Adam McKay is Still Angry About 2008

[Music] Pushkin. Most of 2006 and early 2007, Dr. Michael Barry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an email he wrote, "The partners 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-Cott, a producer here on Against the Rules, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the Big Short. A book that Michael Lewis wrote in 2010. 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 going to tell you what I want you to do. You're an innocent outsider with no particular interest in the global financial crisis. It is like one of these huge events in American history. 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 we're interviewing are the people we're interviewing. Why they matter now. So, I haven't thought about the 2008 financial crisis since it happened, which is when I was in high school. I'm going to 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 the slow-motion train wreck that comes right from that. The essence of its importance was the feeling of unfairness 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 the harsh rules of capitalism except the capitalist themselves. The feeling that the world is rigged. The anger generated by the event has been the dominant mood in our political life. So, I've thought for some time that they'll come a moment where it's worth looking back on and saying, "Why was this important? What were the consequences of this event?" Right, and here we are, it was the moment. And you did it by talking to a bunch of people who you thought could answer questions that you had that kind of came to you as you were rereading the book. Correct. The first person was Adam McKay, who was 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, TellyDataNights, were you anxious about interesting your book to this guy who up until then had only done comedies? Anxious doesn't describe what I felt. What I felt was incredulity. I thought there's no way they're going to turn this book in no movie. And so, I was amazed that it happened, you know, in the first place. I thought, no way they're going to be able to pull this off. And the fact that he pulled this off is incredible, the way he did. Now, I remember thinking the only way it works is if it's funny. Like, you ask a comedian to be funny, they can be funny. That's their job is when they're supposed to be funny, they're funny. I find that so hard. I feel like I 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 K took it on, I thought if someone's going to 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 "Talda"拦人家, it's an anchor man. It is the guy. This is the big, short companion pod. After the break, Michael Lewis' conversation with Adam the K, about how he transformed a wonky book about the 2008 financial crisis into an Oscar-winning film. This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. Business and the ways we do it are changing, in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. Welcome to Compound Interest from "Selma 4 Business." I'm Liz Hoffman. And I'm Rohan Giswamy. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution. But now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week, we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance your sushi order. We'll unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to Compound Interest from "Selma 4 Business" wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm going to ask you a lot of stupid questions. The question is some of them might know kind of the institute but mostly don't. And before we get to the big short, I want you to tell me about 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 improvise 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 own stuff. And I was frustrated. I mean, it's how they're at live is kind of like the New York Times. I mean, it's a very established institution that has a certain way that it operates. And honestly, if you ask Lauren Michaels, I think he would tell you he was sick of me arguing with them. So I was about to leave in, you know, friendly terms. And I had a manager, Jimmy Miller, who said, if you're going to leave, you might as well make a totally unreasonable demand. So I went back and I said, all right, I want to make short films. I want you to give me a budget. I want you to let me name my credit. I don't want to ever have to go to production meetings or any of that stuff. And I still want to write sketches as I see fit. So I was like, oh, and I want to raise. And I was expecting the response to come back, you know, get lost. And he said, yes. And it was really all credit to Lauren, the experience I had shooting those short films was really when I knew like, oh, I may writer director. They were all on 16 millimeter, like real film. And they were, it was just an incredible experience. So Farrell and I will Farrell and I had written a script, which we couldn't get made over at Paramount. But we had, it was about a car salesman from Anna, who was the greatest car salesman, but fell into a slump. So we've had so much fun doing that that we decided to write another script. And we wrote the anchor man script. And the idea was always that I would direct it. And once again, to Lauren's credit, he loved it. He was behind it. He was like, my K can direct. Farrell is a star. And every single studio and financier in town passed on it. And I'll never forget we were back in my little apartment in New York City. And I was with Farrell. And it, you know, nothing was going the way we thought it would go. And the only project that anyone wanted to make was this goofy script about him as a full adult being an elf. And we were just sitting in my apartment and we're like, we better make this good. I was hired to do the rewrite. And we hammered on it. And all the studios that it passed on anchor man came back. And like there was like a little bidding war. And that was it. And we got to make anchor man. This is the beginning of your long form career as a film director. Yeah. Is anchor man. I remember you telling me that anchor man, 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. And that's the background 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 an anchor man is 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 with Taladek and I step brothers always as ridiculous as they were. We were trying to play it at the highest stakes. And then Will and I would always have a little secret that we were like anchor man is actually about the collapse of mainstream news media. Taladek and I it's is about this backwards pride of the W Bush supporters step brothers was about how consumerism turns grown men into children. And so every movie we have this little secret we never tell anyone. So the big shorts. Yeah, I mean, it was really like someone recommended the book. Oh, they have good taste. I picked it up. Oh, let me read this could not put it down. And I was like, Oh my god, this story is incredible. I mean, people forget, but at the time that book came out that was like the book of that era. Because we were in the full throws of what people now call the neoliberal economic model. That's where essentially corruption became quote smart. And it was this weird period, which is now coming to full blossom where not only are institutions, but our culture itself the way we operate as a society became something that was about get what you can get. You know, Michael, you're familiar with the last man out theory, which was the scariest thing I discovered when I was doing the big short and that theory is get everything you can get your bonuses, make as much money as you can screw everything and just don't be the last man left. Make sure you're out before the collapse. And I really think if you look at the neoliberal economic age, that one theory explains so much. Yeah, I loved your book. You also have a really good sense of humor. So you made me laugh several times. And then I loved it in the book how you would call stuff out and stop and say if you're confused right now. So as I when I heard this. And that was really the bell that went off. And that was putting, putting Margot Robbie in a bathtub to explain credit default swaps. Yeah. Yeah. So the banks started filling these bonds with riski and risky mortgages. Thank you. That way I can keep that profit machine churning. Right? By the way, these risky mortgages are called subprime. So whenever you hear subprime think shit. A friend Michael Burry found out that these mortgage bonds that were supposedly 65% triple A were actually just mostly full of shit. So now he's going to show up the bonds, which means to bet against. Got it. You've 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 talking about? Stop. And I knew we had picked the right moment when my sound guy came to me and said, hey, Adam, I just got to let you know this is really confusing. And I was like, yes, we're in good shape. And when we come back, I ask Adam, okay, how we 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 think I'm 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 clip from our episode about Jim Simon's decades ago, Simon's basically invented modern algorithmic trading. And after a few early hiccups, including buying up all the potatoes in Maine, Simon's built a machine that generated incredible returns for decades. The show is called Business History and the previews coming up at the end of today's episode of Against the Rules. Business and the ways we do it are changing in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. Welcome to Compound Interest from Sama 4 Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution, but now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels, to companies that will finance through sushi order, will unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to Compound Interest from Sama 4 Business wherever you get your podcasts. I'm back with writer and director Adam McKay. For you, what were the challenges of 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 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 had no interest because they're like the guy who did step brothers with Wall Street. And we realized we had to get big stars. So just on our own, we went out to Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt. And it was one of those freaky moments where they all said yes. And Adam Goodman was running Paramount. And to his credit, he was like, okay. I mean, they didn't give us a huge amount of money, but they gave us the green light. And that was it. 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 this? I'm going to say this. And it sounds very immodest. But that was a good script. Like, that was, I mean, these actors get, you know, a hundred scripts a year. Maybe they read like 30 or 40. 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 XYZ. But here's how I see this. This will be different. I right away knew that I wanted Barry Acroid 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. And no one adds life to scenes like Barry Acroid. Give me an example of how he creates drama from a phone call. That's just different. So what he does is his background is as a documentary filmmaker. So he 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, 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 want it to be a blend. And he was totally cool with it. And it was some of the most exciting filmmaking I have ever seen. Because it's a constant process of discovery. He kind of treats it like I don't know what's going to happen. And this is a documentary. So you can see him constantly zooming in, finding something. Oh, I like this. Hang out. Meanwhile, I'm behind the monitor going, oh, Barry, that is incredible. But you know what? It sounds like it sounds like a visual 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. 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 were now in eradicates discovery. So if you're going to 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 80s, the late 70s. People would go into movies and have no idea where it was going to end up. There would be investigative pieces where the writer would start with a and end up with like W. And the more and more financialized America has become, the less and less 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 35 billion dollars to the guy who did stepbrothers, they could just say we had 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 Michaelbury? He's just one of the 10 greatest film actors ever. And I would just say if you're going to like create that list of people that are chameleons, people that are really artists. I started doing all this stuff in 1990, which is crazy. And so I've met a lot of actors. We had a lot of hosts at Saturday Night Live. I was doing those short films. I got to work with feature actors. And I just started noticing that there is a giant golf between personality actors who kind of operate off their charisma with some real skills. And then these like I mean for lack of a better term, but like real artists and Bale just wow seeing his process was incredible. I was watching it. I was thinking, oh my god, that's Michaelbury on the screen. I've always been more comfortable along. I believe maybe it's because of my glass eye. I lost the eye in a child of illness. 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 that I had not articulated. So this bothered me because I thought I'm an observant chap. I should have observed whatever it was that he would have needed to play Michaelbury. So we're on the the junket and I'm you know on stage, you know, four or five times with Christian Bale and you sometimes talking about the movie or in the book in the story. And backstage I have a lot of time to chit chat with him. And I kept badgering him like how the hell did you do that? Because all I knew was why Michaelbury had told me Michaelbury said I called him. I said what's going on with the movie goes. Christian Bale visited me. He's the weirdest guy I've ever met. I said if Michaelbury is calling you weird and I said well what was weird about it. He said he said he just wanted 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 whole day and asked me some questions. And then at the end of it he said could I just could I have that t-shirt in those shorts because I'm going to use those I'm aware of those when I play you. And wow. But I saw I went to Christian Bale said like what the hell happened in those 12 hours like what did you figure out because there was something about his body language is I couldn't figure out why he had got him because Michaelbury 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 bastard and finally he says okay he says it wasn't that complicated or if you watch him you could see he does it's a breathing he breathes in the wrong places of sentences. Yes. And he says as long and if you do that you get all herky jerky and I had not noticed that the genius in saying that would just breath taking to me. And he said to me I told mcay would just remind me to breathe in the wrong places and everything else will come. Does that ring a bell? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He told me exactly that what I noticed about him. And I noticed that he's a lovely guy. I noticed this contrast of extremely sensitive big heart and then armor. And I never got into the way he was raised we didn't need to but I could identify with the idea of growing up as a 1970s 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 mcay and I talk about the event behind both the book and the movie. The financial crisis of 2008. Welcome to Compound Interest from Salma for Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution but now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week we'll talk to the operators, the experts and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance through sushi order. Listen to Compound Interest from Salma for Business wherever you get your podcasts. When I think of the difference between the movie and the book, that you know, aside from Margarh 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 Pharaoh that when we did those broad comedies, I used to call an angler man, Taladek Gennights, and stepbrothers, the mediocre white man trilogy, because they're all about white guys who think they're better than they are, think they're more powerful, unearned confidence. And really looking back on it when you go big short, vice, don't look up. I would call it the collapse trilogy. 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 really believed in Obama. It just never occurred to me that someone could be so cynical in that vulnerable moment. It never occurred to me that someone could step into that seat and just go same old, same old, confrontation, adverse. And that betrayal was really deep. 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, yes, 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 70s and the early 80s before Reagan and 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. You are really a little bit. I mean, it's just that I was raised with the opposite. 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 was like something you put on our letter, you know, it's a or collected and sold for profit. I mean, 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 upset injustice in unfairness really upsets me. And so 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 mind 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 a sign legs thing like the wonder is it does it well as 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 the 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 that not only was I doing the junkets with you, but I was in the second row of the Oscars. I'd been to the Oscars before, but I'd been by the time I got to the Oscars further the blind side and money ball. I was very much a spectator like I was just there to watch the everybody get nominated maybe win. In this case, I sit down on my seat in the second row. And one of the Oscars attendants come over and says if the movie wins best picture and it had a real shot says Adam a K insists that you come on stage and receive the Oscar with us. And I was so I was really touched by that like like I teared up like it was just like that there was it was wholly unnecessary on your part. I really have fought from the minute I started had interactions with the movie business that everybody in the movie business would really prefer the author to be dead because he does he causes nothing but trouble like there's no upside. And and and you want to be alive. I was just really pleased with that and I'm grateful. I 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 isn't outside or city. I mean you look historically like a lot of revolutionaries were wealthy and there is 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 here's my name there's a real power to it and I think your point about I believe in fairness stands stronger because you come from where you come from 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 it. What a 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 meet 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, Luigi and Caught and Catherine Geraudet. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our theme was composed by Nick Bertel and our engineer is Hans Dail She. Special thanks to Nicole Optin-Bosh, Jasmine Faustino, Pamela Lawrence and the rest of the Pushkin audiobooks team. Against the rules is the production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin.fm/plus or on our Apple Show page. And you can get the Big Short now at pushkin.fm/audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. 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 Simons. 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, please check out the show. It's called Business History, and it's available wherever you're listening right now. They were doing what we would call today machine learning. A machine learning is like essentially you build a system of the computer, you feed it 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. 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. And the state of Maine potato, big harvester, next year or whatever. Until two thirds of the company's money was in potatoes. They were all in a potatoes, and they got a call from the regulators, the CFPB. The commodity futures trading commission, right? Yeah. Saying, whoa, who are you guys? What are you doing over there? You have almost cornered the market on potatoes. You have to sell. They ended up losing money on the trade. Because they got 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 bomb were really kind of nervous about this whole thing. They had taken investors money. They didn't really know if their system worked. And as the story gets told, they start to like second guess the computer and themselves and they start to think, well, I have this intuition that gold's going to go up because of the geopolitical situation. And they'd make some money on that and then they'd lose some money on that. And so by doubting their own system, it just wasn't really working. And at that point, they're just Wall Street investors, right? When the big computer trying to buy more potatoes. And the man won't let them buy potatoes. I'm Liz Hoffman. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels, to companies that will finance through sushi order. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.