How business journalism contributed to “The Big Short”

Eileen Li of the Chicago Maroon interviewed Adam Davidson, the co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” who acted as a technical advisor to the movie “The Big Short.”

Here is an excerpt:

CM: What was the timeline of your involvement with The Big Short as a technical advisor?

AD: I was very involved as McKay began writing the script. Charles Randolph wrote the original script and McKay started working on it…about two years ago and I was very involved in that process. A lot of that was just talking through what was the cause of the financial crisis, what all these weird financial instruments mean, that was a big part of my work…. But also what was very fun was thinking through the emotion of the financial stuff—what were the characters seeing that nobody else was seeing, why was it that they were able to see it when other people couldn’t see it.

So, anyway, all of that…was pre-movie…and then on set, I was maybe on set like half the time…. Some of it was explaining to the actors, talking them through what their lines mean, talking to McKay about lines…I don’t want to overstate my role, I was one of hundreds of people involved, but that was really fun for me.

Read more here.