Adam McKay responds to criticism of his response to Don't Look Up criticism
The director called some of the conversation surrounding his comments about the movie "Utterly ridiculous" in a recent interview
The conversation surrounding Adam McKay’s recent Netflix hit Don’t Look Up has been like pretty much every other big conversation to sweep across social media in recent years—which is to say, it’s been acrimonious, divisive, and loud.
McKay hasn’t necessarily shied away from that hubbub, either, responding to the mixed reviews for the film—which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as astronomers who discover that a giant climate change metaphor is racing toward the earth—on Twitter a few weeks back, noting that he was “Loving all the heated debate our movie,” but that, “If you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the U.S. teetering) I’m not sure Don’t Look Up makes any sense.”
The response to this tweet was, yes, acrimonious, divisive, and loud, as various people argued whether McKay was implying that anyone who didn’t like his movie—who found it, say, scattershot in its comedy, and ineffective in its attempts at satire—thus didn’t care about climate change.
“Which is utterly ridiculous,” the Anchorman director told IndieWire this week. “No human being would ever say that. I gotta laugh, because it’s right out of the movie.” (McKay’s co-writer on the movie, journalist and political speechwriter David Sirota, went quite a bit further on his own Twitter account, having stated that the media disliked the film because of its heavily critical stance on the way stories about climate change and other emerging horrors of the 21st century get reported.)