Actor-director George Clooney looks on the bright side
Actor discusses his new post-apocalyptic film, the pandemic and how much he misses his family
George Clooney's on the line. It's early December, and he's calling from his house in Los Angeles, where the family's 165-pound Saint Bernard, Rosie, is barrelling toward three-year-old Alexander. (His twin sister, Ella, seems to be staying safely out of range.) Midway through his dad's conversation, Alexander starts babbling into the phone.
“Alexander, say `Hi, Ann,'” Clooney prods.
“HI, ANN!”
The niceties are dispensed with. How is Alexander? “GOOD!” More to the point, is Alexander being good? “YEAH-VEE!” Clooney translates: “Yes, very. He's being very good because remember we talked about Santa yesterday? What do you want from Santa?”
“UH- HI- BE- CO- DECK-TO” Clooney: “A helicopter ...”
“A- PIRA- CHE-WI- LOTTATIES” “... a Pirate's chest with a lot of toys ...”
“AN-FOOD-YIE-DIS!!” “... and food like this. Which is a jelly bean and a gummy bear. That's a good Christmas, if you ask me.”
In ways large and small, the Clooney household has experienced the pandemic like most of us: living on top of one other, spending inordinate amounts of time on Zoom, missing loved ones.
“We haven't moved,” Clooney says simply. “We've been here for nine months and, you know, it's the same thing everybody goes through. I miss my parents, I want to see them, they're in Kentucky, and Amal (Clooney's wife, a human rights lawyer) misses her family. That's the hard stuff for us, and probably for everybody, a little bit.”
Clooney especially feels for his father, Nick, who's 87 and “the life of the party, still. ... He's used to holding court a little bit, and he's not able to do it, which is frustrating.”
Even amid the obstacles of illness spikes, lockdowns and quarantines, Clooney sounds upbeat. Which marks a definite shift from the movie he's promoting: The Midnight Sky, which he directed and stars in, is a deeply affecting portrait of Dr. Augustine Lofthouse, a lonely astronomer who, in the aftermath of a catastrophic world event, tries desperately to reach the crew of a returning space mission to warn them of the devastation they're facing.
As the scientist in question, Clooney, who will turn 60 in May, is barely recognizable behind a bushy white beard; his face is sunken and his body wizened. In one of the myriad interviews he has done for the movie in recent weeks, he told The Daily Mirror that he lost nearly 30 pounds while preparing for the role, his rapid weight loss landing him in the hospital with a case of pancreatitis.
From its bleak tone to its theme of planetary apocalypse — which is never specified — The Midnight Sky feels like 2020 in movie form. As the film opens, a subtitle appears saying, “3 weeks after the event.” This year, that could mean a global flu epidemic. It could mean wildfires, hurricanes, floods and mudslides. It could mean tribal civil conflicts that metastasized into world war. It could mean murder hornets.
Clooney laughs. “I like murder hornets,” he says, adding that he began working on The Midnight Sky — which is adapted from Lily Brooks-dalton's 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight — during PRE-COVID-19 times. His main reference then was nuclear paranoia.
“I grew up in the '60s, and it wasn't a question of if but when we would all blow each other into kingdom come,” he notes. “We used to do duck-and-cover drills in grade school ... so I lived with the idea that man is going to really screw this up at some point.”
It wasn't until Clooney finished shooting that the pandemic hit. As he edited within that context, he says, the contours of the film morphed with the times.
“Because you're sitting by yourself instead of being in an editing room,” he explains, “so everything changed a little bit as we were going. Funnily enough, we took more and more dialogue out, just because the silences felt like they were the part that mattered, the inability to communicate.”
What started out as a cautionary tale about the human race's poor stewardship of the Earth, Clooney observes, wound up reflecting what for him has been the main take-away of 2020: “Understanding how deeply we are in need of communication, and being aware of the people we love, and how hard that is on top of everything else, and the toll that takes.”
The Midnight Sky embodies before-times and after-times in other ways: Clooney filmed his part of the story in Iceland, with director of photography Martin Ruhe using a hand-held 65-millimetre film camera. The setting of the outer-space storyline, in which David Oyelowo, Felicity Jones, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir and Tiffany Boone play the space station's crew, was first conceived in virtual reality.
Clooney has navigated a seismic change in the entertainment industry, wherein the middle-aged
white guy who used to reign supreme is no longer necessarily front and centre when it comes to hot projects.
“I'm not worried about how difficult it is for middle-aged white guys,” he says dismissively. “They've done quite well over the history of time in pretty much every industry.”
Clooney is slated to begin production on his next movie, an adaptation of J.R. Moehringer's memoir The Tender Bar, in the spring. It will be the eighth movie Clooney has directed; earlier this month, Deadline Hollywood reported that Ben Affleck was in negotiations to star in the film.
Clooney's been scouting Boston locations — what else? — virtually. “It's very weird to have them send you pictures and you go, `Yeah, I could shoot there' or ` We could do that,'” he says ruefully.
He misses the serendipity that can sometimes change the whole movie. “Half the things you find are things where you're walking around and you go, `No, you guys, over here,'” he explains. “Even driving to the next location, you go, `Stop, pull over, what's that?' Sometimes it gives you an idea for changing the story, sometimes it gives you an idea for a better place to put the scene ... The good news is that it's a really small story and it takes place mostly inside a bar. It's opened up a bit, but it's not like we're doing Lawrence of Arabia on this one.”
Suddenly Clooney sounds distracted; Rosie the Saint Bernard has just charged his producing partner, Grant Heslov, as he came through the door. “Oh my God,” he says, laughing. “She literally just hit him in the head. Are you OK?”
We agree that this is probably as good a time as any to wrap up the conversation. Plus, he needs to get ready for Santa.
We used to do duck-and-cover drills in grade school ... so I lived with the idea that man is going to really screw this up at some point.