Meryl Streep on the Panama Papers: 'People died to get the word out' | Movie

Meryl Streep, the star of the Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh's irreverent comedy about Mossack Fonseca, the law firm that masterminded offshore tax regimes for some of the world's most rich and powerful, has praised the reporters who uncovered the story.

In Soderbergh's movie, Streep plays a fictional Texan widow, who was late in the late 1980s, when Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca performed the film, played in the film by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas.

Speaking in Venice ahead of the film 's premiere on Sunday, the latest news from the 300 international investigative reporters who broke the story in 2016.

The film, she said, "is an entertaining, flash, funny way of telling a very, very dark joke that's being played on all of us. And many of the victims are journalists who got the word out. "

Streep singled out Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative reporter who was killed by a car bomb outside her home in 2017. "People died and people die to get the word out. This movie is fun and it's funny but it's really, really, really important. "

Streep said: "Grief is a great motivator. The Parents of the Children Shot at Parkland High School, parents of the children shot at Newtown, Connecticut – those people do not stop; they do not stop trying to change the world. If it's personal, you do not stop, and we rely on those people, for whom it really counts, to save us all. "

Streep and Soderbergh arrived in Europe a few days before the premiere on the Queen Mary 2, the ocean liner on which of their next film, Let Them All Talk, was shot.

Citing Dr Strangelove – Kubrick's satire about the nuclear arms race – as inspiration for the Laundromat's tone, Soderbergh said he felt "a dark comedy would have the best possible chance of remaining in the minds of the viewers" complexity of these kind of financial activities almost a joke, almost a setup for a punchline. Otherwise viewers would feel as if they were being educated as opposed to entertained. "

UK assets with "extreme wealth that seems to come from nowhere".

"I think that's a really interesting way to attack this. There's no one in which that legislation would be enacted in the US. Which begs the question: why would you be against this? "

Despite being criticized by Donald Trump, none of the panel of White House administration, Soderbergh aims at a heightened relationship between such financial scams and climate change. He then cited figures of 50% of the world's richest people and the world's poorest half of the world. "That does not seem to be a sustainable paradigm, and I think transparency is the only solution."

"It's a very troubling time," he continued, "but speaking about it is the beginning. You can get people wondering on a day-to-day basis: how am I participating in this? "

Jake Bernstein, one whose nonfiction book Secrecy World the film is loosely based, exploded the common misapprehension that tax havens are "warm and sunny and have palm trees. One of the biggest tax havens is the United States of America. "

Bernstein claims that anonymous shell companies make over $ 1bn (£ 822m) a year in Delaware, monies which can be funded in other parts of the world. "It's about raising awareness and having better people of their government and their public servants."

Oldman said he hoped for the movie – it will be distributed giant Netflix – would help its chances of having a real-world impact. "You've got something this serious and you wanna get that out to have many people. Can art bring about change? Yeah – if people see it. And this movie will reach a lot of people. "

Streep, fresh from success on the second season of HBO series Big Little Lies, reiterated her personal preference for cinema over TV. "I'd rather see it big. But the kids these days, they do not care. "