David O. Russell: I’m sorry, I’m just going to say why. It’s on me. It’s not on you, all right? Sorry, it’s a rough compliment, I know, but sometimes you have to accept a compliment like that. I’m sure it’s really hard. My reason is this, Dr. Strangelove pushes people to cartoonish proportions, that isn’t really true in your movie. I don’t really feel that anyone is pushed to a cartoonish point. No one is being cartoonishly ridiculous, everybody’s being more or less as people we know. The things that are happening are things that are happening or have happened in our world, very accurately. Ariana Grande would be in the green room, she would tell you to shut up if you were old… I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but I mean, she would get many more clicks with her relationship than the information that could end the planet.
Jennifer would be considered bipolar for stating the truth in public as Jesus might have. I want to work up to the moment where Leo says in the beginning, you still haven’t gotten to your title card yet and the beautiful music by Nicholas Britell, “Are we really going to tell the president that this is going to happen?” She goes, “Yes.” She goes, “Give me that,” takes the wastebasket, vomits, and it’s your title card. I was so deep into the movie that I thought, “Oh my God, that’s so brilliant. We’re 11 minutes and 30 seconds into the movie and you throw that right hook and it’s fantastic.” Was that an editing room discovery or a script discovery?
Adam McKay: No, that was always scripted. I love screwing around with the titles. One of the great movies ever that did it was “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”, where they ran opening titles for the first half an hour of the movie through the movie. We just produced a movie called “Fresh” that’s going to premiere at Sundance where the credits do some unusual things. The whole concept of the movie was to keep the audience off balance to try and create that feeling of what it’s like to be alive now. Even the structure of the script, it doesn’t adhere to the Syd Field rules, it breaks a bunch of rules. To do the credits that high and the editing style, we were just going into it thinking that whatever we’ve been doing for the past 10 years, and by the way, this includes me, this isn’t me pointing fingers at other people, it hasn’t been working. We’re somehow missing this story that we’re living through right now.
The idea was like, “Let’s really go into it. Let’s really screw with it. There might be a different angle, maybe narratives and storytelling need to change as we’re in a different era.” That opening credits, I loved it from the beginning. We started task screening it and it was a complaint from some people, “It’s so late.” I was like, “No, we’re never changing that.” You just put your finger on it, the Nicholas Britell music is incredible. It’s one of my favorite pieces he’s ever written. I told him it was like Nino Rota playing on a dirigible that’s about to crash into a mountain, that’s what it feels like. It’s so swaying, crazed, and yet joyful. He told me his inspiration was World War II when the soldiers would listen to big band music, drink, and have the greatest time, but yet they’re about to go into Dunkirk or Battle of the Bulge, so there’s a dark kind of levity to it that was a major breakthrough for the movie.
David O. Russell: I love when it gets real loud when Jennifer’s yelling, I believe, in the restaurant and telling everybody was… that’s another incredible cut. Later on in the movie, people say… and it’s perfectly done when they’re finally in the restaurant talking amongst themselves and someone comes up and says, “What did you just say? That’s a pretty official-looking White House badge you have right there.” That’s a beautifully written way to bust somebody that they have to tell you… “Please, you have to tell us. We deserve to know. We deserve to know.” She says, “Okay, you want to know? Here’s what’s going to happen. They were going to stop the comet, then they found out there was a bunch of gold and other minerals on it, so now they’re going to do it to make a bunch of rich people richer.” Shocked pause, crash of a table being thrown through glass as the reaction kicks in, which is just, again, that’s that reversal you keep doing energetically, which it’s almost a musical thing in your script.
Adam McKay: Yes, that was crazy, David. I don’t know if you know this, but the day that we shot that riot at the Bojo Mambo’s Seafood restaurant, which by the way, I’m quite proud of all the fake company names. I made a decision I’m not using real company names, they’re not getting free advertising for the garbage they fill our world with. Every brand in the movie is fake. They stay at… the motel they stay at, I can’t remember what it’s called.
David O. Russell: Hacienda Suites.
Adam McKay: Hacienda Suites… it sounds so real, and Bojo Mambo’s.
David O. Russell: After they’re told by Jonah, “Peeps, it’s not going to happen tonight.” After waiting and listening to them sing “Happy Birthday”, which is so brilliant. They wait and wait and wait, and they don’t even get to have the meeting. This is so real. They would not get to have the meeting of the century.
Adam McKay: No, they would not. They would not get to have the meeting.
David O. Russell: Of the millennia. Then, you cut right to where they really would be sent. It’s not the Washington Hilton even, it’s Hacienda Suites, some hotel somewhere on the outskirts of Washington.
Adam McKay: That moment of the riot, we shot that the day after the attack on the Capital building, so we had to have discussions with the local Boston police. Remember, there was fear that people were going to attack state capitals around the country, and obviously the capital of Massachusetts is Boston. But the only thing we had going for us, which is a dark thing to have going for you, is COVID. The streets were empty and businesses were shut down, so we were able to film it, but it was one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had. Obviously, it was scripted a year before, and then we’re shooting this riot the day after this attack on the Capitol.
David O. Russell: It’s so surreal. It’s like history and you were mirroring each other. I love when Jennifer’s on the telephone that night at the Hacienda Suites with her boyfriend. He says, “My mom asked if you’re a lesbian.” She says, “Okay, let me just sit down and talk to her in about seven months,” when she knows that the world is going to be over, which is like… that goes under the list of what would you do if you knew the world was going to end in seven months? One of them is a beautiful, comedic check you cash as you would tell your boyfriend, “I’ll talk to your mother in seven months.” It’s just so good, it’s too good. He says, “Oh, that’s such a weirdly specific moment of time to name.” Did you brainstorm about a lot of these jokes like you would on your comedies? Did you sit and go, “What’s funny about this?” To me, it seems like you would have to.
Adam McKay: We absolutely did. A lot of it was in the writing, but in the case of the seven months joke, once again, my theory is just always you’re there, you’re dressed up, you’re on set, you’ve got the takes you want, let’s mess around. I just started talking to Jen. I was like, “What else would happen here?” I go, “I feel like your boyfriend might sense that your distant.” On that day, Himesh Patel who’s fantastic wasn’t there, so I was playing him on the phone and just feeding her, trying to get into a fight with her. I just kept trying to pick a fight with her when she knows the world’s going to end. Jen just came up with that line, and it was golden and sort of made that whole sequence work. Once again, I just never could get enough of them. It’s so fun too because it goes against every convention of the traditional genre to just spin your wheels in this first act beat. We really had to find the perfect line on that because I swear to God I could have hung out in that first 10 minutes for [crosstalk 00:34:02].
David O. Russell: But, that’s the brilliance is that is what we’re living right now. It is so much more refreshing than, “Everybody stop, everybody hold their breath,” because that’s not what would happen today is this has been proven numerous times. You can invade the Capitol, you can have a pandemic, people aren’t going to stop. As long as they can text and put their face on their dog’s face and their dog’s face on their face, they think, “How bad could it be?”
Adam McKay: I don’t know why, David, it seemed like there was judgment about putting your face on your dog’s face. That’s pretty cool. Have you seen that? It’s awfully fun.
David O. Russell: Well, the vicious memes that come out are too fun to be true. The memes that make Jennifer look like a fat baby, that make Jennifer look like she’s a wet cat, a missing tooth ugly woman, that they call him an astronaut I’d like to F an [inaudible 00:34:53] which will lead to his affair with Cate Blanchett. This is what would happen if you were a humble scientist from Michigan State. Suddenly, you’re on set with a very glamorous, attractive woman, Cate Blanchett, and suddenly she likes you and you’re an [inaudible 00:35:06] and they’re moving onto this level of the whole story.
Adam McKay: I mean the craziest thing was after the movie came out and it got this global response, we saw there were people posting videos of actual climate activists and scientists being diminished by sort of puffy morning news shows. There’s a couple of them out there… there’s a clip of George Monbiot, who’s an incredibly eloquent journalist and activist when it comes to the climate, of him breaking down in tears on a British morning show and everyone being like, “Oh, this is embarrassing.” You’re like, “No, he’s having the same response. You’re following a TV show format.” I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know that there were a bunch of examples, but I think we’ve seen it. That’s exactly the response. This climate crisis is now, it’s terrifying. It’s the biggest story in human history and you turn on the news and it just feels like one of 30 issues.
Hearing the climate scientists respond to it has been really beautiful, hearing them really feel seen, and also darkly funny that we thought up this comedy, and sure enough, there’s a reality behind it. I didn’t know that there were these encounters, so it’s been enlightening like, “Oh, it’s actually worse than we thought.”
David O. Russell: Well, let me just try to… I know we have not much time left. I want to talk about some more brilliant writing. I want to talk about how Jonah and Jennifer are always sparring with each other, and it’s just established organically they don’t like each other. He says, “Who are you?” when she’s saying, “You don’t understand how serious this is. You can’t postpone this.” It was so brilliant how they go 3% chance and they go, “You can’t tell people that. That’s not something you can tell people. We’ll say 70, we’ll call it 70.” I bet that’s happened 1000 times in the Oval Office. Jennifer says, “No, you have to tell people this is the real thing.” He says, “Who are you?” She says, “Who the F are you? Aren’t you her son?” Then he calls her the boy with the dragon tattoo and he gives her a fist bump on his way out and says, “Thanks for dressing up,” because she’s not dressed up at all.
Then, how about the moment as Meryl… I think this is one of Meryl’s greatest performances you’ve written for her. I think it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s brilliant. You’re not spoofing our former president really, you’re doing something wholly original that is related to that president. It’s very grounded. It’s not an SNL thing, it’s a very grounded thing. She plays it very subtly, I don’t think there’s anything overplayed about it at all. She starts to react, “Yes. Yay,” and it has nothing to do with… she found her cigarettes. She says, “When I smoke, they see me smoking. I have to be a secret smoker as the President, but my poll numbers actually go up,” which is the irony of one side in our country that likes to do everything that you’re not supposed to do and then watches their poll numbers go up.
Adam McKay: That’s one of my favorite jokes in the movie, and it never got a huge out-loud laugh. But I love the idea that she’s the President that smokes with impunity, the smoking hot magazine cover, and her just surreptitiously lighting up or hitting a vape pen throughout the movie because it feels like something that it’s amazing that it hasn’t happened. I just feel like that could happen next year. There could be… Marjorie Taylor Greene could start smoking in public and her numbers would go up.
David O. Russell: How brilliant is it when Leonardo’s having his panic attacks, which are beautiful, and he starts saying, “You are here now,” what does he say? Seven, 11, [crosstalk 00:38:56].
Adam McKay: Elephants or something, yes. God bless DiCaprio, when he was interested in this role I was like, “This guy has panic attacks. This guy is schlubby. This guy is not published a lot. He’s a lower-tier professor at Michigan State, which by the way, Michigan State’s a great school. They have a great astronomy department. This guy is not the star of the department.” DiCaprio was like, “Let’s go.” You look at him in this and his willingness to play this very real guy, a guy we can all identify with, God bless him. The panic attacks were… filming those, writing those were such a joy because, once again, you’re seeing it now. You’re seeing NBA stars, NFL players come out talking about panic attacks. Well, guess what? We’re all having panic attacks. We’re living on the precipice of civilization and no one will ever say it.
David O. Russell: Well, since the previous presidency, the people who polled who said that they were in a state of feeling alarmed was a higher percentage than ever in history. Feeling alarmed is higher than it’s ever been. The brilliance of Jennifer telling the story of the comet, you avoid ever becoming repetitive about that. When she tells the story again in the Oval Office, she tells it differently than she ever told it before, she tells it differently. Now we’ve made it specifically seven to nine kilometers, it keeps evolving, which is brilliant writing I think.
Adam McKay: That ones a lot of credit to our science advisor, Amy Mainzer, who’s one of the near-earth-object experts in the world. That came out of me talking with her when I was writing the script, and she was telling me it would most likely be a comet and comets are very hard to get a sense of the size. The specificity of the science was really enjoyable to let flow through the script because it just made everything feel more real, the mathematics they did, the way they described that. By the way, the impact is 100% accurate, every bit of it the way Leo describes it, a billion Hiroshima bombs, the tidal waves, the earthquakes, 11 to 12 Richter scale earthquakes, that’s all accurate. That’s what happened with the Chicxulub comet 66 million years ago. By the way, it’d be an interesting argument… there’s an argument to be made, it’s slightly better than what’s happening with global warming, where we’re headed with global warming is actually in some ways worse than the comet by a couple of degrees.
David O. Russell: It’s a slow, torturous thing as opposed to an immediate thing.
Adam McKay: Exactly. It unwinds us. It doesn’t just do us in, it slowly unwinds us to the point where we have no cognitive firm ground under our feet. I mean, you saw it with Kentucky and Colorado, those events were so shocking and strange. The news media and the people that went through it have no framework for it, which a lot of people have written about this and that’s the way a hyper-object like global warming will come about. They call it non-local, you have no sense of time or place. It’s like the book, “Death in Venice”, the Thomas Mann book, what that mean character goes through where he’s slowly undone by a heat wave and a pandemic into the point where he doesn’t even know who he is.
David O. Russell: That’s what’s happening, and yet you do it in a brilliant, loving way. If the writer’s question is always, “What does the protagonist want and what is his need?” As much as you might defy Syd Field, you do fulfill these brilliant things that make stories fulfilling. Leo wants to tell the world about this comet, then he starts having an affair with Cate Blanchett, another brilliantly written scene in a bedroom. “I hate the getting-to-know-you part of relationships,” she says. “Okay, let’s do this.” She slept with two former Presidents, she was married to a Secretary of State. What about you? Well, our family dog died about two years ago and I haven’t cried that hard about anything ever. Oh, and I finally got Mark Hamill to sign my Star Wars poster. Now, and she goes… there they are together in bed. That’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Now, he’s cheated on his wife, and yet at the end of the movie, what is one really…? There’s what you want versus what you need, and what he wanted to do was get the message out.
Suddenly he’s in a commercial, he’s with this glamorous woman, he gets busted by his wife. What does he need? He needs a home where he can be loved and where he wants to be when it all ends, which is beautifully arrived at. I have to say, it’s so beautiful how Linus, your DP, who I’ve also worked with… it’s beautiful how it’s done, how they all want to be together and they want to be with people they love, and holding hands and in a house. We all think about, “Where would we be? What matters at the end of the day?” It’s love. His wife at the door says, “Yes, please come back in,” the wife who was so hurt by him. Another great scene you wrote where she throws all of his meds at him, saying to Cate Blanchett, “Well, here’s the kit for taking care of him. Here’s his Restless Leg Syndrome medicine. Here’s his Anxiety Disorder medicine. Here’s his appetite suppressant medicine,” and she’s got about 500 medicines that she throws at him.
Each of these scenes is epic as are Jen’s monologues, Meryl’s monologues, Leo’s monologues, the small moments and the big.
Adam McKay: It’s funny, David, you’re talking about the ending. I love what you just said about it’s what you need, not what you want. I think that was… that ending, really, I got to give a lot of credit to just the quiet of where I was writing. I think that ending just came out of the fact that I was at a house by a lake with no one near me. I think for writers, as the Writers Guild of America East… by the way I represent East.
David O. Russell: Me too.
Adam McKay: We’re both East. I love WGA East. It’s hard in this world now to find a quiet, or not even quiet, but comfortable place to write because I didn’t even know that was going to be the ending when I started writing it. I didn’t know until I built towards it that’s what I needed as the writer or that’s what I thought the audience maybe needed. It was one of the great writing experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve just never had that kind of quiet with no media, my wifi sucked where I was at. There was just a lake in front of me. That doesn’t have to be a lake house, that could be the library, that could be… I remember, David, at one point you told me you were writing… you liked the lobby of a chiropractor and you’d go to it. Do you remember this? You told me you would write in the lobby of this chiropractor and he would actually leave at the end of the day and give you the keys.
It’s like you found a place where your mind could quiet and it’s a testament to you that you were just like, “I don’t care where it is, I’m going there,” and that ending is, for me, it’s definitely one of the most personal things I’ve ever written. Every time I watch the ending, it’s almost embarrassing because I tear up every time.
David O. Russell: It’s absolutely gorgeous. I’m sorry, I know we’re out of time… I have to keep praising your writing because this is our official WGA thing. There’s so much incredible writing in this. You go down every category. You’re in every event of the decathlon, you get to make fun of a certain brand of humor in this country where the macho hero… you go, “Well, they need a hero. Wouldn’t it just be a robotic thing? Yes, but they want a hero, so we got a hero.” We get Ron Perlman in an astronaut suit and he says, “The only thanks I need,” after the President says, “We can’t thank you enough for this selfless act of this mission,” “The only thanks I need is a shot of Jack Daniels.” I love that you’re taking time to satirize a certain kind of sense of humor. Then, he says, “What if you got the two Indians together?” He insults every race on the planet, all right.
“Here’s all the White people. What if you put the Indians with the arrows together with the Indians with the turbans?” Things like, “Why would you say that?” but he’s saying that. The General says, “He’s from another generation,” to try to excuse him.
Adam McKay: Well, once again, we wanted the movie to feel like the world we live in.
David O. Russell: It is, it’s a perfect mirror.
Adam McKay: The world we live in is like this weird mixture of people that are very sensitive to offending other people and then people that take great joy in offending other people. Perlman’s character, and the fact that we got Perlman was such a joy because I love him. But, that might have been the trickiest stretch of dialogue I’ve ever written in my entire life, which is how do you make something offensive without having it be so offensive? You know what I mean? You’re writing a politically incorrect, hateful…?
David O. Russell: Well, you did it perfectly. I think you did it perfectly, although I’m not either kind of the two Indians so you’ll have to ask them, ask Patel, the actor, but I thought you did it perfectly. Here’s another thing you did perfectly, why does the big tech guy… another incredible character you created who so accurately reflects the kind of wizardly shamans we’ve come to accept who tell us this will completely end world poverty and it turns out we have a wonderful thing here and we’ll all fall into the ocean and be collected and it’ll solve world poverty. Leo says, “That’s crazy. You can’t do that.” I love this cut. Jonah says, “Oh wow, we’ll all be rich and we’ll all be safe. Oh no, we’ll all be rich and we’ll all be safe.” Then, you cut right then. You also do a lot of brilliant cuts from loudness, whether music or Jen screaming to the silence of space. I love those cuts.
Adam McKay: It’s a cool thing. I’ve worked with Hank Corwin now on three movies and a TV show and we know each other so well that I find myself writing for him. I don’t know if other writers have experienced this, when you get a certain creative team, maybe it’s an incredibly privileged position to be in. But I now find myself knowing Hank and writing for those dynamics where it’s energy, a hard cut, and cutting back and forth like the sequence where President Orlean describes what they’re going to do to get the mission going and it’s cutting back and forth between her telling them and then her doing the speech. Well, that was actually scripted like that. Hank was like, “Well, that worked really well.” I was like, “Well, yes, I’ve worked with you on three projects, I knew what you were going to do.” It’s a cool thing when you get in that groove with certain people, whether it’s a DP, whether it’s a producer, an editor. I think it’s an element of writing, with film writing specifically, that can really be exciting.
David O. Russell: Well now, how does the head of big tech just walk into a cabinet meeting where they’re discussing this? He’s a Platinum Eagle Donor Level, okay, that’s how. Then, you understand who really is the boss when he says, “I’d like to have a word with you Mrs. President,” and two seconds later, she’s not out there. He goes, “Janie, now.” She has to go out there, and then she comes back in and they change the whole thing, so they stop the whole mission. This is brilliant writing. That they have a mission to save us, and then that mission gets undone in the name of a brilliant, high-minded, big tech… his speech is so brilliantly written. All these elements we must have of is beryllium and the selenium and these are all [inaudible 00:50:33] quantities now, and China now has its big panda on top of that, that’s such good writing that China has… we can’t get these minerals, so we need them. Low and behold, this goes from being a disaster to a miracle.
Adam McKay: Before I got the thing of Will walking in the room was when I did The Big Short, I talked to the two young guys in the movie and they told me a story of going to Congress to go tell… they wouldn’t tell me who this Congressman was, whether it was the Senator or not. They refused to say his name, I have an idea of who it was. They went to tell the representative from New York state about all the illegal stuff that went on from the big banks with the crash in ’07, and they were kept waiting for two hours. Finally, this representative came walking out with Jamie Dimon, who at the time was CEO at Bank of America, and the two of them were laughing with their arms around each other. The two young guys just realized, “Oh, that’s it. It’s already cooked.” I never have forgotten that, that Jamie Dimon could just walk through senator’s offices with impunity and he’s given so much money out they all just love him. It made me sick, but it really is a reality in DC.
David O. Russell: Well, let me say this, another brilliantly written line… every character is brilliantly written and I love it. I know because my favorite movies… I love to do them all day, like you do bits, right? I love to do them. I could do all of “Raging Bull” right now. I could do half of “Goodfellas”. I could do half of “Paper Moon”, just because it’s like listening to music, it makes me happy. You have so many scenes in this movie that I’d like to do, including the Mark Rylance character. Then, you have the beauty of the idea that he has so much data on Leo, he knows how many polyps Leo has and that he should probably have them checked out now. He knows every item that Leo wants to purchase, everything that he prefers, and he knows how everyone’s going to die. Now, this is brilliant writing. That is just a mere extension of what our devices are doing. My phone already makes movies and collages about my family, which half I thought, “Well, that’s cool,” and I half was mortified.
I thought, “How did you get into my pictures and pick pictures of my youngest son and put it together with my older son and put this music to it?” Then, that’s what happens earlier when everybody buys the DJ’s album, their phone does it without them even choosing to. Our phones are increasingly choosing to do things without our permission. I love what Leo says near the third act, which he says, “What have we done to ourselves? What have we done to ourselves?”
Adam McKay: That little run in his speech, I love how raw it is. Why does everything have to be likable or clever or charming? Sometimes we just got to be able to say things to each other, my God, what have we done to ourselves?
David O. Russell: What have we done to ourselves that this is happening, yet we’re unable to communicate about it at a human level and we’re thinking about how to make money off of it and people are ignoring it and debating? Who have we become?
Adam McKay: Yes, it’s that single moment… I mean, there’s a couple moments in the movie, the prayer at the end always gets me, but that moment when Leo says that, it’s just like, “What? There’s got to be some grown-up that’s got to just stop this for a second so we can see what we’re doing,” but it just keeps barreling forward with this odd conviction from our society that’s just so strange. What we’re doing is not working. We’re not communicating with each other. We’re not communicating the climate crisis. Our country is divided, everything is not working, yet there’s this odd defensiveness to what we’ve been doing, that “Oh, well, wait, you can’t change…” I guess that’s how you get into a death spiral.
David O. Russell: Well, let’s go back to Dr. Strangelove for a moment. Dr. Strangelove is a comparable moment in history. The bomb had been created, Russia had the bomb… I think China might have gotten the bomb then and people were terrified. My parents were terrified when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened, and they thought, “Wow.” We had bomb shelter drills in my school, it was a very real thing that people felt that we could die in a nuclear winter. President Kennedy gave two speeches of it in the last months of his life, which are the most beautiful antiwar speeches almost by any president, if you watch them, the American University speech. He said, “How different are we from the Russians?” It was a very human moment. “Don’t we all drink the same water and want the same things for our children? To live with clean air and clean water and to live in a safe world.”
He’s saying we’re not different from the Russians, which was heresy at that time, and may have resulted in his death. I believe a chain of events starting from his death through Vietnam to the creation of Reagan and Fox News to the internet leads us right to here. That was a time when people regarded the Atom bomb, but there were grownups like him and there were grownups even like Eisenhower who said, “No, this has to be very carefully controlled.” When there were Generals saying to him, “You should bomb Cuba,” he said, “I am never going to be the guy who does that and I don’t want anybody ever to drop an atomic bomb ever.”
Adam McKay: Have you ever heard this story, David, about the moment where LeMay had maybe convinced JFK to bomb Cuba?
David O. Russell: With an atomic weapon?
Adam McKay: Yes. There was a moment in one of the conference rooms in the White House where Kennedy was like, “Maybe we’ve got to do this.” There was a lot of people in the room and he said, “If anyone can tell me why I shouldn’t do this, now is the time.” A guy way in the back corner of the room raised his hands and he said, “My name is Allen Spencer,” I’m making up the name. “I’m a Russian analyst and you don’t need to do this, Khrushchev actually just wants to save face and that’s what this is all about,” and because that guy raised his hand, we did not have a nuclear war, which literally could have destroyed 80% of life on planet Earth, if not all. That’s a true story. I’ve always looked into that because it shows how each of us in our own little place can stop the flow of bad decisions just by standing up, and the courage it must have taken for that guy to raise his hand because the [inaudible 00:57:08] brothers and LeMay were pushing for this, they wanted this.
There was this big political headwind with the anti-communist stuff. I think we’re in a similar place today where each of us has a moment where we can demand better from our news, demand better from our leaders, demand better from whatever institution we need. I’m getting a little preachy, I know I am.
David O. Russell: No, let me say this. No, you’re absolutely correct, what you’re saying is correct and it is a beautiful note to bring toward that get… hold on, I want to praise some more things here. As then, Kennedy, I also heard this story about Kennedy, which you also have in your movie brilliantly with Meryl Streep, when she calls up DiCaprio and says, “We have a ship with 2000 seats, if you’d like to come.” He says, as a principle person, “Of course, you have a ship for the elite 2000.” He doesn’t say that, it doesn’t have to be said. He says, “No, thank you. I’m going to…” He chooses to stay with his loved ones. Kennedy had been told, “Well, we’ll all go to a special bomb shelter.” Kennedy said, “Excuse me, if this happens, we’re not going anywhere.” He said, “We are going to stay right here and we will die with everybody else.”
That is also a grown-up, principled moment. For a person who may have been very messy in his personal life, he actually had real principles, some of them that I think cost him his life, his brother’s life, Martin Luther King’s life, and Malcolm X’s life. Those are the four people who could have stopped the Vietnam war, and they got rid of all of them. Thank you for your brilliant film.
Adam McKay: David, thank you so much for hosting this. By the way, I got to say this, there’s a little gem of a scene in one of David’s movies, and David’s been praised quite a bit for his brilliant movies. But if you ever have a chance, watch “I Heart Huckabee” and watch the scene at the dinner table with Richard Jenkins, Mark Walberg, and Jonah Hill where they argue about fossil fuels. I told David after I saw the movie, “I love the movie, but I could have watched that scene for an hour and a half.” I think it’s just people tend to be all or nothing with movies, it’s this or that.
David O. Russell: No, I feel the movie needed better rewrites with me and you, but that’s one of the best scenes in the picture and that was Joni Hill’s first time in a movie.
Adam McKay: It’s incredible, but it’s also one of the great scenes of that time. I love the movie and I would highly encourage people to go back and look at it. Anyway, I just had to say that because…
David O. Russell: That’s very kind of you. I love your cast. I love your picture. I can’t talk about it enough. I hope I see you soon. It was a privilege to do this and this movie should go far and wide.
Adam McKay: Love you, David. Thank you so much, my friend.
David O. Russell: Love you, writers. Love you, Dana. All right, everybody, keep writing. Writers need to tell the truth and make us see it and feel it.
Geri Cole: Wow. Thank you, Adam and David, for that awesome conversation. That’s it for this episode. OnWriting is a production of the Writer’s Guild of America East and is hosted by me, Geri Cole. This series was created and is produced by Jason Gordon. Tech production and original music by Taylor Bradshaw at Stockboy Creative. Our associate producer and designer is Molly Beer. You can learn more about the Writers Guild of America East online at wgaeast.org and you can follow the Guild on all social media platforms at WGAeast. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and rate us. Thank you for listening, and write on.
