CLOONEY DIRECTS, EDGE
Trump candidacy spurred ‘Suburbicon’
VENICE, Italy — It was standing room only as Venice Film Festival fave George Clooney talked up his film “Suburbicon” at a press conference prior to its world premiere yesterday. Sitting between the film’s stars, Matt Damon and Julianne Moore, producer/director Clooney acknowledged how Donald Trump’s candidacy prompted the picture, which he adapted from a Coen brothers’ screenplay written “in the ’80s” and set in 1959 America. “I was watching a lot of speeches on the cam- paign trail of scapegoating minorities and building fences, and I was looking back at our history and I found a story in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and I remembered the Coens’ screenplay,” Clooney said. His film contrasts the violence ignited when a black family integrates the all-white Suburbicon community with the horrendous homicidal happenings just next door in Damon’s house. “When you say ‘Make America great again,’” Clooney continued, “it’s the Eisenhower Fifties — and it wasn’t ‘great’ if you weren’t white, male. These are the problems the country has not quite come to terms with yet. They are unfortunately never out of vogue in our country.”
Damon noted, “It’s a definition of white privilege when you’re riding your bicycle, covered in blood and murdering people and the African-American family is blamed for it. We weren’t thinking race riots in Charlottesville would come when we were filming ours.”
Damon was unapologetically gleeful about getting to be this very bad guy.
“Playing it was very fun. George said this was stuff you’ve never been able to do in your career so far and it was fun to take the leap with George.”
Co-writer and Clooney partner Grant Heslov teased, “This is the closest to the real Matt Damon we’ve ever seen.”
As for Clooney’s skills as a director, Damon, tongue firmly in cheek, explained, “I’ve done seven or eight movies with George, and the key is when he gives you the direction, you do the opposite.”
(“Suburbicon” is set to open in the U.S. next month.)