Adam McKay: “The right wing lies to the workers with racism or nationalism, but at least it speaks to them. The left does not even that.”

The director of ‘Do not look up’, a comedian and a moral conscience of the new immoralities, imagines in his new film what would happen if a meteorite suddenly approached the earth. It is a fable and punctual description of the disaster that we live

Fool, like the drunkard, the child, or even the clown, has at least the benefit of honesty. Or so it maintains that so elitist that is the popular lore. Adam McKay (Filadelfia, 1968) He has been playing mad for years with a childish vehemence more like a drunkard. And by dint of perseverance it has ended up becoming the true moral conscience of a country and a society with a certain tendency to immorality. He started disguised as a clown as the ideologue of the mythical program Saturday night live and now premieres on Netflix Don’t look up (on the platform on Christmas Eve), a great guiol about world incompetence, populism, alternative rights, climate change, fake news and … a meteorite. After gutting the 2008 crisis at the hands of the surprising The big bet and after popping Dick Cheney’s biography in The vice of power, now it is the turn of the consequences of trumpismo international that does not stop. All of this from the hand of the most stunning rosary of stars that Hollywood has given: Meryl Streep a Leonardo DiCaprio pasando por Jennifer Lawrence o Jonah Hill nobody is missing. He attends us by zooming in and zooming in, warning us of the disgust that zooms in on him. Crazy, Chesterton said, is not he who has lost his reason, but he who has lost everything, everything, except reason. Be that.

A catastrophe movie about the catastrophe of the reality in which we live is a genius or a redundancy?

It is the second. Actually, when I decided to write the script, I simply limited myself to telling what was happening in front of me. The meteor that is coming over in Don’t Look Up is obviously climate change. We have the science, we know how to combat global warming, we know that we will end us if we do not act … but we refuse to do anything or take any action. We are looking for all kinds of excuses for him to blow us up in our faces. Yes, definitely, in the information age, we have lost the most basic ability to communicate.

His film, like the previous two, is a comedy, but it is also much more. You yourself have said on occasion that it is anything but a comedy.

The reality is so absurd and macabre that it is no longer funny. The reality has changed so much and has become so surreal, so outside the rules, that conventional genres no longer work. In my last three films I simply try to find an appropriate way to communicate. They are documentaries but fictionalized. They are comedies, but in such a broad sense that they are already something else. In this movie you laugh, although everything that happens is to burst into tears. All I want is to bring people together. We all agree that the world has gone crazy in a very short time and you can laugh at that, of course, but you cannot lose sight of how it really is terrifying.

How do you think the world has changed since Trump’s defeat?

Any. We are still doing what we could generically call Era Trump. To summarize we talk about him, but Bolsonaro, Erdogan or all his apprentices in all the countries of the world are still there. They are demagogic leaders with a penchant for caricature and who respond to the same obscene impulse. They are not there at all by chance, they are there for money. In the United States, for example, the Democratic Party is so corrupt and so weak that, in reality, it has not achieved anything important. I sincerely believe that all the conditions are in place for Trump or someone exactly like him to return to power. We become obsessed with people and no, the problem is another. It’s like fast food. We invented the phenomenon, but it is already all over the world. I don’t want to call it trumpismo. That is giving the character too much credit.

But I imagine that the left will also be responsible for what is happening …

Well, the problem is that in the United States, I don’t know in Spain, the left has ceased to exist. What we mean by the left here, the Democratic Party, is the right anywhere in the world. What has happened is that politics has long been a matter for large corporations. Money, the enormous amount of money that entered politics, castrated the left, took away their reason for being. If the left does not address the working class, what is it for?

So?

So we have a left that says nothing to the workers and a right that blatantly lies to them. But at least it addresses them, if only to intoxicate them with lies. In that they have shown themselves to be intelligent. What is the recipe on the right? Well, racism, nationalism, free use of weapons and a sense of macabre pride. It’s rubbish, but it’s easily understandable.

Everything he raises is bleak. Do you see any hope?

I want to believe that the movie talks about that: of hope. Fear is the most destructive of feelings. You have to stop having it and act urgently. We are on time.

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