In 2008, the global economy was rocked by an egregious Wall Street blunder that involved the creation of questionable subprime loans which led to the housing market bubble bursting — to summarize it in ridiculously simplistic terms. Eight years later, the financial institutions’ doublespeak explanations of the economic collapse and its cause have left many still wondering what the hell happened. In his gripping film The Big Short, director Adam McKay clearly lays out the big banks’ horrifically unscrupulous actions that precipitated the crash. The film is based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling book of the same name, and McKay, known primarily for helming satirical, ribald comedies starring Will Ferrell (Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, Anchorman), deftly brings this equally outrageous story to the screen with a sense of mission. I recently spoke over the phone with McKay about his multi-Academy Award–nominated film. Below is an extremely abbreviated version of our conversation.
Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short is a complicated story, and I thought you did a fantastic job of making it accessible. Did you find translating the book to the screen difficult? I was so excited by the book. Even though, yes, I agree, there were complicated elements to it, by the end I felt like I got the shape in a fairly clear way. I got it in a way that was so exciting; my goal was just to make sure a filmgoing audience was as excited as I was. I just knew it was a matter of, “How do you do it?” So then you look at the story, and you say, “Well, what do you need to do?” Because the story always tells you, and I was surprised when the answer was, “You need to break the fourth wall with this.” In this case, it was just screaming for it; this is a story where it’s all about looking behind the curtain. Once I hit on that, it was like, “Oh, all right; now there’s a spark going on.”
It’s a technique that can be jarring, but the fourth-wall breaks in your film were fluid. Oh, thank you. I think sometimes people see fourth-wall breaks and they’re afterthought fixes. In this case, the movie was built around the idea, and that’s why it didn’t jump out at people. We designed the movie around it, and I think that’s why you still feel that flow when you’re watching it.