We punch mirrors and we explore our darker selves. No, it's just an amalgam of all newscasters that we grew up with. Sort of like before there was cable, when these people were like gods.
When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.
It's just funny that Americans have to contend with 2000 channels, and 60 different specific news sources, and the confusion that it creates, and the junk that we get to see is hilarious.
There's such an aggressively apolitical movement in the US that anything that smells of being political - even the term "political" is so ridiculous, when you think about it. The worst part of governing, the political side, is the grossest part, so that's what they call it. So anything that reeks of that immediately gets tuned out by 70 percent of the population.
I don't think there's ever been a moment in history where that, as an artistic message, has played very well, because people in their hearts know that's terrible and a lie.