Former vice president and Highland Park resident Dick Cheney has always been known for playing his cards close. He is calculatedly boring. So how do you make a compelling movie about him?
If you're writer/director Adam McKay, you go for broke. You cast Christian Bale as Cheney, and Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush. You craft a story that veers between comedy and tragedy, from youthful indiscretions to an all-consuming quest for power. You argue that the Bush presidency was, in fact, the Cheney presidency. And you use the same experimental approach as your previous Oscar-nominated feature, The Big Short.
Vice, opening Christmas Day, performs the near-impossible: It turns the Dick Cheney story into a wild ride. Vice led all movies with six Golden Globe nominations and is sure to be a major player come Oscar time.
We caught up with McKay, a former head writer on Saturday Night Live, on the day of Vice's Los Angeles premiere. The conversation has been edited for length.I feel like one thing the movie does is make Cheney human. Was that your intent?
It actually was. First and foremost, the movie's a portrait of this inscrutable, mysterious character, and we really wanted to find out who he was. I'm not really a believer that people are just born villains or heroes. Then quickly you find out it's about his wife [Lynne Cheney, played by Amy Adams], and how they took this circuitous route to what they ended up becoming. You see this young man's ambition in Wyoming with his wife, and her ambition to make her family proud, make her kids proud, and to see that turn more towards power, more darker, more towards the need for safety. I felt like that progression for the character was pretty fascinating.
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Why Cheney? What interests you so much about him?
I'm interested in the real power that's out there. A lot of times people say how boring they think politics are, or banking, or math, all these different things, but the stories that are changing the world kind of operate in those dusty "boring" subjects. To me, there's never been a guy who uses that kind of boredom to his advantage more than Cheney. He's just really not that charismatic. He likes not being in the spotlight. He likes being behind the closed office door. He likes operating from an undisclosed location. Those types of characters just really intrigue me as opposed to the kind of "Look at Me" characters that are always jumping in the spotlight. I usually end up finding out there's not a whole lot there with those characters.
The film makes the case that Cheney was essentially president.
Yeah. George H.W. Bush said something like, "I wouldn't have recommended Cheney to my son if I had known he was going to run a shadow empire out of the White House." I always thought that said it pretty well.
What made you think of Rockwell to play W.? What approach did you guys take?
It was tricky. I mean, Will Ferrell's impression is so omnipresent, so definitive. I needed an actor who was really, really, really good and really fearless to go into this character. I just knew Rockwell would pull it off. The guy's so good. The trick is you've got to play him as a real person but also acknowledge that George W. Bush is actually awkward. That is part of his personality, and it's kind of funny. I told Sam, "You have to make him a real person, but he is a little bit funny as well." Rockwell just found that perfect balance.
The film creates the sense that he loses some of his soul in his quest for power, almost like Citizen Kane.
I don't think you're wrong. When I first started sniffing around this as a movie, it just felt very large to me. It felt like a big, epic American movie. We kept talking about Citizen Kane. We talked about Patton. We talked about Little Big Man. It felt like it lived in that kind of zone. People keep asking, is it a comedy or a drama? I'd say it's kind of tragedy.
