CLOONEY GOES QUIET

The pandemic changed George Clooney's movie The Midnight Sky, maybe for the better

HEY.

IT'S GEORGE.'

Those are Clooney's first words when I pick up the phone. In that voice. Even if I hadn't been expecting the call — even if it hadn't been my only topic of conversation with my family for the previous two days — I'd have known it was him.

Clooney hasn't been in a movie since 2016 gave us Hail, Caesar! and Money Monster, though he's been keeping busy producing, directing and acting in the streaming series Catch-22. But on Dec. 23 Netflix subscribers can see him starring in The Midnight Sky, a science-fiction story he also directed.

He wasn't approached to direct. “This was just a project that Netflix brought to me just to act in,” he says. “And I was like, I think I have a take on this.”

He was awed by the scope of the story, and enamored with its parallels to a movie he loves, On the Beach. (The 1959 film makes a cameo in The Midnight Sky when one of the characters watches it.) “But I also thought it was an interesting exploration into living with regret and seeking redemption.”

“I know a lot of people who are older now and have lived with regret,” he continues. “And it eats them alive as they get older. It gets worse, like a cancer. And the character I was playing was a guy who just swelling with regret, and seeking some form of redemption. I like those kinds of themes.”

Based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight, by Lily Brooks-Dalton, The Midnight Sky tells the story of a lonely astronomer in the High Arctic, trying to make contact with a spaceship returning from a mission to one of Jupiter's moons, after a mysterious catastrophe silences all of Earth's communications. Clooney plays the astronomer, Augustine, while the ship is crewed by Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Tiffany Boone, Demián Bichir and Kyle Chandler.

The film finished shooting on Feb. 7, with COVID-19 already on the march, and Europe and North America just weeks away from lockdown. I ask Clooney whether working on editing and post-production during a global pandemic changed the tone of his movie.

“It does change, because you can't help but be affected by it,” he says. Originally, the disaster was meant to be a bit more specific — some kind of war or attack. “This is all a very fragile thing, humanity, and we have to take care of it. We could blow it up or set it on fire — but pandemic wasn't really in the conversation at the time.”

That soon changed. “When I was in the editing room ... it started to become clearer and clearer what we were dealing with exactly at that moment, which is our inability to be near each other, and the inability to be with the people we love, so deeply affects each and every one of us.”

And so the film suddenly became quieter, quite literally so. “What you end up doing mostly was taking out dialogue,” says Clooney. “It suddenly became about this idea of our inability to communicate. We lean more on that as we got into it, by taking lines out and making silence this thing that's a character in the film.”

Take the scene where Clooney's character, on a trek between one Arctic science station and another, comes upon a downed airplane. We never know for certain where it was going or why it crashed; it looks like there might be looted artworks in the wreckage. Clooney says there used to be a conversation in the screenplay. Now it's nine words. “Stay here. Please. Get out of here. Go. OK.” A rifle shot. Then silence.

“I felt like having that be really quiet ... seemed to make sense,” he says. “And the score there really picks up. That tells us the temperature in the room just changed.”

More about that score. It's by Alexandre Desplat, whose work you've heard even if you don't know his name. He has Oscars for The Shape of Water and The Grand Budapest Hotel, and nine more nominations including for Little Women, The Imitation Game, Argo, The King's Speech and The Queen.

I first noticed his work in 2008 with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, another nominee. This is his best since then. It's also the seventh time he's worked with Clooney. The first was on Syriana in 2005. “He wrote this incredibly beautiful piece of music at the end of the movie that just blows you away. He can do anything!”

For The Midnight Sky, Clooney says: “I told him there's going to be so little dialogue, music is going to be a character ... and you're going to have to write more music than you've written for any other movie. And he said OK.”

Clooney had demands. Desplat met them. There's a death in the book, for instance, that happens very differently on the screen. “I want you to write a ballet of blood,” he told the composer. Desplat delivered.

Then there's the final scene. “We cut that to Clair de Lune,” says Clooney, referring to the famous piece of classical music by Claude Debussy. “And then you send that to Alexandre and say: Do something other than Clair de Lune. Do something like Debussy would do here. It has to be quiet and sad, melancholy, but there has to be hope in it. That's what Debussy had in Clair de Lune.”

That's all. Just “something like Debussy would do.” No pressure. “He says, I know what to do. And two days later he sends you this piece and you go, yeah, you know what to do.”

No discussion of the sound design in The Midnight Sky would be complete without a mention of Ethan Peck, who plays a younger version of Augustine in flashbacks. He sounds eerily like Clooney.

“We blended the two of us,” he explains. “It's so much more complicated than it sounds. Because my voice was an octave higher when I was 33 years old — everybody's for the most part is – and so first of all we had to raise my voice, and break down sound into these hundreds of pieces, and I had to loop to exactly what Ethan was doing, his performance, not just his mouth but how he performed it.”

Netflix had originally offered to do an Irishman, de-ageing Clooney for the flashbacks. He balked. “When I was watching The Irishman, I just watched that as opposed to watching the movie. It took me out of the movie.”

He jokes that Peck is four inches taller than he is, 25 years younger, and super handsome. (Though Clooney's no slouch.) The casting call sounds like the conversation you'd have in a furniture showroom. “I love this guy. He's great looking. He's a good actor. I'll take him!”

“Voices are really distinct,” Clooney notes. “If you don't sound like who people know — people know me for 30 years now. They know my voice. If I do a voiceover in a commercial they go, there's George. It's really hard to fake that.”

True enough. Before we end the call we trade book recommendations. I tell him if he liked Good Morning, Midnight enough to direct the movie he should check out the post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and also J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel The Drowned World, which might be the earliest work of fiction to feature global warming as a central plot device.

He suggests I look for The Tender Bar, a memoir by journalist J.R. Moehringer, and Daniel James Brown's The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Not coincidentally, Clooney plans to direct film versions of both, with Ben Affleck starring in The Tender Bar.

And then: “OK, man, thanks. And stay safe. We're almost through this sh-t, you know? We'll all be in the same room one day soon.” Hard not to trust that voice.

The Midnight Sky is available on Netflix on Dec. 23.

NETFLIX