Comedy director Adam McKay gets serious with ‘The Big Short’

You don’t have to look too closely to realize that Adam McKay’s work has always been at least a little bit political.

But the director, writer and producer, best known for broad comedies like Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers, turned some heads when he raised his hand to direct an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s financial crisis book The Big Short.

His film, which opened this week in DFW, is a bristling look at the real finance guys who realized before the rest of us that the housing bubble would burst . It boasts an all-star cast including Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carell and has been garnering some serious Oscar buzz.

It’s a departure for McKay in that it’s so overtly about the thing he is talking about and not cloaked in allegory or big, absurdist laughs. But it wasn’t as big a stretch as one might think.

Politics are life for McKay. He credits his childhood for that, when being dirt poor and on food stamps and having a single mom who was a waitress still allowed for a nice life and solid educational opportunities.

“I grew up sort of believing that government could be a positive. It’s not always perfect, but there was a positive force to it,” he said. “My grandfather and I always talked about the election and what was going on. He was always reading the paper and telling me to stay in touch.”

Even his big, broad absurdist comedies have germs of subversive ideas embedded in them.

“First and foremost they’re supposed to be funny and entertaining. (Will) Ferrell and I always think that you have to have a point of view. So, as silly as it is, with Anchorman, we were making fun of what has happened to local news..”

The Big Short isn’t the first time McKay tried to tackle the financial crisis, either. It was in the 2009 Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg comedy The Other Guys. The closing credits present a damning portrait of Ponzi schemes and exorbitant CEO compensation with animated charts.

Audiences at the time left scratching their heads.

The Big Short was another chance to address it head on. He devoured the book in a single night. Brad Pitt’s company Plan B held the rights and liked the idea of McKay taking a shot. The book’s author, Michael Lewis, didn’t have a say in the matter but he thought it was perfect.

Suffice it to say, The Big Short exists in some seriously genre-less waters. One person in a focus group called it a “tragic, docu-comedy.” McKay liked that.

“I think it’s the best movie about Wall Street ever made and that almost doesn’t do it justice,” Lewis said. “I was totally impressed, and I had nothing to do with it.”

This story was originally published December 25, 2015 at 8:40 AM with the headline "Comedy director Adam McKay gets serious with ‘The Big Short’."