By Iain Blair

Writer/director Adam McKay has become one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood thanks to such hits as Anchorman, Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Big Short, Vice and Marvel’s Ant-Man. His new film is another comedy/drama/action mashup, the apocalyptic satire Don’t Look Up. The Netflix film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as two astronomers who discover a comet headed straight for Earth. There are A-listers galore — including Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett and Jonah Hill — tons of locations, ambitious set pieces and lots of visual effects. It was nominated for four Oscar Awards.

Director Adam McKay

McKay also assembled an equally stellar team behind the scenes, including his go-to editor Hank Corwin, ACE; DP Linus Sandgren, ASC, FSF; composer Nicholas Britell; and VFX supervisor Raymond Gieringer.

Editor Hank Corwin

I spoke with McKay about making the film, his love of post and awards season. Corwin, who was just nominated for an Oscar Award for his work on Don’t Look Up, joined the conversation.

What sort of film did you set out to make?
Adam McKay: When I was writing the script and talking to Hank about it before we even shot, the whole idea was to make a big comedy that dealt with how crazy and ridiculous our world is, and how we can’t even process the most basic information. Then at the end, when you’d normally have a traditional happy comedy ending, we’d shift tones to a big emotional one.

That was always our approach and how we went into it. And as I often joke with Hank, we always pick the most difficult blend of tones and subjects, and we ended up working 10, 12 hours every day for months in post trying to find the right balance. Any time you work with Hank you leave the door slightly ajar in terms of the tone, so it can shift when you make all these discoveries in post. And this was a very hard one, especially with its blend of ridiculous comedy and realistic space sequences. The goal was always to have it play to a big global audience.

Hank, how early did you come on board?
Hank Corwin: Adam was already talking to me about it when we were doing Vice. The way we work at this point is to play around with a lot of ideas as we go. Adam was shooting in Boston, and I’d just try different things. I’d take different slivers of music and work very closely with Nick Britell, our composer, and sometimes I’d use things not necessarily the way Adam had intended. It was a form of collage initially, putting stuff together and trying to figure it all out.

How early on did you start on post and visual effects?
McKay: We had a great VFX team headed by supervisor Raymond Gieringer and producer Dione Wood, who did Vice with me. They did a great job of giving us VFX temps early on that Hank could cut with. The crazy thing with this movie was — since we had to shut down for five months because of COVID — we got so much of it done early, as the VFX team just kept going during that time.

Corwin: They were really diligent, and I got VFX material far earlier than usual. When I was cutting the launch sequence, initially the only live-action footage we had was of some extras out on the Cape. Raymond and the team had already created a lot of mission control and the shuttles just so I could figure out how to cut it.

How much previz did you do?
McKay: Day For Nite did it and we used quite a lot, especially for sequences like the first and second launches, and then some for the comet at the end. Hank was playing with a lot of the previz, but as you know, the difference between the previz and the final shot is often night and day. It comes to life when it gets close to being finished, so we definitely had to use our imagination.

It was also tough with this one as a lot of it’s a comedy and we were test-screening it a fair amount. So it was really a big thrill for us when we got the finished VFX shots; they really lit up the ending of the movie and the whole middle launch sequence.

Tell us about post. Was it remote because of COVID? Where did you do it?
McKay: Hank began cutting at home in Malibu, and then we moved to the Sony lot, which was a ghost town because of COVID. It was very strange. Then we did all the sound and mixing up at Skywalker.

Hank, what were the main editing challenges? Finding the right tone?
Corwin: Absolutely. Initially, I think we all understood the tone and knew exactly where the film was going, but it was devilishly hard trying to balance all the elements. I hate to sound pretentious, but it was like quantum physics. You could never really find a place. It was like a cloud. You’d get a tone to a certain place, then 40 minutes later down the film, you’d realize the tone you’d established up front was no longer working or resonating. So we’d have to circle back. We spent untold hours trying to figure it all out.

What was the most difficult sequence to cut and why?
Corwin: It’ll surprise you, but it was the first Oval Office scene. On paper it doesn’t seem that complex, but you have some of the greatest actors covering the script, and then Adam gave them all two days to romp all over it and improvise. We were shooting with up to six cameras to cover all that, and then the tone was so difficult to pin down. It wasn’t a matter of trying to find good takes. It was like chess, figuring out the laughs and how they’d play later, and we were cutting that scene almost for the duration of the whole edit.

McKay: It was a case of triangulating how crazy the world actually is, how crazy the audience thinks it is and how crazy we think it is. That’s what we were trying to balance — everyone is living through this insane moment but dealing with it in very different ways. Some are in denial, others know it’s crazy but kind of normal, and some know it’s completely bonkers. When we first screened the sequence for a test audience, they felt it was just too crazy and absurd, so we went back and recut and recut to try to find some middle ground.

There are a lot of VFX. Who did them, and what was entailed?
McKay: I really enjoy working with VFX, and I’ve done a few movies with a decent amount of them, like Talladega Nights, The Other Guys, Vice, so I’ve learned through the years to draw all the shots and hire really good VFX supervisors, and then dial in your style and get it as close to photoreal as you can get. And don’t play it like the big superhero movie kind of thing, just keep it as real as you can. You’ll never get 100% there, but you can get very close.

We had a lot of vendors [Scanline, Framestore, Lola, Otomo, Picturemill, Instinctual] all working on different sequences, and some of the biggest VFX were crowd creation. Any time you see a crowd, it’s all VFX since we couldn’t have a real crowd because of COVID. I really laughed watching Hank — who’s cut such serious movies as JFK, Natural Born Killers, The Tree of Life — having to deal with rocket ships blasting into space and all the other VFX we had.

Corwin: (Laughs) I’d never dealt with VFX before. I knew nothing about them. Or comedy. I had to learn on the job.

What about the DI? Who was the colorist, and how closely did you work with them and the DP?
McKay: It was Matt Wallach at Company 3, who also did the dailies grading. He, Linus and I all worked very closely. We shot on film, as I still love that real film look, even though you’re obviously transferring it. Linus has such a great eye, and we went for an “artful” look, with shadows and depth, but also with a bit of a colorful pop to it.

So the goal was this sort of metropolitan, energetic look, but artfully done – and Linus just nailed it. It’s exactly what I wanted, and then we did some work enhancing and fixing stuff and balancing it all in the DI, which I love. A lot of it was dealing with the crowd VFX and making sure it all looked real, and the film turned out great.

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.