Adam McKay, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep participate in a Q&A after a screening of “Don’t Look Up” at L.A.’s BRegency Bruin Theater. “I’m a Debbie Downer when it comes to this issue,” DiCaprio said at a Q&A following the screening. “I really, really, am. I could go off for an hour,” DiCaprio added, to which his co-star Jennifer Lawrence jokingly balked, “An hour?” “I’m not going to be Debbie Downer tonight,” DiCaprio said. “Hopefully, films like this that recreate the narrative, and start to create different conversations and more people talking about it will push the private sector and the powers that be to make massive changes. But right now though, we have such a limited amount of time and there’s such massive scale that needs to happen so quickly. And if we don’t do something, we know the outcome. We know the outcome.” The film’s director Adam McKay was also in attendance, as was Meryl Streep, who plays the President of the United States in Don’t Look Up opposite DiCaprio’s science professor character and Lawrence’s PhD student. McKay said he’d been toying with how to write a climate change movie for years and was having a hard time cracking it – until one fateful conversation with journalist David Sirota, who gets a “story by” credit on the film. “I have written up a bunch of different ideas of how to enter the idea of the greatest, most important story in the history of mankind the climate crisis. I have written ones that – I wrote one-page treatments that were dramatic. I wrote some that were thrillers, and all credit to David Sirota, who’s a brilliant journalist,” McKay said. DiCaprio described McKay’s comet metaphor in Don’t Look Up as a “brilliant stroke of genius.” “By creating a comet that was going to make impact within a year’s time: how do we as a species, as a society, as a culture, politically, deal with imminent Armageddon?” he said. “He had cracked the code, so to speak, on how to bring all the insanity that we as the human race are responding to this crisis in a two-hour format.”