I think the story is more about a system and incentives and what they do to individuals. McKay: Well, I wouldn't say it's about good and bad guys. I mean these are not ultimately good guys in a traditional sense, right? McEvers: You know, in order to tell this really compelling story on the screen, you had to do it through the eyes of these guys who bet against the housing market, who did see this coming but then got really rich off the fact that they saw it coming. And so he pieced together the crime as it was being committed.
And in his case, it was a total resistance to the propaganda coming out of Wall Street coupled with an insistence on seeing what the numbers were. They had qualities in them that enabled them to see.
So the idea of the book and movie is that it's not an accident that these people are the ones who saw what the system failed to see and was blind to. So he lives his whole life by email and one of the first things he did after I met him was dump all of his emails going back to the beginning of the crisis on me, and I could reconstruct it through this man. He's in San Jose, Calif., basically not seeing anybody face-to-face. In many ways he's who makes the book possible because - Christian Bale gets this across but it's never said in the movie - he has Asperger's syndrome. Possibly the weirdest is this doctor, Dr. McEvers: Let's talk about the main characters in The Big Short, the group of people who, a long time before it happened, figured out that we were heading off of a financial cliff and then basically made this huge financial bet that it was going to happen, thus "the big short." In the film, you describe them as "outsiders" and "weirdoes". So, you know, is it pandering? You know, in a massive, massive way that hopefully is more satirical than sincerely pandering.
You know, we wanted to fill the movie with these images of music videos and iPhones and just this idea that we get so much information during the day that doesn't really tell us anything, but what if Kim Kardashian, every time you heard her on TV she described like the LIBOR Rate scandal or. I just have to ask, did you ever think you were pandering just a little too much to the audience?Īdam: The whole idea was it was a joke on pop culture. McEvers: At one point there's a naked lady in a bathtub explaining one of these things. And because he was able to tie that information to their stories, I was able to digest it. He wrote a book that was kind of amazing in the sense that it fused these incredible characters with a lot of dense information. Adam, were you intimidated by that?Īdam McKay: You know, I'm going to do something I don't like to do which is I'm going to give Michael Lewis a lot of credit. It's a little bit easier in a book - people can take their time, you can sort of go back and reread - but in a movie you've got two hours to not only explain things like collateralized debt obligations, but you also have to make it entertaining. Kelly McEvers: The way the housing market imploded is obviously not an easy thing to explain. McKay and Lewis join NPR's Kelly McEvers to discuss the story's antiheroes and the film's approach to explaining finance: McKay's film received four Golden Globe nominations this week, including one for best screenplay. The result (also called The Big Short) has bad guys and heroes - but even the heroes are kind of jerks. How do you make a subject as complicated as the subprime mortgage crisis into a really good movie? That's the challenge director Adam McKay took on when decided to turn The Big Short, Michael Lewis' best-selling book about the people who profited from the crisis, into a film. Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Mark Baum make a large chunk of money and feel absolutely disgusted by it." Director Adam McKay says, "One of my favorite moments in the movie is where you see. Steve Carell plays Mark Baum and Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett in The Big Short.