Kevin Messick on his thriving filmmaking relationship with ‘Don’t Look Up’ director Adam McKay

Kevin Messick makes no bones about his role as producing partner to industrious multi-hyphenate Adam McKay. “My job is to do as many things as possible that let Adam purely enjoy his job as a writer/director,” says Messick. “Any other problems or puzzles are on my plate. It’s as simple as that.”

Messick had more on his plate than usual with Don’t Look Up, McKay’s comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as two low-level astronomers taking a media tour to warn about a comet set to destroy Earth.

Finding a backer was not the problem, says the producer, though Para­mount, where McKay had a deal at the time, apparently baulked at the reported $75m budget necessitated by a starry cast and substantial visual-effects work. “I don’t think they had the appetite for what we hoped to do with the film,” Messick explains. “Because to make a disaster satire, you have to be able to afford the disaster component, not just the satire component.”

Other studios were interested but in the end it was Netflix that stepped up with the necessary budget and the global reach the filmmakers wanted to get their message out.

Nor was recruiting the film’s impressive ensemble particularly tricky, thanks, says Messick, to “the timing of the piece and what it had to say — both pre-pandemic, with Adam’s ambition to write an allegory about climate change, and post-pandemic, with our inability to deal with facts and the truth. Putting a cast like this together is a big, big puzzle, but it was great that everybody had the same reason for being there — they wanted to help Adam tell this particular story.” Those names include Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Rob Morgan, Timothée Chalamet and Ron Perlman, who joined Lawrence and DiCaprio.

What was a challenge was the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic just as Don’t Look Up was preparing for an April 2020 start; the shoot that eventually began in November of that year was under very different conditions.

“The ins and outs of quarantines and testing were a constant grind,” Messick recalls of filming with pre-vaccine pandemic safety measures in place. “It wasn’t just the expense, it was the management of flying people in and out, not allowing people to leave, shooting through Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you were a producer making films before the vaccines, you got a big education on medicine, on testing protocols, on all of it. It was much more arduous than the regular challenges of just making a movie.”

The effort has paid off, with a hugely successful pre-Christmas run on Netflix — the streamer reported Don’t Look Up to be its second most popular original feature of all time. Awards recognition followed, including four Oscar and four Bafta nominations — including best picture/best film citations for Messick himself and McKay — as well as nods from the US producers, writers and actors guilds.

The film’s message, meanwhile, has led to McKay taking part in a climate-change discussion with UK MPs in the House of Commons and lining up forthcoming initiatives with the United Nations and the White House.

Getting together

Messick’s relationship with McKay goes back to 2009, when the then‑independent producer (with credits including the 2005 Ashton Kutcher and Amanda Peet romcom A Lot Like Love) sold used-car comedy The Goods to Gary Sanchez Productions, the company founded by McKay and Will Ferrell.

Joining Gary Sanchez, Messick produced or executive produced a string of the company’s hit commercial comedies, among them McKay-written-and-directed Ferrell vehicles The Other Guys and Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues plus Ferrell outings with other filmmakers such as Daddy’s Home and Get Hard.

Messick helped the company make its mark in television as an executive producer on Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s Emmy favourite that made its debut for HBO in 2018. He also executive produced McKay’s 2015 Wall Street comedy The Big Short and produced the writer/director’s 2018 political dramedy Vice, both of them fact-based stories — and Oscar winners — that showed their maker’s growing predilection for mixing humour with current affairs.

After the Gary Sanchez founders parted ways in 2019, Messick stayed with McKay to launch Los Angeles-based film, TV and podcast production venture Hyperobject Industries. The two-year-old company reflects the interests suggested by The Big Short, Vice and Succession, projects on which McKay was “scratching at different things”, says Messick. “Hyperobject is a continuation of that,” he adds.

“Those are all things that lend themselves to Adam’s particular point of view,” explains the producer, “and we share a similar world outlook in that sense. So projects we take on, whether they’re film or television, represent a bigger, more diverse point of view than some of the films we made. But we made a lot of fun comedies, so no knock on those.”

Hyperobject signed a first-look deal for TV with HBO (also home to Gary Sanchez-produced hit Eastbound & Down). For scripted features, however, the company last year replaced its original deal with Paramount with a first-look arrangement at Apple, joining the tech giant’s growing list of feature film suppliers.

Hyperobject’s slate beyond Don’t Look Up points in some intriguing directions for the fledgling operation. On the feature side, Fresh, a horror comedy starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and backed by Legendary Entertainment, recently screened in the Midnight section at Sundance Film Festival and was acquired by Searchlight Pictures for a March 4 release on Hulu, and on Disney+ in other markets including the UK.

In post-production is The Menu, another horror comedy for Searchlight, this one from frequent Successiondirector Mark Mylod, with Anya Taylor-Joy starring.

In development for Apple, meanwhile, is Bad Blood, with McKay set to direct Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of biotech start-up Theranos, who was recently found guilty on four counts of defrauding investors.

On the TV side, Hyperobject’s basketball series Winning Time: The Rise Of The Lakers Dynasty, with a pilot directed by McKay and a second season being written, is about to launch on HBO and HBO Max.

McKay is working on scripts for The Uninhabited Earth, an HBO Max drama anthology series based on one of the books that inspired Don’t Look Up. And in development for HBO is a limited dramatic series based on a book about billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Particularly intriguing is McKay’s English-language limited series inspired by Bong Joon Ho’s Oscar-winning Korean feature Para­site, a project now in “very active development” for HBO, according to Messick. Revealing only that the series will be set in New York City, Messick says Bong “came to us before the movie opened in the States. He wanted Adam to take a look at it and it was his notion to turn it into something for television set in America.” Bong and McKay “are working closely on it and it’s really cool”.

Projects like Don’t Look Up, The Uninhabited Earth and the Parasite spin-off are perhaps testament to the value of longstanding producer/director team-ups. Messick and McKay’s partnership has thrived, says the former, because both bring a “no drama” attitude to their work and each focuses on what he does best.

“There’s an efficiency to how we work together,” is how Messick puts it. “He writes great scripts and I help get them made.”

Nothing could be simpler.

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