Adam McKay is Still Angry About 2008

Michael Lewis (0:06)

Pushkin. Most of 2006 and early 2007, Dr. Michael Berry had experienced as a private nightmare. In an email he wrote, the partners closest to me tend to ultimately hate me. This business kills a part of life that is pretty essential. The thing is, I haven't identified what it kills, but it is something vital that is dead inside of me. I can feel it.

Lidia Jean Kott (0:40)

I'm Lidia Jean Kott, a producer here on Against the Rules, and what we just heard is an excerpt from The Big Short, a book that Michael Lewis wrote in 2010 He's now releasing it for the first time as an audiobook, narrated by him.

Michael Lewis (0:55)

Yeah, and I'm here too. So LJ, I'm going to tell you what I want you to do. You're an innocent outsider with no particular interest in the global financial crisis. It is like one of these huge events in American history. And it's really useful to me to hear what you're curious about and also for me to explain to you why the people who we're interviewing are the people we're interviewing, why they matter now.

Lidia Jean Kott (1:23)

So I haven't thought about the 2008 financial crisis since it happened, which is when I was in high school. And I'm going to be honest, I actually didn't even really think about it that much when it happened.

Michael Lewis (1:34)

Why would you?

Lidia Jean Kott (1:35)

I was thinking about high school. Why did you want to revisit it? Why look back at it now?

Michael Lewis (1:42)

It has never lost its relevance. There's been this slow motion train wreck that comes right from that. The essence of its importance was the feeling of unfairness it generated by how it was dealt with.

You had these elites on Wall Street doing things they shouldn't have been doing, getting paid a fortune to do them. And when it all goes wrong and everybody suffers, there's no apparent cost. They get to go about doing their business. They get bailed out by the government. Everybody has to live by the harsh rules of capitalism except the capitalists themselves. The feeling that the world is rigged, the anger generated by the event has been the dominant mood in our political life. So I've thought for some time that there'll come a moment where it's worth looking back on it and saying like why was this important? What were the consequences of this event?

Lidia Jean Kott (2:31)

Right. And here we are. Now's the moment. And you did it by talking to a bunch of people, right, who you thought could answer questions that you had that kind of came to you as you were re-reading the book. And the first person was Adam McKay, who was the director of the Big Short movie. How would you characterize your relationship to that movie?

Michael Lewis (2:55)

The same as my relationship to the movies of all my books, is that I had no effect whatsoever on how they made the movie, but they pretended to listen to me. They pretended to care what I thought while they were making the movie. So I developed personal relationships with some of the actors and with the director. To make a movie from a book, you need to break the thing and remake it. And the author is, I think, uniquely unsuited to do that. And the movie was different from the book. So I wanted to start with McKay because I'm awed by him. He's a huge talent. He grappled with the same material. And I wanted to just talk about how he grappled with it. We had never had that conversation when the movie was made.

Lidia Jean Kott (3:35)

Well, Adam McKay, when he took on the movie, before that, he had only done straight up comedies. Stepbrothers, Talladega Nights. Were you anxious about entrusting your book to this guy who up until then had only done comedies?

Michael Lewis (3:51)

Anxious doesn't describe what I felt. What I felt was incredulity. I thought there's no way they're going to turn this book into a movie.

Lidia Jean Kott (4:00)

Right.

Michael Lewis (4:01)

And so I was amazed that it happened in the first place. I thought no way they're going to be able to pull this off. And the fact that he pulled this off is incredible, the way he did. Now, I remember thinking the only way it works is if it's funny. Like, you ask a comedian to be funny, they can be funny. That's their job.

When they're supposed to be funny, they're funny. I find that so hard.

Lidia Jean Kott (4:21)