Adam McKay, the director of the acrid Dick Cheney biopic “Vice”, appears to have been genuinely pleased by a recent news report that the US president’s daughter, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, both currently White House advisers, unexpectedly left their seats in a cinema and walked out of his film’s screening during the Christmas holidays.
“Someone told me that, yeah”, McKay said, laughing a bit, on the latest episode of The Awardist podcast on the website EW, before adding:
“That’s one of the least surprising things I’ve ever heard”.
During the airing, he shared that the story would perhaps be like a scene for “Vice”, where cameramen would focus on the audience at some point and show the couple, sometimes jokingly referred to as Javanka, stand up and leave the venue.
“We actually at one point toyed with showing shots of the actual audience, and that would have been something we would have done. Yeah, that’s pretty remarkable”, McKay concluded.
People earlier reported, citing an unnamed eyewitness, that the First Daughter, accompanied by her husband and security staffers, attended a “Vice” screening while they stayed at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort during the Christmas days, but left abruptly, halfway through the film, for reasons that remain unclear.
McKay also touched upon the chameleonic nature of Christian Bale, who played Dick Cheney in the biopic and has since grabbed two awards for the role –a Golden Globe for best performance in a comedy and the Critics’ Choice Awards for best actor and best actor in a comedy film.
McKay billed Cheney and his character “a pretty thick-skinned guy”, adding he is “a weird contradiction because there’s part of him — he’s always served power”, at all times being “the right-hand man to power”. “And holy moly, what Christian does in showing him is just freakish. To depict it that accurately, I would think he would have to get a kick out of it”, the director summed up.
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Dick Cheney served as vice president of the US from 2001 to 2009, and played a major role in shaping George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” doctrine following the 9/11 events. Cheney also lobbied for the US’ intervention in the Iraqi crisis, alleging that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was used as a pretext for the US-led invasion of the Mideast country in 2003.
After it happened, Cheney went on to support the war, stating that it would be an "enormous success story", and made many visits to the country. Cheney continued to allege links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, even though President Bush received a classified President's Daily Brief on September 21, 2001, indicating the US intelligence had no evidence proving that Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.