Adam McKay says Don’t Look Up “oopsy” was supposed to be there, actually
The Don't Look Up film crew is visible at one hour and 28 minutes into the film
Hoping to avoid an inevitable fate of serving a life sentence on the IMDb “Goofs” page, Adam McKay has entered the discourse regarding a supposed mistake in his film Don’t Look Up. Pulling a page from the great debater Pee-Wee Herman, McKay insists he meant to do that.
Don’t Look Up viewers who did not heed the title’s advice (and instead looked straight ahead at their television screens) noticed a shot in McKay’s film that features the production crew members shooting the movie. TikTok user Ben Köhler (@sightproject) even [gasp] posted about it, calling the shot an “oopsy.”
The shot, which appears one hour and 28 minutes into the film, features three or four frames of the entire film crew, including McKay, shooting the picture.
After The Matrix Resurrections, we wouldn’t fault viewers for assuming we were staring down the precipice of a revival of postmodern filmmaking that playfully reminds viewers that they’re enjoying a piece of corporate entertainment. Well, we might be. But, as McKay explains, that “blip” was a tribute to the film’s COVID-compliant film production, which required masks, social distancing, and a more nimble crew.
“Good eye!” McKay tweeted. “We left that blip of the crew in on purpose to commemorate the strange filming experience.”
McKay directed Don’t Look Up, the story of a world-ending comet and the human race that ignored it, during the COVID-19 pandemic—one of those world-ending comet situations that the human race doesn’t need to look up to see.
While this might be the case, the crew’s presence isn’t immediately recognizable in the film because it simply looks like other members of the scene who are watching and filming a partygoer smashing a bottle in a flaming garbage can. Anyone who has ever been to a back alley party hosted by a gang of suburban gutter punks at the end of the world knows that this is very true to life. What else are you going to do? Not film your buddy smashing a bottle?
[via The Hollywood Reporter]