Adam McKay / "Vice"

President Dick Cheney. Christian Bale plays the part and yet another uncanny performance. But if you've noted the critical reaction to this film, it's been incredibly split. I've frankly been a bit taken aback by some of the more grandstandy proclamations I'll call it. Adam pointed this out himself on Twitter recently. Some find it to be one of the finest films of the year. I'm one of them. Others have literally called it the worst. So there's a spectrum

for you. I guess I found it to be brilliant, a movie that sank into my bones, honestly, and I was very eager to catch up with Adam to talk about it. If you haven't seen the film, i'd encourage

you to do so before listening to this particular episode. However, when I got together with Christian Bale and Sam Rockwell a few weeks ago, Sam plays George W. Bush in the film, we steered pretty clear of too much detail, so that's a safe bet, and i'd encourage you to listen to that anyway, because those two guys are delight together. But for now, here's Adam McKay and a deep dive

into Vice. I hope you enjoy. All Right, everyone, I'm here today with Adam McKay, the writer and director of Vice, which is, uh, you know, the wholesome story of Dick Cheney and his Shenanigans. And we're happy to have him here today. Thank you, Adam for coming on the show. My pleasure, Thanks for having me quite the holiday movie Christmas. Whatever kid wants in the Christmas Tree is a curmudgeonly bureaucratic vice president snarling at them, so we deliver absolutely.

I love the movie. As I was saying earlier, Bravo on it. It had to be just like, is this the kind of movie that when you embark on an undertaking like this, it's going to have a huge spotlight on it for obvious reasons. Are you just freaked out, scared, or just excited ready to just tell people what you think? Essentially? You know, it's more that you get excited by the opportunity, And I feel like, you know, after movies I've done before, I sort of had a little bit of room to

give this a shot. Um, So No, I get excited about the open field of it. And as soon as I caught wind of this and and really started to see who Dick Cheney was and really started to research them, I just kept getting more and more excited. So you don't really think about that part of it. I guess the first time you really feel that way is when the movie like Gonna be released or people start seeing it.

Then it hits you a little bit. People start to have takes exactly, and the word take becomes involved, and it's a little worries exactly. We'll tell me, like, give me a little bit of chronology here. When does the idea to do a movie about Dick Cheney first hit you? So it's like two weeks after the end of the Academy Awards, uh, and the run on the Big Short and my body does that thing that bodies tend to do where it's like, oh, I've been holding onto this

horrible flu for months. Here it is all at once, and I think I was set for three straight weeks, like it was really crazy. So I was just laid up and I started looking at the bookshelf and it's all these books that friends have given you through the years. And I've always been kind of intrigued by Channing. I always felt like there was more more there than than we knew about sides the shooting the guy in the

face and the Darth Vader jokes. So I just started reading the book and every four or five pages I was going, oh my god, Oh my god. And uh. Pretty soon, I, you know, did what we do. And at that time, I guess what, two thousand sixteen, I went online and ordered like five other books, and all of the books had me doing the same thing, like this is an epic American story. This is crazy. I didn't know any of this about this guy. I knew he had affected history, but the manner in which he

did it just blew me away. Because there's something that like, as you're reading all of this material, is there a certain thread that you're trying to track down because it's obfuscated in this book or you know whatever, like trying trying to put it together with the various source materials. Essentially,

that was exactly the trick. There were tons of great books that were written about them, but each one kind of had its own take on who he was, and they were looking at certain chapters in his life for certain through lines of what he did when he was in office as vice president. So between reading all of them,

it really started giving a full portrait. And then there's also you know, interviews, and there's the documentary Chainey in his own words, and and you just start looking at all of that and and that's really how we got the complete picture. And then at that point, when you're trying to track down this mysterious character, then you kind of break glass in case of emergency and you call Christian Bale and you know he's going to get to

the center of it. Um. So that was the final move. Well, at the beginning of the movie, you know, you get the standard this is based on the true story, and then you say, or is as close as it can be given how secretive a leader he was. We tried our fucking best. As as you say at the beginning. What that leads in the whole movie in general left me wondering, is how bulletproof do you have to be with your screenplay essentially to avoid any kind of litigation

or something like that. Well, you know, I mean that statement kind of says it all. Like we did our absolute best. He's so secretive. There are hundreds of thousands of documents that he's never handed over. There over twenty million emails that have disappeared. There are things he just won't talk about. You know. He tends to only do interviews with very sympathetic journalists. So yeah, we had to research our butts off, and we had to triple check everything.

We hired fact checkers. We actually hired our own journalists at one point who interviewed people from Chenese Circle was all off the records, so they would talk to us, but just to make sure we weren't crazy people. The good news is it's out there. You can find it. It's just took a lot of work. Um, but yeah, anything you see that's like policy, times, dates, actions has all been quadruple checked, and then there are those couple scenes where just no one else was there besides Jenny

and Rumsfeld or Janey and his wife. And in those cases, you just do the best you can. You know, you look about people that talked about that moment, you look for little flickers of what they said about it, and you try and go conservative. You try not to do anything too crazy, like let's not have Channy breakdown in tears here. He hasn't really done that in the rest of the movie, so you play a kind of straight line at that point. But yeah, he's a secretive dude. Man.

He covers his tracks. I mean, I kept joking with my editor, Hank Corwin. I was like, this guy did not want a movie made about him, Like, I mean, that's just the truth. There's nothing he left out there for anyone to go, Hey, let's make a movie about this guy. Um. I want to just tell you about my react. What what what? What I felt after I saw the movie. And I don't know if it's what you were going for hoping people would take away, but this,

this was what I took away. I felt unbelievable emptiness. I felt like I I stared into the void for a bit afterwards, I felt like I had just I said this to Christian and Sam. I felt like I had just seen a portrait of a soulless individual. And did you feel that way when you were making it? Is that? What is that what you were aiming to kind of portray? I know what you mean. I mean what really surprised me about the movie was that we

looked for his humanity. We wanted to find out who he was, and we wanted to find out who Lynn was and the family, and we feel like we found it, like there were real people there, There was a real family that cared about each other. And then in the end, just when those daughters were split and it it I wouldn't say emptiness, but it made me really sad. That's what struck me about it. And I never expected to feel that way at the end of a story about Dick Cheney, but I felt I felt sad for him.

I felt sad for his daughters. I felt sad all the people who had suffered because of his policies. I felt sad for a crazy country which seems to have no faith in its own government right now. Uh. And I remember the first time we watched it with a really big crowd. I remember having tears in my eyes, and I did not expect that. Yeah, Christian said something similar,

just profound sadness. I think what what I'm What I was taking away was you know, he says things like when he sees Rumsfeld for the first time, what's he that's a Republican? That's what I am? Uh, he asks, what do we believe? There's nothing there? Right? And then and then I I come away wondering, why, uh this this huge push for power to what end? You're not the president, so you don't get the credit per se,

you don't need the money. Why And and you know, in some sense, maybe it's he thought he was being a patriot, but it's just not what I came away feeling. And maybe that's my personal politics coming into play. But I just to kind of put that to you and ask you, like, what's the why of it for you? I think, you know, there used to be I feel like when I was a kid in the seventies and the early eighties, we used to talk about the toll

that power would take on people. I feel like we don't talk about it that much anymore, and like power screws you up like it's the It's the biggest drug there is. I mean, there's nothing better than power, not even money, sex, anything else you can think of. Power is the one I Originally in the very first draft of the script, I had some voice over talking about how power is the thing that comes closest to disguising

itself as love, because you're needed. People look at you with, you know, a want in their eyes, and it really feels close to love. And I think what you saw was out of the sixties and seventies, not just with the Chinese, but I think a lot of people in America like this idea of career and ambition and this idea climbing ladders came about and and just some degree that's fine, But I think with the Chinese it just

it took an extra step. It became about this kind of the fatherhood, the father le nature of the presidency, mixed with this desire for his wife to love him, for his family to be proud of him. And these are all kind of like decent things to want. And then when you threw nine eleven in there, and the paranoia and fear of that, I just feel like it detonated. I feel like it became a very scary individual in a lot of ways. From that point one definitely, um

how much was left on the cutting room floor. This is a movie I look at and I feel like they shot so much, but there's there's like because just I love the editing style, but it just if you know what you're looking for, you can see where, Okay, they shot a lot of stuff that's around this image or that scene, and I'm just curious, like what you're editing process was like what you found through the editing things like that? Well, I was, you know, obviously, you know,

Hank Corwin is one of the great living editors. He's a genius. And uh and we definitely had quite a chore on our hands once again to tell the story of the man who doesn't want his story told. The big two things we lost. There was one thing I really didn't want to give up was the story of them as teenagers, Dick and Lynn Cheney, and how they met and how they fell and fell in love. And Greg Frasier, our DP, just shot that so beautifully. Man, it looked like Splendor in the grass. It was just

like luscious film. And then Nick Brittell, our composer, put this beautiful music over it, and the audience was just not into it. They just did not care about fifteen year old sixteen seventeen year old Dick Cheney. So we tried so many times. We did it long, we did a medium, short, we put in different places, and that was probably the biggest loss. And then the other one that was pretty ambitious was we had a musical number. You know, I had people telling me it was the

musical number in there. I was like, no, tell me about the musical number. Thought about the musical I couldn't get that one to work either. Those are the two things I couldn't get to work. Um. It was kind of when Runs felt his teaching Cheney about Washington, d c. And how to get ahead, and it's sort of like neither a borrower nor lender b is kind of giving him that speech. But the speech is basically like who cares about anything? You gotta just get ahead of people, like,

you know, making your moves. I think there was a line in it like the means justify the ends, which I always loved just and we have Brittany Howard from the Alabama Shakes just wailing on it. Nick Brittel wrote this just beautiful song. Uh. We had to composed. The choreographer from Hamilton choreographed it. It's breathticking, it's incredible, and it just didn't work. It was like you didn't need it. It was too long in that area of the movie.

You know, storytelling beats everything we tried. Oh my god, we tried fifteen versions of it. I mean, we moved it here, we moved it there, We played it really short, we played it way longer. We put scenes in the middle of it. I mean, we tried every single thing you could do. I mean, the only reason it doesn't pain me to this moment is because I know we tried everything we could do. But but those were the two.

Those were the two like when you were in the edit room, you're like, well, this is amazing, this is gonna work, and you just forget, like the movie tells you what it wants. And in that case, it was like get rid of these two things. Other than that, we did pretty well. Other than that, it was just those two chunks that could not make their way in

the movie. Special features on the DVD maybe darn right. Well, what I did was I took um then as teenagers and actually cut it into a short film, a black and white short film, a little bit in the spirit of trying to think of the anyway. It's its own little kind of short film about their young love. Do we have a title for that yet? It's called best of All He Loves Me Back, That's what it's called. Looking forward to that? Yeah, Yeah, and the musicals on

there too. And there's another little scene we cut out too that's on there. So you mentioned Greg Fraser there. I've done Greg for ten years, one of the best dps working. I feel I could not agree with you more. I want to talk about the visual approach to the movie. Um, you know, i'm i'm. I often ask filmmakers if there were references in any kind of inspiration, not just in film,

but artwork, uh, photography, anything like that. What kind of a visual approach did you guys sit down and talk about. You know, the big trick we had was that we wanted an evolution to the visual approach without looking gimmicky. You know, the very lazy first thought would be, you shoot the early wyoming stuff in black and white. When you go to DC, you go to color. It's like, well, that's kind of lame. So what we just talked about

was just subtle gradients in the color palette. As we moved ahead, you know, we were looking at stuff like Eggleston still photographs for the early days, kind of what you would think you would look at. And you know, we looked at a bunch of the famous seventies movies, as far as offices in Washington, d C. We looked at all of that. But uh, and then because we were shooting on film, we also talked about how we were gonna let some of the dirt stay in the

film and the early stuff. But really the big breakthrough was when Greg was like, we should use sixteen, we should use Super eight, we should use the vintage old TV cameras whenever we can. And once that came into the movie, I feel like the movie really kind of found its its visual style. UM. So the thirty five was always the lush reality the bottom of the movie.

I mean that was the movie. Man oh man. When that's sixteen and that Super eight started getting him there, we were just like, oh, I can't get enough of this. Um And that gave enough diversity to the look that because you know, the movie covers six decades UM and we just needed something to reflect that. And you know, obviously as we got later, you start seeing video, you start seeing more modern looks. It was always complimentary, was always off to the side. Um, but yeah, it was.

He just loved it. You know, he's such a camera geek. He knows every one of those cameras, He knows everyone how they work. He gets every look like perfect. I mean, I still can't believe the way he shot Colin pal like Tyler Perry. I mean, it looks like it's the real footage of Colin pal speech. It just blows me away. Um. Yeah, he's something special man, that guy. Wow. How about color palette.

You talk about what colors would mean, color palette, but you know, we we definitely had richer, kind of earthier tones in the beginning. That was closer to wyoming, closer to like a man, an American man, kind of forming himself. Our idea was that once you have a fully formed chainey's a cooler, colder, kind of more sie uh palette to it. That came about, But at the same time, we didn't want it to feel like a giant gear jump. You know, we wanted them all to be a little

bit close to each other. So it was pretty subtle stuff. But uh, and a lot of that. The way it came out was just in the modern day stuff. With the thirty five, I would say, okay, now clean all the dirt out. Now, let's get a little sharper, and we would hit some of those blues and grays a

little bit harder in the more modern stuff. Um, but yeah, I think we just let the earlier stuff be dirty and little mange gear, and it mixed in a little that Super eight and a little bit of that sixteen, and then as it was moving forward, it was just getting like a little bit colder, a little bit you know, cleaner. Um. But hopefully our our goal was that the audience never consciously was aware of it, just it's just happening. Was

it always like on the page? Was it written like in a scattered, temporally speaking kind of way, Like, was it always going to just bounce all around, you know, starting with nine eleven, then going back and then things like this. Um, there's a few of the things we discovered in the edit room and actually originally did. That's not true. The first draft of the script did start with nine eleven. I then switched it out and we

then started more on them as kids. So actually then we went back to nine eleven for the beginning part. But yeah, there were always little time jumps back and forth. I mean, one of the things we were aware of is just the biopic structure is a tough one. It's something we've all probably seen hundreds of biopics throughout our life, and when it's when it's um sequential like that, when it's just lined up, it can get a little tiring,

a little pounding. So that was a big thing that Hank and I were playing around with in the edit room was when do we time jump? How much do we time jump? Is it okay to sometimes stay semi sequential um? And what we found was just like a little bit of a time to ash, a little bit of a jump would go a long way, just taking it a little bit out of sequence, then let it go back to sequence, a little bit out of sequence,

back to sequence. UM. That was a lot of our experimenting in the edit room is just trying to get that exactly right. How much jumping, how little jumping, when to let it play out? Very tricky, very tricky, but man, you could feel it when it would get too sequential. It's just all of a sudden, you just start feeling like you're watching a biopick, like you've seen three hundred of them. So we would have to go and mess

with it at that point, even within scenes. And you know when it said it's most radical if it'll just throw something in there, it's almost expressionistic. And in the way it's do have the editorial, it's there's a it's kind of an interesting tradition. JFK to me is one of the most exquisitely crafted films of all time, especially in the editing, So I kind of think of that, you know, the way it's just it's shards, you know, at times, I think that's kind of I think that's

one of Hank's signatures. I think that's he does it probably better than anyone. There's a moment in the movie I really love where Dick says, let's make sure to get my daughter Liz into the State Department, and Hank just did this quick cut to Liz at the table going okay, Dad, and it's like the table from like a scene ten minutes before, and he's like, okay, Dad, and then it goes right back to the scene. But like it's sort of a feeling than it is like

a logical thing that you're clocking. And when he's on his game, which he almost always is, that's that's how that stuff really lands. Yeah, how did you decide on Nicholas Pertel for the score? That was easy, That was I had the luck of working with him and Hank on Big Short. I forgot Nicholas did Big Short? Did he did the Big Short? Okay, well there you go.

Well that answers the question. Well, but part of the trick is the reason you don't think of him immediately with The Big Short was there's so much found stuff in that movie. You know, we were trying to show the kind of irrational exuberance of our culture and how

crazed our culture was. That there's a lot of like, you know, what you called diagetic music in that movie, and so a lot of people weren't aware or what was nick score and what was something that was you know source um, because man, he wrote some beautiful music for that movie. And I always felt like Nick never

got his due for it. And then later I would ask to friends, and then I would talk to friends and they would say, oh, yeah, that's that classical piece she played was like no, no. Our composer wrote that, like he's amazing, He's incredible. So this was such a treat because on this one he was just totally off the chain, Like we hardly use any source music. I think it's over seventy five minutes of score and he just he knocked us over on this one. It's just incredible.

He really harnesses some of the just like Shakespearean qualities of the epic, you know, especially and just I watched it again last night. It's the one movie, by the way, my wife has been dying to see all year. I want to mention that because she doesn't get to see everything anymore. We've got a two year old now, so it's always like one or two movies and this was like number one. So we watched it last night. She

loved it. But I was the big just crescendo of the movie that ends with that this is going to air after the movie comes up, that ends with that heart lying on the table. Uh. The score there is just everything stunning. He's a beast man. He's the real deal. I mean, he's really got something special. You don't see guys like him come along, but you know, for every

once every ten years. I'm in that lineman queue with those giant horns, and when you see him when he's on the pole, I can't get over that queue either. He and I talked about it. We bring him in very early in our process because he's more like just a collaborator than just you know, he's more than just a composer. He's definitely a collaborator. So I talked to him when I was writing the script, and I just talked to him about what I was thinking about have

this epic quality. He's like, you should check out Maler's Ninth because Maler's heart was failing him and some people think the time signature is off because of his heart. So when I wrote the script, I listened to Maler's Ninth pretty much the whole time. But then, like very early on, and he comes in way earlier than any other composer would. He starts coming in writing these demos for the movie that are just mind blowingly good, and Hanks able to like bounce off of them, and I

sort of got like half of them ended up. The demos, he went to London and recorded with orchestras, like a lot of his music that was his first thought ended up staying in the movies. So he's a huge part of our process. And it's like Hank, Nick and I just bounce off each other in the edit all the time. Um, what were you guys talking about that? What would the music convey? What was it meant to be? This kind

of like turn it into almost this. I don't know if the words baroque, just this big epic in a way always it always was supposed to be a big American sound. I mean, one of the ideas we talked about was like we kind of know what the three acts structure of the American epic is. You know, it's kind of Act one is like striving, I'm gonna rise up. Act to is things are starting to work, Okay, the end of Act two there's a moment of doubt, but you overcome it. N Act three is triumph. And one

of our questions was, like what's act four? And you know, so I another friend of mine saw it. He called like the music that Nick did for this, like dark Copeland. It's a pretty good description, and that was kind of it. It's it's the like heroic infrastructure of the American mythology, but like kind of screwed with and warped a little bit. Um. Yeah, he just released the score yesterday, actually just came out. I just bought it. It's like he bought it an

they couldn't send you one about it. Uh, we're recording this in December, I imagine. Uh Cheney has not seen this film. Um. Has anyone in Washington seen the film? Like, I'm just curious if what that world might think of the movie if you've shown it to anyone. Well, remember we're talking about Dick Cheney, so he probably has getting getting you know. Like thinking on Shaney is he's a tough dude and there's been a lot of things written

about him, a lot of comments made on him. I think most of the movie he wouldn't have a problem with him, and it's accurate to what he did, I mean, invaded Iraq, Like all the stuff's true. I think the very end where we definitely give it a tragic twist in the end, he probably wouldn't like that. Um. I'd be most curious what his daughter Mary would think of this.

I'd really be interested to hear that. We are attempting to do a couple of screenings in Washington, d C. They're not locked in yet, but to let you know how that goes. You know, he's such an enigmatic but looming figure. I'm also curious to see, you know, when he left office, his approval writing was under twenty. It's

one of the lowest ever recorded. And I'm curious to see how much the right just comes out to defend him out of like habit, where did they kind of go you're on your own, Like, I'm curious just about the way they react to I'm talking about like the militant right. Not when we screened the movie, there are plenty of Republicans in the audience. We're like, hey, I'm fine with it is what happened. So we didn't have any problems with that, But like that that's super militant side.

I'm curious if they complain about it at all. We'll have to see. And he's kind of bubbled back up, you know, with the passing of HW recently, and we saw him at the funeral and you know, so it's it's interesting to see him again right before this movie is about to come out. It looks pretty spry, didn't look bad, and you know, his daughter now is like third in command in the House of Representatives. I mean, she's in the minority, but still that's a high position

that she's she's reached. That's the position her her father used to have. So I mean, there's a chance you could see Speaker Liz Cheney. That could actually happen. It's five or ten years. Yeah, since we're on the subject, I was kind of just wanting to get your thought, Well, what are your expectations for God, no idea at this point, right I don't think the Democrats know what they're going for. I think I mean the question is does Trump make it to or did the Republicans turn on him. It's

kind of up to the Republicans at this point. He's in a lot of trouble right now. I Mean, one thing we all know is if the economy falters, that that's an easy story to write. But and the other thing I've learned is it seems like in the last five or ten years, all all political predictions have been horribly wrong. So it's almost like predictions. Yeah, it's really been weird. Man, everything's just weird right now? Is breaking down? It kind of is. Yeah, I think we're at that place,

So I don't know. I don't know. You know, with the Dems, it's a battle between kind of the traditional d n C and the more progressive Dems. Which side will win and very curious Biden's making noise like he wants to run. That seems strange to me. What's that? Does? I feel wrong to you? Goes wrong to me? Yeah, it feels like you're going back to kind of a system that really hasn't worked very well for the d n C. But you know, we'll see who he runs against.

I I really have a feeling Trump's not going to run again. I think even if he gets to, he resigns, and I think he walks away and just says, you know, I was too good for you all, or give some speech like that I'm going out on top spend it. I mean, doesn't seem like Yeah, I can't imagine he gets past. But once again, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about. I know you're a Bernie fan. I mean, are you are you hopeful that he would run again?

That would be exciting? Uh? Yeah, I think no matter what, even if he wins or not, I just think he brings a nice, you know, breath of fresh air into any kind of Race. I love that no one owns him, you know, there's no big money like pulling him around on a leash. I think that's exciting. I think there's some other you know, I think better work from Texas certain clearly got some people excited. Uh. You know Elizabeth Warren, I've always been a huge fan of She's another one

no one owns her. That's my big thing is like I just want someone that no one owns, you know, I want someone not taking money from banks oil And you know, if you're someone like that, I'm immediately interested. So I like Shared Brown out of Ohio, and I think he's really sharp. Got to Elizabeth Warren and Shared Brown would be a really rock solid ticket. Like they're both veterans of d C, they're both progressive, they're realistic that yet no one owns them. You know. Um, now

that I just said that, there's no way it's happening. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, as as you say, it's it's hard to kind of figure out where the one's gonna blow. No idea, so if or there's going to even be windy. Uh, last thing here, Uh, you're a guinea pig for a new segment on this show. This is our one first episode, so we're gonna try something different. Thank you, Thank you. We're gonna ask people, I think at the end of every episode, you tell me what is the movie that

made you fall in love with movies? I like that question, all right. I got a very definitive answer for you. Awesome. It's the first movie I really remember as a young kid, and I remember watching that. I saw it in a movie theater with my dad, I believe, and it was The Man Who Would Be King, and I've never forgotten it to this day. It had such a mystery to it and a scope and the reveal in the end of the If you haven't seen it yet, don't listen the reveal in the end of the skull with the

gold crown on it. Also, that score was so incredible. Where were you? I was in Worcester, Massachusetts and what was that? In second grade? First grade? Something like that? God bless my dad. We went to the movies a lot, and I remember that was a big one. And that's what I've gone back and watched through the years and it's still hold quite nicely. But I was a little kid, maybe fall in love with movies and I'm fifty years old now and I could still watch it and still

love movies because of it. Was that the atmosphere of the movie. Was there something about the visuals, like is it just hard to peg down? Why it sticks with you? It's such a mystery. They're going into the snow, They're going into Alexander the Great supposedly had this kingdom. No one knows if it's real or not. Who are these people? What is this strange land? You know it's kipling And uh, it's just the mystery of the whole thing of it.

And I remember being a kid and it made the world feel so big and full of such like crazy possibility. It's also shot beautifully, I mean it looks amazing, and then it also has a turn in it that's kind of tragic, like you fall in love with Sean Connery's character and his ego starts to take over. You know what I'm realizing as I'm talking about it sounds a little bit like vice. What note to end on movie is called advice. You should check it out because it's

fantastic and it's out. Now take the family, Uh, find out a little bit of maybe how we got to where we are Adam McKay. Thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it so much for having me really fun