Jodie Foster: George Clooney brought great moves to Money Monster sequences
There’s one crucial point that director Jodie Foster wants to make abundantly clear about George Clooney’s crazy dancing in her new financial thriller, Money Monster.
Yes, that’s right, Clooney dances — Vegas-style numbers in which his onscreen personality Lee Gates hoofs it with two showgirls.
Foster swears those moves were Clooney’s brainchild, not the director’s insistence.
“[Clooney] came up with the whole idea,” says Foster. “He said, ‘What if I did this little move?’. I said, ‘Oh, you want to dance, huh? We’re going to make you dance’.”
It’s not that Foster, 53, needs more razzle-dazzle for her fourth film directing effort (in cinemas today). Money Monster is already blessed with the celebrated pairing of Clooney and Julia Roberts, and a dazzling Cannes Film Festival world premiere Thursday in France.
Foster says that after bringing Clooney on-board — as both producer and star, playing the stock-shilling and sometimes dancing showman — she left it to him to ask Roberts to play the steadfast producer holding the show together from the control room.
“We kept saying that it would be great to get someone like Julia Roberts,” says Foster. “We kindly asked George to get a quick ‘No’ from her, so we could move on to someone else. But she said yes.”
Roberts and Clooney display their famed onscreen chemistry (seen previously in 2001’s Ocean’s 11 and 2004’s Ocean’s 12) in scenes depicting Money Monster’s chaotic preshow. That’s before a disgruntled viewer (Jack O’Connell), who has lost his entire life savings betting on Gates’ “sure-thing” stock pick, turns the live show into a hostage situation.
With Roberts’ character in the control room talking Clooney’s Gates through the armed drama via his earpiece, the two actually had very little shared onset time together.
“It’s all a little bit of an illusion. Julia was really acting to [Clooney] on set monitors and playback. And George didn’t really have Roberts speaking in his ear at all,” says Foster. “But it’s the two of them together that are the heroes of the movie. She’s the brains and he’s the showman.”
But the lack of mutual set time did mean that Roberts missed out on Clooney’s now-infamous dance number. Foster is sure she heard about how it all went down. The guffaws and post-dance talk could not be contained.
“We were standing there watching [Clooney] make a complete fool of himself. We were laughing so hard,” says Foster.
She even foresees Clooney, who married wife Amal in 2014, perhaps adding Dancing With The Stars or Magic Mike 3 to his already-packed schedule. He just has that dancing drive.
“George says he didn’t prepare anything, and he just kind of went out there and did a crazy thing,” says Foster. “But you know he was at home in front of his mirror with Amal shaking it around. I’m sure he was dancing up a storm every day.”