George Clooney Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

and we got on a pontoon and Matt, Don, Brad and I crossed the water in the boat, climbed the ladder and went up to the house. The first thing we saw was like a statue of a snake eating a woman's head or something like oh, so we came to the conclusion that we give ten thousand dollars to any guy who could spend the night in the haunted house with just one candle and a bottle you have you have a candle you have six matches and a bottle of wine and we went I guess we left cheadle and pit there and Matt and I went out we were sitting in the boat in the middle of the lake and we have to see the candle go through each window, it goes like two or three windows and then we get a call and they tell us like this, get us out. from this house we came back and got them out, so there was a lot of stupidity that happened along the way, but we had a great time and they, you know, are still very dear friends, so good night and good night.

Luckily, I was very vocal about my opposition to the Iraq War in 2003 and people like Bill O'reilly were doing shows about why my career was over because I was an unpatriotic American and they were organizing boycotts of movies I was in and stuff. like that and then I wrote good night, good luck in protest of the idea of ​​how do you know I felt like the fourth estate, the news organizations had dropped the ball and asked the hard questions and what happens if the other three states fail? , how important it is. is that the fourth estate rises and I look back and remembered the story of Murrow and McCarthy.

I remember the McCarthy hearings in the military and I started writing about that, so we raised, you know, like $6 million, which is a pretty low budget for what we shot. in 24 days on a soundstage and from the moment we started everyone understood, you know, we'd give all these guys who played the Murrow guys a copy of a newspaper, we'd say, well, here's a This is, you know, November. 5th 1954 New York Post and they would sit at the typewriter, they would all get their different newspapers, they would say a typewriter and they would get stories out of it and then we had two hidden cameras inside the screening room and I was playing Fred friendly, who was the producer and I would say, well, what's your leadership and each of them, because everyone had taken out every page they had of the story and they would say, well, they expelled Nixon from Duke University because they already You know.

It really gave it that live cinema feel and I knew the whole time that I wanted to use Diane Reeves singing like a choir like a Greek choir that constantly had this beat that was uh that was our soundtrack and with the other thing other than that no there's score, take the photo, he wants to do the story, joe, remember Delbert Clark is no longer with us, New York time, yes, our friend at the time, yes, this was yesterday morning, they're saying that en, how old is he? 53 illness, uh sudden illness at a friend's house no, it's not novid piece natalie sent some flowers there from the cvs a couple of things case before the supreme court involving the constitutionality of a section of the internal security law um provides for the deportation of any foreigner if they become a communist after entering this country I shouted for Mike Nichols and he loved it and then we never screened it for anyone else and we went to the Venice film festival and in the end we got this, you know, five, six or seven minutes standing. ovation and we didn't know at the time if anyone would understand it, you know, we had no idea, we thought it was just a little protest film because if they are right and this instrument serves no purpose other than to entertain, amuse and isolate, then the tube is flashing now and soon we will see that the whole fight is lost.

This instrument can teach, it can enlighten, and yes, it can even inspire, but it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it for those purposes. Otherwise, it is impossible. just wires and lights in a box, good night and good luck. I have many journalism professors at universities who use that film as a teaching tool which I am very proud of. It's important to watch that movie now and listen to what Murrow says. It's just talking about the idea of ​​saying we won't be led into an era of unreason we're not, you know, born of fearful men and men who were afraid to write or speak against things that were unpopular at the time it's important to remember that those those words and every bit of it is still playing unfortunately, it was the beginning of a commentary in the news about how important that was and it's important to remember how important that was, it helped bring down McCarthy and the madness of what McCarthyism was and it was crazy let there be a revisionist history.

Now people like to change the rules, but it was crazy to hold up a blank sheet of paper and say I have a list of names, it was ruining people's lives, but it also opens the door to the Sean Hannities of the world, You know, it also opens the door for comments from much less responsible people, the Tucker Carlsons of the world, who can spit out anything and say that. As important as it was, you always wish it was Walter Cronkite or Edward Romero and you hope it's not Laura Ingram and Bill. o'reilly when you open that box that's what you get sometimes michael clayton you know we were filming in new york and it's kind of wintery and nasty everything felt a little heavier while we were there but i gotta tell you if you know To Tom or if you know, Tilde Matilda is the funniest of all because she always plays cold and tense

characters

, you know, and she has an incredible laugh, she is one of the funniest,

most

attractive and entertaining human beings I have ever met in my life. and enjoy life like a tax life in a way that is very fun and she was spectacular in it 10 million dollars in your account at the moment this meeting is karen everyone is waiting I'm coming you have a deal you're like that , What are you.

If what you mean, guess if there is some problem that I don't understand. Let me take a photo while I do it. You don't want the money. No. Keep the money. You're going to need it. I can win at that one and usually he doesn't know it, that's the thing, if you look at my career, I played against a lot of criminals or people who have done some kind of crooked things in life, this guy is a criminal you know who is his own worst enemy and doesn't win those arguments. You know I go in and talk to the lawyers and they say you know, look, just take this payment and shut up and every argument I get into.

I lose, you know, and in the end with Tilda I got her the goods and she finally got caught in the way we hope to catch them, you know, the corporate misconduct that we're talking about before the way we want to catch them. them, so for us it's a big relief that we catch the big company doing that shit, it's not that it's going to cost them money, it's not that they're going to be fined, they're going to go to jail and that's what we want. You want to see these people handcuffed and thrown out and it's a really good movie because it gives you everything you know, it has a payoff at the end, here we go, that guy right there, stop him, grab that guy, what are you doing?

With NYPD detectives, I'll tell you something interesting that people don't know. It was based on research on the Ford Pinto and if you hit it from behind it would explode this car that was made and the idea. It was that Ford finally had to retire it, but there was a scandal about it, which was that there was an internal Ford document at the time that said, Look, it's going to cost us a billion dollars to retire all these Ford Pintos. 11 people die a year. If we were hit behind by the class action lawsuits it would cost us 200 million, we think it is cheaper to absorb the 11 deaths and the 200 million class action lawsuit than to remove all the cars that piece of paper got into the hands of a judge and he said Okay, now you're all dead and everyone got fired and a huge class action lawsuit.

He couldn't do that story, Tony didn't necessarily want to do that story, but he based Michael Clayton on that, so he always based it on the idea of ​​this corporate misconduct, the idea that everything and all the machinery, the lawyers and all these pieces that have to come into play for these things to work, for them to get their way with these kinds of things, was based on a very deep reality. important themes but it was still a fiction like a work of fiction so you could play a little more with the story and without worrying about lawsuits and that kind of thing we talked for a while about how we wanted to To finish the movie knowing that the end of the movie It was really me walking away, but we had to finish it and it needed to land, we came up with the Graduate Ending and how when they get on the back of the bus in The Graduate Ending they just sit there for a long time and first they live happily ever after and then you sit with them for a while and it's like what have we done and holy shit so Tony says okay well we'll just put you in the back of the car and leave the camera again if that was a take you did the beginning of the movie would be the

most

boring shot in the history of cinema, but it's a shot where everyone watching it relives their version of the movie runs through me through what I'm thinking, so they're playing it and it's It's his version that happens, but we didn't have the permits to film in New York City in the middle of the afternoon, so we're just stealing the location, so we get in the car and the car is covered in lights around it and a camera , two cameras set up there, I think, and we're going through a lot of traffic on Fifth Avenue, right in the middle of New York.

And then everyone was like God, what were you thinking when you were going through that? What was going through your mind? Do you know what it was? Do you know how you are? You know this because we see that we learned a lot about the character from everything he was trying to do. I didn't laugh because every time we stopped at the light, people stopped like they see, you know they're looking in because there's all these lights in this chamber, come on, that's just a clue, hey, George Clooney, what? what are you doing? Hey, I'm just looking forward, you know, looking at the camera and all I'm trying to do is not laugh for three and a half minutes because everywhere you go, hey, look at that George, look at me, yeah.

You know, and it still makes me laugh today because when I watch the movie all I can see is me trying not to laugh and everyone else sees something completely different. You know, The Descendants, the line was interesting because it was the first movie I made. I had once played where I was really a coward, you know, my wife was cheating on me, you know, there's a scene where I run in flip flops that I specifically tried to run like an idiot and it was one where you know I'm I'm I'm I'm not athletic I'm not I'm in control even if I'm not in control you know you can't really scold anyone my seven year old daughter is smarter than me and you know more she has more common sense than me do it I've never played a character that was so lost before and that was betrayed before your mother wanted it this way she has this she has this see that she says we have to do it this way we both do all the actors and there were some wonderful actors there to work with, but Shailene, you know she was a professional , but she was more than a professional when she walked on set.

I think in one of the first scenes we filmed, I think we'll let her go because when you tell her that her mom isn't going to survive and she goes underwater she cries underwater and I've never seen anything like that in my life and I told her then I'm going. Let's look I don't know what's going to happen with this movie but you Don't worry about your career, it's funny about the life of our lives, now you know that we write to each other and I really consider her as my eldest daughter. You know that she is a dear person who I love very much.

She was on her way to swim. the pool of blackheads with brandy and suddenly I see mom and some idiot walking into a house, her house, I guess it's just some guy, it could be anyone, Alexander Payne, I think he's a brilliant, brilliant director and his understanding of what I needed to be and that's how it was. You know, fascinating because me, my person, is fighting against being the guy who gets a pie in the face. I always think that I would like to play any role, but I don't want to be the guy who gets a you-know-someone. he throws a pie in your face and then everyone laughs at you and the only way the movie works is if for the first two-thirds of the movie I'm the guy who gets the pie in the face and you have to let it happen you just have to do it, there are no other options, so it wasn't a comfortable acting job for me in that way because you know everything is like everyone, you know everyone who walks in the room is smarter than me and everyone acts better than me.

Doing it was more complicated, but I also knew I was in very good hands. Alexander hadn't had a movie, it hadn't been successful, you know, it hadn't been critically successful and the script was fantastic, I knew my role was great in the end, I knew that. The scene where he says goodbye to his wife was his kind of moment of strength and his moment, you know, where I knew that the story had a circle and that circle would eventually come together and I knew that the family that would be back together. united wasto Work again, another kind of tableau with everyone sitting there, you know, watching TV together, but I felt like I was in Alexander's hands.

No, I wasn't worried at all. Midnight Sky, I knew it was ultimately a story. about redemption and it was a story about it was a much smaller story. I have to warn you about the conditions on the ground. You know, I wanted it to be like a partly silent film. I wanted it to be a meditation on a form of loss, we weren't in the middle of a pandemic when it happened, but there were still all these other elements, you know, these elements of how much hate and anger we were all experiencing at this moment in our history. everyone, you know, see Bolsonaro in Brazil or Orban and Hungary or look around with a lot of anger and hatred and that if they play together, this will take place in 2049, if they played it, they will know, 30 years, this might as well be our reality.

It's whether that kind of hate is allowed to fester. I knew the idea was for us to take these big canvases and tell very small stories. Little stories I can tell. I know how to make the big canvases. Needed help. Know? And that was with this amazing cinematographer, uh Martin Roo, and with these fantastic effects guys, who really helped us, and then you know it's easy when you go out to Iceland with a 70 mile an hour wind, 40 degrees below zero , needless. a lot of acting to be cold, you know, or feel pain, you want to be an explorer, but while you're doing all that, your own life is slipping away from you, so I have to contact them.

I came up with these huge LED backdrops. which we used that had cameras in front of our camera so that the backgrounds only for the winter things outside when we are in the snow so that when the camera moved the camera triggering the camera would know and change the background to the angle of where We were moving towards some really amazing things and it was a technical nightmare, as you can imagine, but you know we finished ahead of schedule and under budget, we did everything we were supposed to do. You know, it's about the idea of, first and foremost, what a man.

We might do to man if we don't pay attention to what we are capable of, but it is also about the spirit of who we really are. You know, if you boil us down, there's this need for redemption and this need to be good and kind. and just and all those things that as the movie reaches its climax, all these judgments are made, the two guys who decide to go home, a judgment is made there, do I owe it to my wife or do I want to take this girl? to home. You know, there are things that are life or death decisions, but they show such great human character that I love the script so I love the idea of ​​the story.

You also know that we saw her a couple of days ago. Unfortunately for a lot of people I can't see it on a big screen that we shot on 65, so we saw it a couple of days ago in Westwood in the Village on this big screen and you know, it's just stunning. shots that those that they put together, even the spaceship stuff in space from the spacewalk, when you see them, you know that in 65 is really something, so on gravity you worked with director alfonso quaron, did you take what you learned with him and did you apply it?

In this case, the thing about gravity, Alfonso, it was this genius, we were doing scenes in gravity that they hadn't invented the technology for yet, because I had the wildest experiences, like they put a VR headset on me, you know, and then me. I would hold another, you know, camera in my hand and in virtual reality I would be walking around in the spaceship that doesn't exist. Everything is in virtual reality inside this empty gym and there would be a big monitor behind it with the cinematographer looking at it. and I would walk through all the cracks on the outside for the space walk and I would look up and you could see the antenna there, I'm going okay, this is the angle, this is the shot for here, they would mark it and I would walk so I could shoot like if it was in this giant thing we built when we were only going to build parts and the rest was going to be cgi.

An incredible experience and a great lesson. My objective. in my career was to always say look me and I just constantly said it uh and luckily my agents were nice about what I just said look my job is, you know, I don't want to worry about it, I don't want to At the end of my career, I just I'll be able to tell how many movies open number one. You know, I don't care about opening weekend. I wanted them to be films that lasted longer than an opening weekend and I've been lucky. It's enough to have a few and you know that makes me feel very lucky.