‘All I do is yell’ Hollywood star George Clooney, 58, on directing and starring in an adaptation of what is considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century…

How did you end up doing Catch-22?

I got this call, and somebody said,

“Do you wanna do Catch-22?”

I thought, “No, that sounds stupid”. And then I read the screenplay, and you don’t get very many screenplays that are that good...

You were directing yourself? Directing yourself is challenging. You can’t do more takes on yourself than you do on other actors, and I’ve been around when directors say, “Do it your way if you want” – but they’ll never use it.

Hugh Laurie’s on the cast, as the terrifying Major de Coverley… [Joking] We wanted to get the best actors we possibly could for the project. We couldn’t afford them, so we got these. Hugh did us a favour. No, I want to say that the actors were sensational – and pretty much every one is

a Brit. I felt very lucky to have such wonderful actors. And you filmed scenes in old Spitfire planes?

We only had two planes, so a lot of it was shooting scenes over and over again, and until you get inside you don’t realise how small they are. We used actual WW2 footage, in the hope that it would make it a little more real. Our director of photography instrumented all that – and he’s German!

You know what I’m saying. It was his chance to make up for everything….

We hear the filming schedule was intense?

Honest to God, as an actor, I would kill myself if I had to do what Christopher [Abbot, who plays lead character Yossarian] did. It was brutal, because we’d shoot four – sometimes five – episodes in a day. The end of the day was always, “OK, get your clothes off for the final episode!” [Abbott was in so many scenes that there wasn’t time for him to change in a dressing room]. What is your character, Commander Scheisskopf, like? His name translates directly in German to “sh*thead”, so there wasn’t a whole lot of subtlety in who I was playing. It’s fun, because all I did was yell – there was no great arc to him.

Tell us about the soundtrack... There are three tracks which actually feature my Great Aunt Rosemary [an America singer and actress]. I grew up around some amazing classical music.