Adam McKay is a big fan of Climate Defiance’s relentless approach to shaming fossil fuel companies and the businesses and politicians who support them. The nonprofit group is known for provocative protests, including unfurling a banner that read “Eat Shit, Darren” at an event honoring Exxon CEO Darren Woods and 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 for their activism, but the reality is that advertising, propaganda and misinformation caused this problem,” says McKay, director of “Step Brothers” and “Anchorman.” “This is the only time in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history that we’ve warmed this fast. It’s like a bomb went off. The idea of using manipulative marketing language to describe something so menacing is insane. It’s like having a poster of the Heimlich maneuver in a restaurant, but the only person showing you how to do it is a sexy woman in a bikini.”
McKay decided to lend his name to Just Look Up, a new full-scale documentary about the work of Climate Defiance and its founder Michael Greenberg, after co-director Emma Wall asked him to see an early cut of the film. Wall is married to Jeremy Strong, who starred in McKay’s The Big Short, and the director agreed to be a producer on the film. Just Look Up, co-directed by Betsy Hershey and following activists over several months, opened at the Tribeca Festival. McKay praised the way Greenberg, who has dedicated his life to drawing attention to the climate crisis, has used every platform at his disposal to increase the dangers of global warming.
“They go straight to corrupt people selling out billions for donor checks from oil companies and the banks that fund oil companies,” McKay says. “I love how we stand together as human beings to fight climate change, rather than having it exist as a campaign issue or something to compromise on.”
McKay, who publicly left the Democratic Party in 2024 after the presidential election, says politicians on both sides of the aisle are to blame for the environmental disaster. He has no more compassion for Democrats, whom he previously accused of “not once mentioning public health care[in the presidential race]and condoning fracking, Cheney, and a year of child slaughter in Gaza.”
“Democrats have the potential to be just as destructive to the climate as Republicans,” he says. “At the end of the day, it’s all about money.”
Beyond climate, McKay said he’s disappointed with the Democratic Party’s response to Donald Trump’s return to power.
“I’ve seen better fake opponents, like professional wrestling and the Harlem Globetrotters playing against the Washington Generals. They’re better at pretending to be the opposition than the Democrats,” McKay says. “I’ve almost realized that the Democratic Party is no longer even pretending to be an opposition party. The party is completely flooded with dark money. It’s corrupt from head to toe. It’s completely collapsed.”
McKay isn’t the only big-name director to join the Just Look Up production team. Wall also enlisted the help of documentary maker Joshua Oppenheimer, who was nominated for an Academy Award for “The Act of Killing.” Like McKay, Oppenheimer was moved by Greenberg and his fellow activists. They reminded him of his experiences as a young man working at Act Up during the height of the AIDS crisis.
“This film shows what resistance looks like, how fascinating it is, how courageous it is, how human it is,” Oppenheimer says. “I think it’s an antidote to the feeling that it has become uncool or awkward to participate in the very things we need to do to save ourselves as a species and as a democratic society.”
But Oppenheimer also praised Just Look Up for not shying away from chronicling the toll of Greenberg’s activism as he struggled to balance love and social life while running an all-consuming campaign.
“It shows how difficult it is to avoid burnout,” Oppenheimer said. “This is not only a portrait of the kind of resistance we need, but also a handbook on how to survive and thereby try to build a meaningful life.”
The documentary’s title, “Just Look Up,” is an homage to “Don’t Look Up,” a 2021 satirical film written and directed by McKay about a looming ecological disaster and the establishment’s chaotic and incompetent attempts to save the world. The film premiered on Netflix and starred the world’s biggest movie stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. But McKay doubts the film will be produced in the current political climate.
“It would definitely be much harder to make now,” McKay says. “Netflix is very good on climate change. They’re the only studio or streamer that isn’t afraid of this issue. But even when I wrote the script, everyone ignored it except Netflix.”
A few years have passed since “Don’t Look Up” debuted, and the political winds have shifted again. Entertainment companies like Disney and Paramount have settled lawsuits with Trump, and big names like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and David Ellison have shown favor with the president. Is Mr. McKay surprised that an industry once thought to be liberal has changed its tune?
“Hollywood’s response to Trump is a byproduct of the market-based corporate takeover of America,” McKay says. “Culture and politics are completely intertwined. When you work for one of these studios or distributors, the company cares more about its stock valuation than anything else. If you criticize Trump publicly, he can penalize your company. That creates an atmosphere of silence.”
