I believe it was because of my glass eye. I lost the eye. A child of alash separates me from people.

I could not have told Christian Bale how to do it. That meant Christian Bale figured stuff out that I had not articulated. So this bothered me because I thought, I'm an observer, I'm an observant chap. I should have observed whatever it was that he would have needed to play

With the movie he goes.

He said, Christian Bale visited me. He's the weirdest guy I've ever met. And I said, if Michael Berry is calling you weird, and I said, well, what was weird about it? He said, he said, he just want to come for a day. He came in the morning, sat across from me until the evening, did not get up to go to the bathroom, and just watched me the

I'm gonna weare those when I play you and Wow. But I saw.

I went to Christi Balle, I said, like, what the hell happened in those twelve hours? Like what did you figure out? Because there was something about his body, languages. I couldn't figure out why he had got him because Michael Berry, in his presence, you feel this discomfort. And Christian Bale had replicated that, and he says to me, I don't want to talk about it. I really pestered him and finally he says, okay. He says, it wasn't that complicated. Oh, if you watched him, you could see

Oh yeah, oh yeah, he told me exactly that. What I noticed about him Bury is he's a lovely guy. I noticed this contrast of extremely sensitive, big heart and then armor. We never got into the way he was raised. We didn't need to, but I could identify with the idea growing up as a nineteen seventies latchkey kid with kind of the tumult of childhood, the chaos, seeking a safe place.

So we're going to take a quick break now.

When we return, Adam McKay and I talk about the event behind both the book and the movie, the financial Crisis of two thousand and eight. When I think of the difference between the movie and the book that you know, aside from Margaret Robbie being in a bathtub rather than a footnote in my book talking to the reader, I think there's a tonal difference.

It's to your credit, it's to your moral credit. The movie's angrier than the book.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And it may be partly because some time had passed and we could see what had happened. Yeah, it was part I think it's partly temperamental. I think you have an ability to get angrier than I do.

Well.

You know, that is a great point because I always joked with Ferrell that when we did those broad comedies, I used to call Anchorman, Taladegan, Knights and step Brothers the mediocre white Man Trilogy, because they're all about white guys who think they're better than they are. I think they're more powerful unearned confidence and really, looking back on it, when you go big Short vice don't look up, yep, I would call it the collapse trilogy.

Yep.

I mean, I think now even mainstream people can admit, like the West is collapsing, like the climate is collapsing, you know. And Big Short was the first with that in the sense that I was really angry with Obama for not prosecuting, not doing the right thing as far as the allocation of all the money taking care of the homeowners. And that was kind of my peak betrayal moment because I had really is embarrassing, but I had

You got radicalized by the financial crisis.

Yes, I mean, the only thing I'll say is I've always been left.

I grew up you know this.

You know, we were on food stamps, welfare.

I was poor.

So I always grew up as the guy who's like, look, this system worked. That LBJ great society was really working in the seventies, in the early eighties before Reagan and then Bill Clinton dismantled it. But I definitely the anger you're talking about.

Yeah, you know, it's well earned.

It's well earned. It's a funny thing.

I don't feel I have the right to be angry. It's that you were really a little bit. I mean, it's just that I was raised with the opposite you. I was raised with incredible privilege. Not only did I did we not have food stamps. I couldn't have told you what a food stamp was. I thought, it's like something you put on our letter. You know, it's or collected and sold for profit.

I'm to your credit. Pretty much every book you've written has been suspicious of the power structure, the jargon.

But it comes from a different place. It comes from New Orleans. It comes from being an outsider to the mainstream culture, and I think that's where it starts.

Also, but also comes from a place of.

I do have the fairness gene, like I get really injustice. In unfairness really upsets me.

And so that's that's the other thing.

We only have a few minutes left, And there was something I wanted to say, because first off, it was very clearly the least likely book.

Of mine to be turned into a movie.

So it was to me an amazing triumph it happened at all. It was like the dog walking on its hind legs.

Thing, like the wonder is that does it well? Is that it does it at all?

But that it was that good, and it was so difficult to make the degree of difficulty was incredible, and so it was in some ways the movie that I felt least responsible for. So it was touching and curious to me that when the movie came out, you insisted on dragging me along for the ride, and so that I not only was I doing the junkets with you, but I was in the second row of the Oscars.

Oscar with us.

And I was so I was really touched by that, like like I teared up, like it was just like could it was wholly.

Unnecessary on your part.

I really have thought from the minute I started at interactions with the movie business that everybody in the movie business would really for the author to be dead because he does CAUs he causes nothing but trouble, like there's no.

Upside, and and and you.

Wanted to be alive. I was just really pleased with that. And I'm and grateful.

I've said to you over and over again through the years, the energy of reading that book is directly.

In the movie.

I just think maybe part of the power of your stories, you know, it's the fact that you do come from a whatever you want to call it, privilege, you know, somewhat wealthy background and New Orleans, which is an outsider city. I mean, you look historically like a lot of revolutionaries were wealthy. And there's a credibility to that voice that really can't be challenged because no one can say to you, oh, Michael Lewis, you just want to get rich. Here's my privilege,

In your movies, you make these useful and jarring cuts from one thing to the next. I'm going to make a useful and jarring cut to the end of this conversation.

Thanks for doing us pleasure, man.

The pleasure is always mine.

I always leave any conversation with Adam McKay feeling like I want to go.

Write something again anyway.

Coming up next week, we're going to beat some of the real life characters, the short sellers, traders and investment bankers who appeared in both the movie and the book, the ones who saw the financial crisis looming long before anyone else did. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Big Short Companion podcast, See you soon.

Against the Rules The Big Short Companion is hosted by Michael Lewis. It's produced by Me Ludy, Jean Kott, and Catherine Girodeau. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Burtel, and our engineer is Hans Dale. She special thanks to Nicole opten Bosch, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin Audiobooks team. Against

It's Jacob Goldstein. I'm the co host of a new show called Business History, and we're bringing you a clip right now from an episode we did about a mathematician named Jim Simon's. Simons wanted to take human emotions out of investing, and after a few early hiccups, including buying up all the potatoes in Maine, he created one of the greatest money machines in history. I really hope you like the clip, and if you want to hear more,

They were doing what we would call today michechine learning.

Machine learning is like, essentially, you build a system in a computer, you feeded a bunch of data, and the system sort of builds a map of the relationships in that data, and then with new data it can kind of interpolate or extrapolate and make guesses about what should come next.

And of course today.

We have an exciting, maybe misleading confounding term for machine learning.

We call it AI exactly right, right, this is still very basic machine learning, and the computer at the time keeps making mistakes that they didn't really understand. So, for instance, once the computer developed a taste for potatoes, main potatoes, the system kept buying main potato futures in the state of Maine, potato potatoes, big harvest year, next year or whatever. Yes, okay, until two thirds of the company's money was in potatoes.

Cftb PP comodi's Futures Trading Commission.

Right yeah, saying whoa who are you guys, Like, what are you doing over there? You have almost cornered the market on potatoes. You have to sell. And they ended up losing money on the trade because blown out on potatoes, they had stopped the computer whatever the computer's plan was. But you know, this was just one small weird thing. Simon and Baum were really kind of nervous about this whole thing. They had taken investors money, they didn't really