Author Michael Lewis joins Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and director Adam McKay for a freewheeling conversation on the making of their biting satire about the financial crisis, victim blaming and what happens if The Donald actually makes it into the White House.

Seventy-seven pages into his 2010 best-seller, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, author Michael Lewis stops to congratulate readers with a “gold star” for getting this far. After all, the detailed analysis of the financial-industry machinations that led to the collapse of the U.S. housing market and the Great Recession (and, arguably, the election of President Obama in 2008) is a whirlwind of such headache-inducing terms as collateralized debt obligations and triple-A tranches woven together by the personal stories of the men who foresaw the implosion and made millions. “Nobody wants to read about credit default swaps,” jokes Lewis today. “And nobody wants to…