Lawrence here, and I wrote Teddy Oglethorpe for Rob Morgan, who I’d worked with on our HBO Lakers show. I wrote the role of Kate Dibiasky for Ms. The cast is so packed wall-to-wall with big stars, it’s almost like one of those 1970s disaster movies like “The Towering Inferno” or “The Poseidon Adventure.” Adam, were you envisioning that kind of all-star cast from the start? So it was extremely exciting to sign on to it. And I’ve wanted to work with Adam for as long as I can remember. And finally, this came along and it was just funny and urgent. Lawrence: I’m sure I can say this on behalf of pretty much everybody: It’s extremely frustrating to be a citizen that believes in climate change and is scared, but I’m not a part of it - you know, I can’t buy a senator - so we’re just kind of helpless. Jen and Leo, what appealed to you about the idea? It’s absolutely ridiculous that we don’t address it to a degree where it’s almost funny and at the same time wildly upsetting. Right away, I thought, “Wow, that could be funny and disturbing” - which is kind of how I feel about the climate crisis. It’s sort of a Clark Kent-level disguised allegory for the climate crisis. What I loved about the idea was that it’s a reference to a lot of narratives that we already know we’re very comfortable with end-of-the-world movies and how they always wrap up in a nifty bow. He said, “Yeah, it’s like an asteroid is going to hit Earth and no one cares.” I was talking to a friend of mine - journalist David Sirota, who is also a speechwriter for Bernie Sanders - about how tepid and anemic a lot of the mainstream media’s coverage of the climate crisis is. But none of them felt like they fully landed with that big open door you need for an idea like this. Some were “Twilight Zone”-type thrillers, some were character pieces. McKay: I’d been trying to find a way to crack the story of the climate crisis and I’d written a bunch of different treatments. The Times spoke with McKay, DiCaprio and Lawrence about turning climate change, toxic political polarization and anti-science conspiracy theories into fodder for comedy - and, they hope, a bracing wake-up call for audiences to look up before it’s too late.Īdam, what made a comet feel like a good metaphor for the existential threat you wanted to explore in this movie? “As COVID was hitting, as the Capitol was being stormed, our art was imitating real life.” “As ridiculous as a lot of this stuff seemed, we were seeing a lot of this play out in real time,” DiCaprio said. Using the familiar cinematic premise of an impending asteroid impact as a stand-in for the threat of climate change, McKay combines the stinging satire of his 2018 film “Vice,” which earned him Oscar nods for best picture, screenplay and director, with the gleeful absurdism of his early comedies like “Anchorman,” lampooning politics, social media, cable news, Big Tech and Hollywood.įor the cast and crew of “Don’t Look Up,” the experience of making a comedy about the end of the world just as the world actually seemed to be coming apart at the seams was head-spinning. Overwhelmed by the enormity of what they’ve learned, the two set out to warn a world that really isn’t equipped to handle such bad news. 24, “Don’t Look Up” stars Lawrence and DiCaprio - along with a panoply of stars, including Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry - as a pair of obscure astronomers who discover that a comet is on track to destroy the Earth in just six months. Such is the cognitive dissonance of these times - and of “Don’t Look Up.”Ĭurrently playing in theaters and set to hit Netflix on Dec. Speaking with The Times over Zoom from New York, where they were promoting the star-studded end-of-the-world dark comedy “Don’t Look Up,” the three were in good cheer as they contemplated the potential future extinction of life on Earth. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and on a recent afternoon, Jennifer Lawrence, Leonardo DiCaprio and director Adam McKay are feeling fine.
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