Adam McKay is a big fan of Climate Defiance’s no holds barred approach to shaming fossil fuel companies and the corporations and politicians who support them. The non-profit is known for its provocative protests, which include everything from unfurling a banner stating “Eat Shit, Darren” at an event honoring Exxon CEO Darren Woods to disrupting the White House Correspondents Dinner to protest the Biden administration’s approval of oil and gas leases.
“People tend to want to use the rules of advertising and marketing in their activism, and the truth of the matter is advertising, propaganda, misinformation is what caused this problem,” says McKay, the director of “Step Brothers” and “Anchorman.” “This is the only time in the four and a half billion year history of Earth that we have seen this rate of warming. It’s a bomb going off. The idea of using manipulative marketing language to describe something so threatening is insane. It would be like having a Heimlich maneuver poster in a restaurant, but having the person showing you how to do it be a sexy lady in a bikini.”
McKay decided to lend his name to “Just Look Up,” a new vérité documentary about the work of Climate Defiance and its founder Michael Greenberg after its co-director Emma Wall asked him to view an early cut of the film. Wall is married to Jeremy Strong, who appeared in McKay’s “The Big Short,” and the director agreed to become a producer on the film. “Just Look Up,” which is co-directed by Betsy Hershey and follows the activists over the course of several months, opened at the Tribeca Festival. McKay admired how Greenberg, who has devoted his life to drawing attention to the climate crisis, has used every platform at his disposal to magnify the stakes of global warming.
“They go right to the corrupt people that are selling out billions of human beings for donor checks from oil companies and the banks that fund the oil companies,” McKay says. “I love how Climate Defiance confronts them, eye to eye as human beings, as opposed to allowing the discourse around the climate collapse to exist as a campaign issue, or something to compromise over.”
McKay, who publicly left the Democratic Party in 2024 after the presidential election, argues that politicians on both sides of the aisle are to blame for the environmental disaster taking place. He’s not feeling any more charitable about the Democrats, who he previously faulted for “never mentioning public healthcare [in the presidential campaign] & embracing fracking, the Cheneys & a yr long slaughter of children in Gaza.”
“The Democratic Party can be every bit as much destructive on the climate as the Republican Party,” he says. “It really all boils down to money.”
Beyond climate, McKay says he’s disappointed with how the Democrats have reacted to Donald Trump‘s return to power.
“I’ve seen better fake opponents in professional wrestling, or that team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters, the Washington Generals. They do a better job of pretending to be opposition than the Democrats do,” McKay says. “I’ve almost noticed that Democrats don’t even really pretend to be opposition any more. The party is totally overrun with dark money. It’s corrupt from head to toe. It’s utterly broken.”
McKay isn’t the only big name director to join the producing team of “Just Look Up.” Wall also enlisted Joshua Oppenheimer, the Oscar-nominated documentarian behind “The Act of Killing.” Like McKay, Oppenheimer was moved by Greenberg and his fellow activists. They reminded him of his experience as a young man working with Act Up during the height of the AIDS crisis.
“This film shows what resistance looks like and how compelling it is, how courageous it is, and how human it is,” Oppenheimer says. “I see it as an antidote to the sense that it’s become uncool or cringe to participate in doing the very thing we need to to save ourselves as a species and as a democratic society.”
But Oppenheimer also praises “Just Look Up” for not shying away from documenting the cost of that activism, as Greenberg finds himself struggling to balance a romantic and social life while waging an all-consuming campaign.
“It shows how hard it is to not burn out,” Oppenheimer notes. “It’s not just a portrait of a kind of resistance we need. It’s also a handbook for how you try to survive and build a meaningful life doing that.”
The title of the documentary, “Just Look Up,” is a nod to “Don’t Look Up,” a 2021 satire that McKay wrote and directed about a looming ecological disaster and the establishment’s chaotic and inept attempts to save the world. The film premiered on Netflix and starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, two of the biggest movie stars in the world. Yet McKay wonders if it would get produced in the current political climate.
“It definitely would be a lot harder to make right now, no question,” McKay says. “Netflix is really good with climate. They’re the one studio or streamer that isn’t afraid of the issue. But even when I wrote the script, everyone passed on it, except Netflix.”
In the years since “Don’t Look Up” debuted, the political winds have shifted again. Entertainment companies like Disney and Paramount have settled lawsuits with Trump and moguls like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and David Ellison have curried favor with the president. Is McKay surprised that industries that were once seen as liberal have changed their stripes?
“Hollywood’s response to Trump is a byproduct of the market-based corporate takeover of America,” McKay says. “Culture and politics have fused completely. If you work at one of these studios or streamers, your company first and foremost cares about their stock valuation. If you criticize Trump publicly, he could penalize your company. That’s created an atmosphere of silence.”
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