Meryl Streep perpetrates a little revenge on Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s new political satire, which hits Netflix in theaters this Friday. Just elected Trump president of the United States, in January 2017, the actress took advantage of her speech at the Golden Globes, collecting an honorary award, to tell the new president that they were not going to forget the defense of the rights of women and the collective LGTBIQ in these next four years. Of course, Trump responded. “The most overrated actress in history,” he said of an actress who has two Oscars and more than twenty nominations.

Now fiction has given him the opportunity to play Donald Trump. I mean, a president obsessed with money, power and stupidity. The actress, very polite, said at a press conference that she has been inspired by many people. “There were many places to get proposals … there are many people in public positions who have a lot to do with it. It has been fun to put characteristics of all those in this character and their appetites for having a lot of power, money, more power and more money. And then fantastic hair and perfect nails. Unfortunately we are paying for that now, to be a public representative you have to make a lot of sacrifices and not everyone can do it. We need these people more than ever, “he said before his colleagues.

Don’t Look Up is a comedy that aims to defuse the deniers. He does it with the political humor of a director who in three films has told us the political reality of the United States like no one else. It is Adam Mckay, a seasoned guy as a screenwriter in the Saturday Night Live and as a director in the hooligan comedies with Will Ferrer who he signed at the beginning of his career. In 2015 he won an Oscar for best screenplay adapted by The big bet, where he dismantled the financial crisis. There is something of that history that he has maintained in his two subsequent films and even in the series that he produces for HBO, Succession. It is the denunciation of how the rich see business even in the world’s greatest tragedies. And that has not known the Madrid health. On The vice of power he dismantled Dick Chenny and his way of getting even richer in the Iraq war.

On Don’t look upIt shows how politicians and businessmen are capable of allowing a meteor to fall on the earth whenever it is profitable for them, of course. If that duo – politicians and businessmen – we unite the media, we have the perfect storm. “Behind the media there is a lot of money in advertising and clicks that have to hook people. I like the way that is told in the film, in how we laugh at how we talk in the media, on the networks social “, said the director that deactivates the media discourse and shows how this trivialization favors hate speech, fake news and empowers deniers.

The whole comedy is an attempt to dismantle denialism against science and against climate change, one of the problems that most worries the director. “We talked about the idea of ​​talking about climate change, but we were worried about doing it because it is quite an overwhelming topic right now. In the end we thought we could tell it laughing, with a certain distance, because that allowed us to feel the urgency, the sadness, but also see from outside the importance “.

Defending the environment was what made Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor who has been aware of it for years, enter this comedy and play a half-haired scientist who has to convince his country that the apocalypse is near, except that the society act. “I wanted to highlight the frustration of the scientific community that tells the truth all the time but does not pay attention to it. We work together to highlight that and how a scientist would act in a situation like this where he knows that the world is going to hell,” he explained DiCaprio at the press conference with his co-star, actress Jennifer Lawrence, who also plays a scientist. “Leo has said it perfectly. It is frustrating to see people who have dedicated their lives to telling the truth and see how they are cornered because in reality people do not want to hear that truth.”

“Adam created the film in the middle about climate change, but that emergency was created with a comet that is going to hit the earth in just eight months. Scientists are being politicized and alternative facts appear and I have composed this character of all the scientists that I have known in this time, their problems and their challenges before the press. I really like how Adam has written these two characters, one who speaks more like Greta Thumber, who believes in the system to change and the other the opposite. I also like the way in which we are destroying the truth, the Covid has shown us again, “DiCaprio deepened.

Comedy is for McKay the best way to change the speeches, to master that reality. “We wanted to talk about climate change in the film, but we were worried about doing it because it is quite an overwhelming topic right now. In the end we thought we could tell it laughing, with a certain distance, because that allowed us to feel the urgency, the sadness, but also see from out of importance. “

Don’t look up it speaks mainly of the story. How to ensure that not only the speeches of the extreme right fall, so that there is political commitment. Hence the harsh reproach to the media, especially the televisions to which he puts a broth. Cate Blanchett is Susana Griso or Ana Rosa, interested in the audience, in good vibes, in money and clothes … We cannot forget Mark Rylance in a role that merges Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, long after will fold t-shirts.

There is also Ariana Grande signing one of the songs on the soundtrack with the composer Nicholas Britell – the same one who has composed the header of Succession. The singer laughs at herself in this crazy, smart and stinging comedy for which she has even composed a song. If Aerosmuth did it with Armageddon, she does it with an end-of-the-world theme. The film has a lot of Armageddon, the photography emulates those tremendously American catastrophe films, but the story and the characters are far from heroism. Ameríca needs heroes, yes, but above all comedians.