His actions have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully.”
No, this is not a question (or is it an answer?) from last night’s episode of Liberal Jeopardy. And thumbs off your signaling buttons, contestants, because in this case, the question is not “Who is George W. Bush?”
This biting quote was lifted from George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, the channeled Edward R. Murrow biopic currently in theaters that chronicles the legendary newsman’s instrumental role in the fall of bullying Senator Joseph McCarthy.
And yet, you’ve got to be living in a spider hole to not pick up on the implicit parallel drawn by co-writer and director Clooney between the junior senator from Wisconsin who cried “Red,” and the president who now calls terrorists “yellow.”
So it goes for Clooney. After enduring years of lite fair, i.e. Intolerable Cruelty, One Fine Day and, lest we forget, Batman & Robin, it seems filmmaking these days for the oft-outspoken ER alumnus is politics, as usual.
Next week, Syriana, Clooney’s oil think-tanker of a political thriller, hits Washington-area multiplexes. Despite the subject matter, the 44-year-old actor claims the film is not intended as an overt dart at the president.
“This film is going after 50 or 60 years of flawed policies in the Middle East,” Clooney said in a telephone conference call with Diversions. “This isn’t something that happened in the past four and a half years. So in general we certainly weren’t making this a go-get-Bush thing.”
But with more known left wingers on board than the Washington Capitals, including Clooney, Matt Damon and writer/director Stephen Gaghan (Oscar-winning scribe of Traffic), Warner Brothers will be hard-pressed in convincing moviegoers, particularly those in red states, that Clooney and company have no diabolical lefty agenda.
“Our argument is to raise the debate,” said Clooney, who also produced Syriana. “If you’re going to have a war against an idea, which is terror, then you have to understand the elements. You can’t just say they’re evil – we’re not going to be called unpatriotic for asking questions.”
Yet that’s exactly what happened to Clooney during the lead-up to the Iraq war. In a time when the twin towers were being digitally removed from, of all movies, Zoolander, because “it’s just too soon,” magazines, Bill O’Reilly and many others labeled the star a traitor for questioning the Bush administration.
And it’s because of Clooney’s history that Syriana is being called “George Clooney’s controversial new movie,” and not, say, Matt Damon’s.
“Matt, he gets some flak every once in a while,” joked Clooney of his co-star and close friend. “In fact, I’m gonna give him some flak later today.”
Syriana began filming about a month after the two actors wrapped Ocean’s Twelve. No doubt Damon’s break was a little more pleasant than Clooney’s; the latter had to pack on 30 pounds in that 30-day span in preparation for the new project.
“The truth is it’s not nearly as fun as it sounds, the idea of putting on that kind of weight,” said Clooney, who also grew a thick salt-and-pepper-colored beard for the part. “My job was just to eat as fast as I could as much as I could. Mostly you just ate until you wanted to throw up and made sure you didn’t.”
Hardships continued on-set for the actor. During a grueling few days of filming an intense interrogation scene, Clooney slammed his head on the ground, tearing his dura, the tough membrane that encloses the spinal cord and brain, which caused cerebrospinal fluid to leak. Luckily he was able to make a full recovery.
“It was my own dumb fault,” Clooney said about the scene in which his character, CIA Officer Bob Barnes (based on real life agent Robert Baer) is tortured. “I was taped to a chair and a guy was pretending to hit me – then I flipped myself over in the chair and cracked my head. Good fun, I highly recommend it for everybody out there.”
With acting becoming so hazardous, maybe the former People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” will decide to step behind the camera for good. Clooney is two-for-two as a director. Under his belt so far he’s got 2002’s critically lauded Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the aforementioned Good Night, and Good Luck, which many expect to strongly contend for this year’s Best Picture Academy Award.
“With directing you get to be the boss all the time, and acting you gotta listen to the director,” Clooney said. “So it’s fun to be the boss. And by the way, directing is something you can do when you get old and fat and so believe me, directing is the way to go.”
But don’t expect Clooney to disappear entirely from the silver screen anytime soon; studio chiefs know full well that audiences everywhere want to see the hunk on-screen, even if it’s just in a supporting role.
“Both films that I directed I had to be in to get the funding for them,” said Clooney, who played bit parts as news producer Fred Friendly in Good Night and another mysterious CIA agent in Confessions. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been in them at all. It’s no fun [to direct yourself]. It’s no fun to actually talk to yourself and say, ‘Hey, good job, George.'”
Yet, despite the concessions he makes in order to be a part of films he considers to be of real substance, Clooney still sees detractors come out of the woodwork, even in Hollywood. In the March issue of GQ, Russell Crowe ripped Clooney for “using his ‘celebrity'” to make a living, saying, “I don’t do ads for suits in Spain like George Clooney.”
“I don’t want to get into a spat with Russell over him saying something relatively ridiculous,” said Clooney, usually a $20 million-per-picture star. “Listen, I got paid a dollar to write, direct and act in Good Night, and Good Luck and I got paid a dollar to act in and produce Syriana. So if I go and I do a commercial overseas that pays me a little bit of money I have no problems with that. My feeling is that artists in general should be very careful about attacking other artists.”
This isn’t exactly an odd place for Clooney – on the defensive – given his history. But, as anyone who’s seen him spar with Bill O’Reilly can attest, he can dish out the invectives as well as anyone.
While describing his interrogation scene, the actor slipped in a zinger: “I was getting buckets of water thrown on me, which isn’t in the film anymore. There’s a lot more torture to it that you don’t see – sort of like what we’re doing in the [Bush] administration. Just kidding!”
Contact reporter Patrick Gavin at gavindbk@gmail.com.
