Funny Man Adam McKay Takes A Step Back From Comedy For His Dream Project “The Big Short”

Awards season is in full swing and the film The Big Short has already racked up an impressive number of nominations thanks to brilliant director Adam McKay (the cast is pretty great, too). McKay joins Greta Van Susteren to talk about the film, based on the book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, which McKay admits he read in one day before deciding it was his dream project. The Big Short tells the story of the 2007 housing crisis which silently unfolded during the year prior to the 2008 stock market crash. While the details are certainly complicated, Greta is a big fan of the way the film explains the complex crisis to the average movie-goer.

In this edition of Greta Talk, McKay, whose work usually falls on the comedy side (he directed Step Brothers, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, etc.), tells Greta how his film The Other Guys inspired him to investigate the housing crisis, and ultimately make the “trauma-dey” The Big Short. McKay and the On the Record host also discuss the crisis and their shared outraged that no one went to prison for it, the difficulty of trying to choose a genre for a real-life film (hence “trauma-dey”), and McKay even reveals a potential new project that would reunite Step Brothers’ Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly!

And why does McKay agree to pull his earlobe if he wins an Oscar?

Download and tune in to find out!