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One challenge of satire has always been how to spoof reality when it becomes stranger than fiction. Case in point: the election cycle of 2016 and the subsequent free fall into a sociopolitical cataclysm.
“喜剧是一个非常奇怪的地方，”作家兼导演亚当·麦凯（Adam McKay）说。“我认为每个人的第二和第三个都在猜测自己。您有一个只想对抗并将其称为言论自由的小组。然后，您拥有像我这样的传统漫画，这些漫画是从那条分界线的。我的许多朋友都在试图弄清楚。当世界不断掉在手中时，您会开玩笑，例如试图捡起沙堡吗？”
It’s a quandary McKay attempted to work out in不要抬头。
McKay’s latest film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of astronomers who are desperately trying to alert the world that a comet is about to end life on Earth as we know it—”trying” being the operative word. What follows is a farce of government, media, and big business that doesn’t feel like much of a stretch from where we are now.
“Nick Britell，作曲家不要抬头，写了一个爵士乐作品，我形容为爵士乐队，铅中毒在兴登堡。这就是现在的感觉，”麦凯说。“一切都破了。所有机构都崩溃了。我们都破裂了。
“So I think culture is catching up to this moment and trying to figure out what the hell’s going on—and that includes comedy.”
McKay’s early films—Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,塔拉迪加之夜：里奇·鲍比的民谣， 和继兄弟—were more straightforward comedies “making fun of bogus white-guy culture,” McKay says. “We jokingly called [them] the mediocre white guy trilogy.”
But like for so many others, there was a shift for McKay during the 2008 financial collapse.
“You started seeing the effects of that entitlement—and the effects were dark,” he says. “Now you look at the ultimate version of it: It’s people attacking the Capitol building trying to overthrow an election, extremists. And then the biggest of all the big stories, without exaggeration, empirically, the collapse of the livable atmosphere while we sit on our hands kind of getting knocked around by our distraction culture. So I think what allowed me to do comedy with [不要抬头]是我要对现在活着的感觉做喜剧。”
Check out highlights of McKay’s conversation below where he discusses a new state of satire,不要抬头颠覆性的结局及其对创造力的定义。
It’s hard to explain
“Where is comedy? Where is culture? We’re sort of caught between these two eras. So I’m really inspired by recent films that have played with genre. And I do think that we’re living in a time that defies genre. So a movie like出去，太棒了，但我不知道该怎么称呼。那是一部讽刺，恐怖，惊悚片喜剧？你看一部电影Kung Fu Hustle，我崇拜的：这就像一个活着的卡通爱情故事。因此，我肯定会吸引很难定义的那一刻。在整个制作这部电影的整个过程中，我们一直在开玩笑说您将如何对其进行分类。我们想出的最接近的是这是一个疯狂，疯狂，疯狂的世界是由拉尔斯·冯·特里尔（Lars von Trier）制造的。”
An Inconvenient ending
“It was such a freeing feeling knowing that I didn’t have to do the usual three-chord progression ending that you always do. And this is not giving anything away: It’s not a traditional ending. The fact that I knew that I didn’t have to click into that Michael Bay, Marvel movie—or, for older people,Towering Inferno—ending was so freeing. Some of my favorite scenes in the movie are during that stretch [toward the end], because we sort of throw off this Syd Field—the famous screenwriting instructor and author—we throw off the Syd Field exoskeleton, and the movie gets to just operate with this level of freedom that was just an absolute joy to write and to film.”
无论走多远，都要沿着小径
“I would say creativity, if we’re going to put it in the rawest, simplest terms for me, is always some sort of hitch or toehold of inspiration. It could be really small. And it can sometimes happen in an instant. Sometimes it builds over months. But there’s a moment where you realize that you have a seed, that you have something that’s so rich and full of possibilities that [you] feel like [you] could write 500 pages on it. And that’s always when I know I’ve got something that’s exciting, when it feels endless.”