And it's certainly not the place you want to reside if you are intending to make a satire about US race relations, particularly after Jordan Peele's Get Out covered the juxtaposition of black lives and privileged white suburbia so effectively.
That combat classic, Mr. Stiller recently told The Los Angeles Daily News, helped inspire him to make a satire when its director, Oliver Stone, dismissed him at a casting meeting for the movie with the words "You're cute".
In the same way, if you're going to make a satire of a demagogue, you couldn't come up with Trump, who strains the credibility of satire every day.
He was the subject of Nanni Moretti's The Caiman (2006), in which a B-movie director makes a satire about the leader.
While Mr. Cuesta has a fine eye for the absurdities of everyday life, he hasn't made a satire and, if "L.I.E". is any indication, his moral sensibility is undistorted by closet Puritanism.
"If you were making a satire of Hollywood, you would have the anti-Semitic, drunk, racist, misogynistic movie director making the Judah Maccabee biopic," The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg said to me by phone from Washington, D.C. "It's an act of outrageous chutzpah for an anti-Semite to appropriate a Jewish hero for a movie.
The duo initially was more interested in making a satire of the media business, something akin to "Wag the Dog" or "Network," but that angle didn't generate much interest since the whales and the Arctic backdrop would require CG effects and an expensive location shoot in Alaska.
John Howard Davies, the head of comedy, was looking for someone to make a topical satire show for BBC2.
He was simply fascinated that someone could make a living writing satire.
The screenwriters, William Broyles, Jr., and the team of Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, make a pass at satire — there is, for example, a fancy dinner party at which a powerful old ape turns up with his trophy wife.
Australian film-makers work with much longer development periods than Hollywood and run the risk if they make, say, a satire about a political system that regularly exchanges one prime minister for another that by the time the film gets through the pipelines it's likely audiences will have moved on.
