GEORGE CLOONEY
STARRING IN AND DIRECTING URGENT SCI-FI THRILLER THE MIDNIGHT SKY, GEORGE CLOONEY IS SPEAKING HIS MIND LIKE NEVER BEFORE
The director/star of The Midnight Sky on a career that’s had everything: coffee, killer tomatoes, Batnipples.
George Clooney is fully in control.
The Midnight Sky, his seventh film as director, is precisely the kind of stirring work he thrives on: an apocalyptic drama, it’s told from the dual perspectives of a spaceship crew drifting near Jupiter, and a dying scientist on Earth (played by Clooney), forced to warn the astronauts of the latter’s sudden doom. As he tells Empire from his Los Angeles home while completing post-production: “I made the film I wanted to make.”
It’s an expansive, ambitious sci-fi, bringing together Clooney’s interests both off screen (he is a staunch environmentalist and outspoken political campaigner) and on (this is his third trip to cinematic space, after Solaris and Gravity). And it’s a film he could have only really made now: the culmination of a long and eventful career in Hollywood, and of hard-won, gradually accumulated creative freedom.
It wasn’t always so straightforward. When he first moved to Hollywood in the early 1980s, Clooney was simply an actor-forhire, most commonly found in B movies (Grizzly II, Return Of The Killer Tomatoes) or sitcoms (Roseanne, The Facts Of Life). Fame came relatively late to him (he was 33 when he began starring in TV hospital drama ER), and while he’s been happy to weaponise that Golden Age Hollywood handsomeness (in films like the
Ocean’s series, his million-dollar smile is practically a character in itself ), it often seemed to be in service of more challenging work — where he could lean into his own personal curiosities rather than simply play the movie star.
For such a certified A-lister, it’s remarkable to note that he’s only starred in one proper, big-budget, franchise tentpole: the critically reviled 1997 box-office bomb Batman & Robin, a film he now cheerfully dismisses with a candour that’s rarely found in Hollywood. But what still makes him tick, after four decades in the business? And how has he kept that integrity intact?
The Midnight Sky is a big space film and also an intimate character study. Is it a challenge to get the balance right between the two?
Well, I never thought of it as a big film. I always thought of it as a small film, because the main [focus] is the relationships. I’ve been in big films where the relationships don’t work. All that spectacle doesn’t mean shit. Sometimes you get away with it — if you have enough guns going off and bombs blowing up that you don’t really give a shit about the characters. But the truth of the matter is, the best films are where the interplay between characters matters. [My character has] a really good relationship with a little girl. The characters on the ship have good relationships. If you don't have that, then honestly, it doesn’t matter what the scale is, it just doesn’t work. From the very beginning, I knew that this was a personal story of redemption, quite honestly, and once you start telling that story of that scale, you just scale it up. The other themes come into play as you scale up.
This is your seventh film as director. Do you feel more confident behind the camera than you did when you made your first film, back in 2002?
I don’t know. It’s funny. The first film I directed [2002’s Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind],
I didn’t know not to be, so I was extraordinarily confident. Until you’ve had one that really flopped, you’re usually pretty confident. Good Night, And Good Luck, I was really confident. Then Leatherheads came out and it bombed and suddenly your confidence gets knocked a bit. It’s how it works. But in general, I think you always have to be questioning what your skill set is. When I looked at this film, I knew I was going to take on the difficulties that The Revenant had, and also the difficulties that Gravity had — in one film. I knew it was not going to be easy. So I had to do my homework. I worked for six months watching films and talking to filmmakers, so I would at least know where the pitfalls were. You’ve got to keep everything small when you’re out in that kind of environment. The space stuff was about being incredibly planned, shot by shot. It’s homework.
Which filmmakers did you speak to?
Alfonso [Cuarón], of course, for Gravity. I talked to [Steven] Soderbergh a lot because, in general, Steve is just such a good filmmaker. And he’s efficient. We shot this in four-and-a-half months. For a film this scale, that’s about half of what people would normally be shooting it in. I talked to Alexander Payne, sent him a script, asked him questions about some character stuff. You know, I wasn’t going to him for space stuff. [Laughs]
You once said that before making Confessions Of you read Sidney Lumet’s book on
I still employ it every time. Lumet brilliantly said your very first shot as a director, set it up, make sure it’s a simple shot — even if it’s a shot you won’t even use in the movie — you go, “Rolling, action!” Do the take, and then you go, “Good. Cut. Print. Moving on!” And everybody in the room — the crew, the actors, everybody — sits up. It completely changes everything for them. Because now they know you mean business. I do a lot of one takes. It’s important to do because it provides this energy. Actors can get into a rhythm, if they think it’s going to be 30 takes, where you just start dogging it, you don’t come with the goods. Find me a director that’s had a better decade than Sidney Lumet, from the late ’60s to the mid-’70s. I mean, he really had a run, man.
I don’t know. I mean, look, I’ve tried a bunch of different genres. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they [didn’t]. But my great fear is repeating myself. My only interest is to keep trying things and keep pushing the envelope as far as I can. I wanted to do an old-fashioned, standard war film with The Monuments Men. We got beat up by reviews. It made a lot of money. People liked it, but the reviewers didn’t. That’s okay. It is what it is. It’s a bummer. But we made the film we wanted to make. You’re constantly saying, “Okay, well, what now?” Honestly, it comes down to screenplays. Because I’m going to spend two years on it. It has to be something I love.
It’s fair to say you haven’t always had that creative freedom. You seemed quite happy as a jobbing actor in the early years.
Up until ER, every single thing I did was: I got a job and I was thrilled to have it. I auditioned, my agent said, “You got it, they’re gonna pay you this amount,” and I’m like, “Woo-hoo!” You got
the job and you take it and you run. I approached films like that, early on. Up to Batman. After that, it was like, “Oh, I actually have a say. I should be focusing on scripts.” That’s the change, you know.
So, was Batman & Robin the turning point in your career, then?
Oh, sure. You know, I was bad in it. It’s a bad film. But I was also being held responsible for it, in a weird way. Then I realised: if you’re gonna be Batman in Batman & Robin, you’re gonna be held responsible. Which never occurred to me. To me, I was still an actor getting a part. From that moment on, I was like, “I have to pick the script, not the part.” So the next script I did was Out Of Sight. And the next script I did was Three Kings. After that, O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The scripts changed considerably. Everybody would say that [Batman] was not the best. But the good news for me was I was able to take that as a lesson, as opposed to a career-ender.
You’ve always been very self-deprecating about that film. Did you at least have fun making it?
I did not enjoy that experience. I love Joel Schumacher, love the actors. But everybody was having a tough time. There was a lot of tension. It took, like, eight months to shoot. I was doing ER while I was doing it — four days a week on Batman, three days a week on ER. Seven days a week. That one just was a slog. There were a lot of problems with it. But, you know, one of the problems was that I wasn’t very good in it. Fair enough! I can’t point fingers at everybody else and not point fingers at myself.
You know, Michael Keaton is going to play Batman again, along with Ben Affleck…
I heard that! That would be fantastic. Is he gonna do it?
He’s still in talks. It’s apparently a Batman multiverse. Would you ever consider getting back in the Batmobile?
[Laughs] It’s funny — you’ll notice they didn’t call me! Somehow I didn’t get that call. They did not ask for my nipples.
You never know!
Oh, I know. Listen, there are certain things you never know. This one, I know. [Laughs]
As you say, though, you went from Batman to Out Of Sight — do you think that film cemented your screen persona, so to speak?
I think that one actually changed my career. It wasn’t a hit at all. But critically, it was a really big hit. People thought of me differently after that. It’s still one of the best films I’ve been in. Once you have that, where you can show that you can be a leading man — it was the thing that you needed to keep your career going, quite honestly. Sometimes that’s a good place to be, when you’re back on your heels.
It feels like you’re channelling Cary Grant in that film. Was that deliberate?
Not really. After O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they said I was making fun of my screen persona in a Clark Gable kind of way. I didn’t really think that. You don’t really think about other stars when you do things like that. Any comparison to any of those guys,
I take as a compliment and move on. I certainly didn’t go, “I want to be Cary Grant here.” I just watched North By Northwest again, the other night. Jesus, he’s just one of those guys. You can’t take your eyes off him.
At the height of your Ocean’s Eleven fame, you were also doing films like Syriana and Solaris. Were you trying to pull away from that movie-star persona in those films?
I did try to mix ’em up. I did have a ‘one for you, one for me’ with the studios for a period of time. In baseball terms, you get a single, a double, a triple or a home run — I was constantly hitting these doubles. And in a weird way, that was very helpful for me, because it meant that I wasn’t being pigeonholed into one specific thing. In some ways, I can attribute that to the fact that neither of those films were massive hits. They hold up like crazy. But neither of them were massive hits at the time, and in a weird way, it was helpful for me to be able to just kind of continue along. Even further down the road, with Up In The Air and The Descendants. Never monster hits. Enough for a profit. Enough that I could keep doing the kind of projects that I wanted to do.
Is that a rhythm you feel comfortable in? A lot of movie stars are now turning to Marvel and Star Wars — is that something you’d consider?
I mean, I’m 59, dude! I don’t really know what I could play in any of those movies anymore. I wouldn’t be against doing something, if there was something great. The choices get different as you get older. [When I did] The American, I had just turned 50. And that was where I actively said: this is the last time I’m going to be doing anything that is romantic of any kind, because I’m 50. Cary Grant once said — I can’t remember which film it was, I think it was Charade — he just said he looked at himself on screen and said, “Okay, I don’t think anybody wants to see me kissing the girl anymore.” That’s all. It’s just coming to terms with ageing.
Are you being more choosy as an actor now? The Midnight Sky is your first movie acting gig in four years.
There were other things. [Mini-series] Catch-22 took a yearand-a-half to direct and produce. But, y’know, I’ve got twins, dude! I’m doing stuff with our foundation [human rights charity Clooney Foundation For Justice]. There just wasn’t a great part that came around. It’s just what happens in your career. It’s just never gonna be this steady upward arc. It’s gonna have down times where other things in your life happen. This is one where I get to come back in a part that I think is sort of perfect for me and gives me something that I can really sink my teeth into. I feel like disappearing for a while doesn’t hurt.
Do you have a priority, creatively — acting or writing or directing?
I like directing and writing more than acting. That’s been my goal, lately. I’m adapting with Grant [Heslov] a Grisham book [Calico Joe] — for Bob Dylan [whose Grey Water Park Productions will co-produce], of all people, which is pretty crazy. And I’m in pre-production on a film called The Tender Bar that I’m going to direct. We’re gonna shoot in February. Hopefully. Who the fuck knows? We can only plan and hope.