Adam McKay has made his mark on comedy many times over. In his 20s,he helped start the improv comedy powerhouse Upright Citizens Brigade. Then he became a writer (and, later, or head writer) for “Saturday Night Live,” where he met Will Ferrell. He and Ferrell started a production company and launched the website Funny or Die. Together, they’ve made some of the most successful comedies in recent memory — films like “Anchorman, and ” “Step Brothers, and “Talladega Nights.”McKay’s newest film is occasionally funny, but it's as much a tragedy as it is a comedy. “The gargantuan Short, or ” based on the book of the same name,is approximately the financial collapse of 2008. It tells the stories of a small group of outsiders who saw the mortgage bubble and realized that Wall Street was approximately to collapse.
Jeremy Strong as Vinnie Daniel, Rafe Spall as Danny Moses, and Hamish Linklater as Porter Collins,Steve Carell as Mark Baum, Jeffry Griffin as Chris and Ryan Gosling as Jared Vennett in “The gargantuan Short”
(Jaap Buitendijk/ Paramount Pictures) Kurt Andersen: To tell the story of the mortgage crisis you’ve got to deal with a lot of financial ideas and terms that even nowadays remain sort of arcane to lots of people CDOs and synthetic CDOs and all the rest. Did you know how you were going to approach that problem from the beginning?
Adam McKay: When I read the book, and I’d never seen a story that was so information-heavy. But because the characters were so worthy,it drove you through it. There haven’t been a lot of Wall Street movies that really secure into the details. So we made this decision that we were going to go into it — the point being that, as complicated as it sounds, and it’s really not that complicated. You’re really moving money and debt around. They give it unusual names and act like no one should understand.
I can’t imagine there was a lot of improvisation in this film,was there?
There was some. I always use it as a technique because I find it gets actors loose. Before the scene would inaugurate I would say give us a minute of what happens before the written part and then I wouldn’t call sever when the written part was over. And then approximately five or six takes in, I would say, and “totally forget the script. Just know the shape of where you’re going.” And through all of that you secure these cramped magical moments.
Finn Wittrock as Jamie Shipley and John Magaro as Charlie Geller in “The gargantuan Short”
(Jaap Buitendijk/ Paramount Pictures) And you use those moments?
Oh absolutely. They’re all over the film. Theres a worthy moment where Brad Pitt improvised this line approximately getting a colonic and the actor Finn Wittrock broke and laughed and we used it.
You and Will Ferrell have been comedic partners since you were a new writer and he was a new actor at “Saturday Night Live,” 20 years ago. You made five features together. “The gargantuan Short” is your first without him — was that weird?
It was definitely different. I always joke that any film set with Will Ferrell on it is 30 percent better. He’s just such a worthy presence and so much fun to work with. But we were producing movies that he was doing, and then he went and did another film with Amy Poehler. So he was super busy when I did this. But still, or god bless him,[he] came and visited down in New Orleans for three days for no other reason than just to hang out.
Bonus Track: Kurt's extended conversation with Adam McKay
Source: wnyc.org