How Oscar contender The Big Short made a comedy-drama out of a crisis
Anchorman director Adam McKay tackles his most serious subject yet – the 2008 financial crisis – and brings out its absurdity and black humour
If you were drawing up a list of possible directors to take on a film about the 2008 financial meltdown, odds are the guy who brought the mustachioed, jazz-flautist weatherman Ron Burgundy into the world wouldn’t immediately spring to mind.
So when Adam McKay first set out to bring Michael Lewis’ 2010 non-fiction bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine to the big screen, he figured he’d face an uphill battle.
The story of a handful of Wall Street outsiders who foresaw the looming economic collapse when few others did, Lewis’ book is packed with complex economic arcana about credit default swaps, subprime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations. McKay – whose credits include the Will Ferrell comedies Talladega Nights, Step Brothers and the Anchorman movies – is known for making films with lines such as “I’ll bet his poop smells like sandalwood” and argue at absurd length over who would win in a fight between a lion and a tuna.
“I said, ‘No one is going to let me direct this,’” says McKay, 47. “No way.”
And yet not only did McKay manage to get The Big Short made by a major studio, Paramount Pictures, with an all-star cast including Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling, but he delivered a film that has vaulted into the thick of the Oscar race and earned rave reviews for its deft balance of drama, comedy and moral outrage. Suffice to say this is not the kind of outcome the average Wall Street trader would have laid money on.