IMDB; Nov. 26, 2002
Clooney Getting Frustrated
George Clooney is getting frustrated at his hunky image - because
its detracting from the serious message his new movie Solaris
tries to deal with. Much of the media coverage surrounding the
new sci-fi movie has focused on two shots of the sex symbol's
naked bottom - but Clooney wishes the focus would be on more
important things. He explains, "I find it funny because
we're trying to talk about things on a much grander scale, with
a story that contains questions about the cosmos and it'll come
down to a 30-second sound bite where I say, 'Yeah, I worked
out.'" And the Ocean's Eleven star believes the recent
furor surrounding the Steven Soderbergh film initially being
given a R-rating in America because of the buttocks shots was
initiated by the movie's nervous studio. He says, "Fox
leaked the story about the MPAA rating on Solaris, how we got
an R because I showed my behind, but I think they're having
trouble selling this film. They don't know what to do with it."
People Online; Nov. 25, 2002
Clooney's Naked Truth About 'Solaris'
TODD PETERSON
George Clooney doesn't want the moon in his new sci-fi film
"Solaris" to get
all the attention.
The movie, which opens this week, drew considerable attention
when its R
rating was challenged by the film's director, Steven Soderbergh,
and studio
20th Century Fox.
The rating was based on a couple scenes in which the 41-year-old
Clooney's
backside is bare -- which Soderbergh and the studio claimed
wasn't enough to
merit the more-mature designation. The Motion Picture Association
of
America, which determines film ratings, eventually relented
and agreed to
release "Solaris" with a PG-13 rating. Makers of the
film hope the lower
rating will draw larger audiences, but now Clooney is concerned
the
attention will be focused primarily on his posterior.
"Fox leaked the story about the MPAA rating on 'Solaris,'
how we got an R
because I showed my (behind), but I think they're having trouble
selling
this film. They don't know what to do with it," Clooney
tells Newsday.
According to an Associated Press report, Clooney speculated
that the
question he would most likely be asked during interviews for
the film would
be, "So you're naked. Did you work out?"
"I find it funny because we're trying to talk about things
on a much grander
scale, with a story that contains questions about the cosmos,
and it'll come
down to a 30-second sound bite where I say, 'Yeah, I worked
out,'" Clooney
said.
"Solaris," a remake of the 1972 science-fiction thriller
by Russian director
Andrei Tarkovsky, stars Clooney as a psychologist sent to a
space station to
investigate the crew's mental fitness, and ends up seeing images
of his wife
who committed suicide.
Ready
for Takeoff
In the space drama 'Solaris,' George Clooney bares more
of his soul- and his body - for audiences
By John Anderson
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
November 24, 2002
LOS ANGELES -- When George Clooney leans across the table, runs
his fingers through his I don't give a damn, gray-flecked hair
and tells you with all seriousness that he doesn't consider
himself a movie star, you understand why hundreds of millions
of fans would numbly nod "Yes, George" while simultaneously
dubbing him the coolest human since Cary Grant.
Note to self: Stay cool.
When Clooney, the star of Steven Soderbergh's "Solaris,"
which opens Wednesday and the debuting director of "Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind" opening in December, answers that
yes, he still has his pet pot-bellied pig and then - with a
conspiratorial smile playing around the outskirts of his mouth
- adds, "It's my longest relationship," you get a
sense of why sisters, mothers, aunts and some uncles would cheerfully
volunteer for long-term duty as Clooney serf, peon and love
slave.
Note to self: Get a grip.
When Clooney sits with his back to the window, silhouetted against
the sun-and-smog-enriched skyline of the Hollywood Hills, you
realize he probably has the longest eyelashes since ...
Note to self: Get some help.
Wasn't there a character in the old musical "Hair"
who insisted he wasn't gay, he just wanted to sleep with MickJagger?
Note to self: It's too late.
Seriously. Really. One of the weirder things about "Solaris,"
Soderbergh's remake of legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's
1972 sci-fi epic, is that even though Clooney and Soderbergh
are partners in the Warner Bros.-based production company Section
Eight - and even though Clooney is the closest that today's
Hollywood can come to the Gable- Grant-Eastwood-Newman-Redford-
capital-S-movie-star time-space continuum - he still had to
write Soderbergh a letter asking for the role.
"I wanted to give him enough room that he didn't have to
react directly, immediately, to me," Clooney says, by way
of explanation. "I said in the letter, 'This has to feel
like it's exactly the right thing for you. And if you think
I'm not the right guy, if I don't have the chops to do it, then
say no and I understand.' I wanted to give him an out."
For Soderbergh, whose hits over the last two years have included
"Traffic," "Erin Brockovich" and "Ocean's
Eleven," the only question was, "'Does he think he
can do it?'
"And the letter basically answered that," Soderbergh
says. "By asking the question of me, I knew he was ready.
That it even occurred to him to ask me whether he should meant
that he could. I thought, at first, maybe he was two years away.
But George pushes himself, he just does. And I think he felt
this is absolutely the time for him to do this."
"This" is the role of Chris Kelvin, a widower and,
in Soderbergh's version, a psychologist, who is sent to investigate
the mental state of the crew of the space station Prometheus,
which has been orbiting the reactive and apparently intelligent
planet Solaris. Once there, Kelvin experiences what the other
travelers have - hallucinations in the form of lost loved ones,
in his case his dead wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone). Haunted
by her suicide, Kelvin allows her "reappearance" to
tear a hole in the fabric of his reality, allowing a three-way
collision of desire, illusion and the super-rationality with
which he once viewed the world.
With more close-ups ("probably," Soderbergh says)
than any previous sci-fi film, "Solaris" is a demanding
movie with thoroughly internalized performances. It certainly
isn't "Sisters" or "ER" or "The Peacemaker"
or "Batman and Robin" or "One Fine Day"
or any of the projects with which Clooney failed to amass any
major movie cred. And it makes "Three Kings," "O
Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Out of Sight"
- the movies that did establish Clooney as the star he is today
- seem like a walk in the park.
"It is very internal," Soderbergh says, "which
is not what people associate with him. And it required, with
a couple of very important exceptions, a complete carving out
of all of the charm that he's known for - that sort of easygoing
sense that everything's going to be fine, this is all going
to work out, don't get too worried. Thirty seconds into this
film you need to go, 'That guy is completely hollowed out, just
dead inside.'"
Clooney readily agrees that "Solaris" is the toughest
acting job he's had. "It's easier when it's Steven,"
he says. "Doing something this abstract would be really
questionable unless it was a director I really trusted. I knew
some of what I was up for - he and I are partners so I knew
basically what he was going to do. But I didn't know for sure.
So yeah, it was scary."
He just as readily agrees that having found fame in his 30s
- or it finding him - made today's George Clooney possible.
"Absolutely," he says. "I'm lucky that I didn't
get really famous when I was doing some really bad TV."
(We mention that "The Facts of Life," something of
a low point in the annals of network sitcoms, is often left
off his biography. "I'm trying to forget it, too,"
he says.)
"I'm also lucky," he continues, "that a lot of
the films I did weren't gigantic successes, even like five years
ago, or I could have gotten pigeonholed into one of those. There
aren't that many actors who get to do "O Brother"
then do "Solaris." Or do "Ocean's Eleven"
then do ... I don't know, but they're very different genres,
all of 'em. And the ability to do them all is not speaking to
my acting ability. It speaks much more to the fact that none
of them for a long time were successful. And because they weren't,
people couldn't go, "Oh, that's you." So I got lucky
in a way."
Not that he would have planned it that way.
"No, there's no planning," he says. "I thought
'Out of Sight' should have done better, y'know. That's a great
film. That was a film that changed not just the way people thought
about me, it reignited the idea I'd learned in TV - but had
to relearn in movies - which is that you can make a very bad
film from a good script but you cannot make a good film from
a bad script. The material had to be first and foremost. And
then the filmmaker. 'Out of Sight' was a really good script.
I wasn't any different an actor than the guy who was in 'The
Peacemaker' - it was only a few months apart. But I realized:
good filmmaker, good script. And then I'll be protected."
With that in mind, Clooney decided to make his directing debut
with "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," based on the
autobiography of "Gong Show" host, "Dating Game"
creator and self-professed CIA operative Chuck Barris, because
the screenplay, by Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich,"
"Adaptation") was "the best script I'd read in
years."
"I thought, well, if I blow it on every level, which I'm
entirely capable of doing," Clooney says, "at least
I'll have good script and good actors around."
Clooney is throwing his growing weight behind worthy projects;
signing on as executive producers, he and Soderbergh helped
Todd Haynes make the current "Far From Heaven" the
way Haynes wanted. He may be moving more into directing. But
the Clooney strength is the Clooney charm, which includes the
tacit understanding he's always seemed to have with his audience,
that we're all in this together and isn't it a hoot?
And it's an innate something he shares with the screen's greatest
stars. When "The Truth About Charlie" was released
recently, more than one review suggested that while you couldn't
remake a Cary Grant movie with Mark Wahlberg, you might get
away with it if you cast George Clooney.
"There's always the danger of reviewing the film that wasn't
made as opposed to the one that was," Clooney says with
a smile. "But I'm such a fan of Mark's. I haven't seen
it, but I look at what he's done and where he's come from to
do it, he's incredibly brave and I adore him. I can't really
speak to 'Truth About Charlie' but there are things people box
me into, too. I'm not fighting that by saying I'm not doing
this, I'm not doing that. I'm just trying to find good scripts
and do them. That's the funniest thing. I'm not anti-movie star,
I'm not anti- ... I'm not against any of it. All I'm trying
to do is find projects that interest me and move forward."
Of course, for someone like Clooney, you can't move forward
of some facts of life. "It's the weirdest thing,"
he says. "There's no real fame school, so early on you
tell people things like 'I'll never get married' that wind up
almost legendary later." The legend, including a $10,000
bet with Nicole Kidman that he would be married with children
at 40. She sent the check; he sent it back and said double or
nothing he'd still be single at 50.
"It gets to where there's no way to talk about anything
else," he says. "Fox leaked the story about the MPAA
rating on 'Solaris,' how we got an R because I showed my [behind],
but I think they're having trouble selling this film. They don't
know what to do with it. The thing is, it's an unbelievable
... thing for them to make this film so you give them unbelievable
props for that. But the dilemma is how do you sell it.
"It's not a sci-fi film; if you sold it like that and young
men showed up they'd be [mad]. But it's not a straight romance
either. So I think they were looking for whatever ink they could
get. It comes down to like, 'Well, George's [behind] is out
there.' Nobody involved with the film cared if we got an R or
a PG-13; it's certainly not an R-rated film in terms of content.
But tomorrow when I do all these TV interviews, you know, where
you sit in a room and do about 60 four-minute interviews, about
55 of them will be, 'So you're naked. Did you work out?'
"I find it funny," he continues, "because we're
trying to talk about things on a much grander scale, with a
story that contains questions about the cosmos and it'll come
down to a 30-second sound bite where I say, "Yeah, I worked
out."
"Solaris," Clooney says, is about really intelligent
people who buy into fantasy. "For Chris, it's absolutely
clear that this is not his wife, but at some point he crosses
the line about giving a -- . It's like a dream you want to get
back to. He just doesn't care. He misses the feeling of love.
What I love about it is you have people who aren't fooled by
the illusion, but they need it anyway."
Which is not just the story of "Solaris," it's the
story of Hollywood - and the story of Hollywood is also about
success limiting one's freedom, of contracting one's choices,
until an actor ends up parodying himself. It's something Clooney
vows to avoid.
"Forget about it being boring, which it is," he says,
"it's also self-defeating. I've been lucky enough to move
from 'The Facts of Life' on, and I'm learning a lot as I go.
I just want to continue to do that until they don't let me do
that anymore."
IMDB
Nov. 21, 2002
Clooney Gets Busy
George Clooney had no trouble getting into character to play
a beleaguered psychiatrist in new movie Solaris - because he
was completely exhausted in real life too. The movie hunk was
pulling double duty putting the finishing touches to his directorial
debut Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind when he took on the role
of a tormented widower in the sci-fi drama. And he admits he
felt like he was in a work-related coma throughout the entire
period. He says, "When I was shooting Solaris, I had a
golf cart right next to the trailer, and I would come out in
a spacesuit, exhausted, and then jump into the cart and go edit
my film. I slept at the office a bunch. I slept in my trailer.
It was literally 17, 18, 19-hour days, every day. It was the
hardest I've ever worked. I looked beat, but I figured, 'What
the hell if I look beat up and old? That's OK for the part.'"
Clooney 'fesses up
By Claudia Puig USA TODAY
STUDIO CITY, Calif. — The other night, George Clooney
awoke with a start. "I woke up at like 4 in the morning,
just in a cold sweat," he says. "I dreamed that I'd
outlived all of my friends. It was this horrible feeling of
sitting around at like 85 years old and all of my friends and
family were gone, and it was just me by myself with people that
I didn't know and didn't recognize. There were people who knew
me from a movie, but they didn't really know me at all."
Carl Jung might have a field day analyzing the dream of one
of Hollywood's best-known leading men.
Clooney visibly shudders as he recounts the experience. "It
was awful; it was a bad one." Then he deadpans, "Don't
have it: Don't eat the cabbage before you to go sleep."
This may be 41-year-old Clooney's greatest charm: He has an
uncanny sense of when to reveal himself and when to pull back,
with humor.
Forget that he's drop-dead handsome, even better-looking in
person than he appears on the screen. Those piercing dark eyes,
that Ultra Brite smile. But Hollywood has plenty of hunks. It's
his smarts and easy affability that clinch the deal.
Movies are more than business
On this afternoon, Clooney is making some final edits, tweaking
music and sound cues, on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind at
a post-production facility at CBS studios. Based on the autobiography
of game-show creator and Gong Show host Chuck Barris, the quirky
Confessions is Clooney's first effort at directing, and the
self-described cinefile is clearly having a grand time. He raves
about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), cinematographer
Newton Thomas Sigel (Three Kings) and his cast of actors, which
includes Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts.
"I felt like if I'm going to screw up, I might as well
screw up with a great script," he says. "Then at least
I won't have any doubts that I can't do it."
Clooney also plays a mustachioed CIA agent in Confessions, which
opens Dec. 27 in limited release. Before audiences catch him
in that, they can see him as a psychiatrist sent to investigate
suspicious events aboard a spaceship in Solaris, a romantic
sci-fi drama that opens Nov. 27. It reteams Clooney with his
producing partner and friend, Steven Soderbergh, who directed
him in one of last year's biggest hits, Ocean's Eleven, and
1997's Out of Sight.
Clooney's past six months have included directing Confessions
and playing the emotionally taxing role in Solaris. The Solaris
shoot began only three days after Confessions wrapped.
"It's been insane, this schedule," he says. "When
I was shooting Solaris, I had a golf cart right next to the
trailer, and I would come out in a spacesuit, exhausted, and
then jump into the cart and go edit my film — during lunch
and at night and in the morning before we shot. I slept at the
office a bunch. I slept in my trailer. It was literally 17-,
18-, 19-hour days, every day. It was the hardest I've ever worked.
"I looked beat, but I figured, 'What the hell if I look
beat up and old? That's OK for the part' " of a tormented
widower in Solaris.
And, indeed, sitting in his production office in a dark T-shirt,
khakis and work boots, he does look about 10 years younger than
he does in the movie.
The intense workload hasn't left any time for much of a life,
let alone romance, he says.
"I'm not dating anyone," he says. "I've had a
lot of stuff to do, so I haven't really had much time for that.
It wouldn't really be fair to even try it right now."
Nicole Kidman, his co-star in 1997's The Peacemaker, once bet
him $10,000 that he would be married again by age 40. (His first
marriage, to model Talia Balsam, ended in divorce after three
years.) When the time came, she dutifully paid up. "I sent
it back and said, 'Double or nothing for the next 10 years,'
" he says.
There's clearly a part of him that would like to lose the bet.
"I'm really not put off by marriage," he says. "I
never have been. I answered a question once 10 years ago to
Barbara Walters about marriage, saying, 'I've done it once and
I'm not interested in doing it again,' and it sort of became
another thing. I was just making a joke."
He's not a man surprised by seeing something small spiral into
something bigger in the media. But five years after accusing
the tabloid press of causing Princess Diana's death, he seems
to have come to terms with its role in his own life. He says
he laughs when he reads accounts of romances he's supposedly
having or about popping into Julia Roberts' wedding to cameraman
Danny Moder. He has been linked with actress/producer Jennifer
Siebel, actress Krista Allen and Canadian model Maria Bertrand,
not to mention that he is rumored to be the guy who broke up
Roberts and Benjamin Bratt.
"I think, 'Wow, I'm living a better life than I thought,'
" he says. "I think part of it is because I played
this womanizer on ER. You sort of become whatever that first
character that you're famous for is."
It isn't worth fighting over. "I realize that's just going
to be part of my persona now, the perception of me. The only
thing you can't do is try to prove them untrue, because then
you just look like an idiot. Every once in a while, they'll
get something right, and I go, 'Whoa. They got it! They nailed
me!' But I'm not complaining. Most of the time it's harmless."
But he is always aware of the paparazzi presence. "You
can't have dinner with anybody," he says. "You really
can't. You can't hug anybody goodbye."
It's safer, easier, to immerse himself in work. And Solaris
and Confessions presented plenty of challenges to keep a mind
engaged.
In Solaris, a remake of a 1972 Russian film, Clooney has a much
more emotionally taxing role than anything he has attempted
before as his lovesick character must sort the real from the
imagined when his dead wife appears on the ship.
"I knew he had it in him," says Soderbergh, who initially
wanted Daniel Day-Lewis for the part. "I didn't hesitate
(after Clooney expressed interest), because I knew it was a
mental leap that he had to make as opposed to a technical one.
It was extremely gratifying to watch him play this part and
watch him grow.
"It's a really naked performance emotionally. I don't know
a lot of male movie stars in his position who would risk that."
(Speaking of naked performances, the only nudity in the movie
is of Clooney's bare bum, which initially earned the movie an
R rating. Soderbergh appealed the rating, and it was changed
last week to a PG-13.)
The script calls for Clooney to cry several times, a departure
for an actor with such a strong masculine presence.
"I cried at Batman and Robin," he jokes. "Oh,
I cried at the premiere. Actually, it wasn't the crying (that
proved most challenging). It was very hard to tap into absolute
fear and real dread. Steven would say, 'OK, now look right into
the camera, and it's the last minute of your life.' That would
happen every three days or so."
As director on the dark, complex comedy Confessions, Clooney
had other worries. "We're taking a character who is so
flawed that there is very little to root for, and somehow you
still have to root for him. It's hard to do."
He tried to make this character sympathetic in a logical and
methodical way, story-boarding each scene long in advance of
shooting.
"The way you have to design it is by having other people
around him care about him so that you understand that there's
something in there you have to root for," he says. "You
have to find small moments where you can understand him."
(As for Clooney's own confessions, he has one he'll share. At
age 7, growing up Catholic in Kentucky, he went to his first
confession and wasn't sure what sin he might have committed.
He chose a whopper: adultery. "I thought it meant acting
like an adult.")
Neither Solaris nor Confessions is considered a commercial slam-dunk,
and that's fine with Clooney. He is determined not to let his
star status dominate his decisions.
"If anyone actually thought of themselves as a movie star,
then he'd stop being an actor, and that's no fun," he says.
"The danger if you decide you're a movie star is then you
start to protect an image you've created. And then all you're
going to do is repeat the same parts over and over. You become
a caricature, and that fan base will eventually leave you."
Says Soderbergh: "Nobody's encouraged to do anything but
what they've done before successfully in this business —
especially if you're a movie star. His refusal to be sucked
into that is really rare."
Putting a point on it is Clooney's next starring role, which
he started two days after Solaris wrapped: a wacky but ruthless
divorce lawyer in Joel and Ethan Coen's Intolerable Cruelty,
which opens in April.
"It's everything we did in O Brother, Where Art Thou? in
terms of overacting," Clooney says. "Joel would say,
'I think you should do it like Popeye. Do it hanging upside
down.' All right. Sure. Why not? My only hope is that one of
these other films will be good, because that one will ruin my
career."
That's just more of that self-deprecating humor, of course.
On a more serious note, he continues: "The real reason
to do these movies is because you sort of want to push the envelope
and make things that interest you. Then at least you can wake
up at 70 and say, 'Boy, we took really good swings when we had
the opportunity.' "
And, with any luck, he'll have friends and family gathered around
to hear him spin the tales.
George Clooney Bares His Bottom
11-20-2002 - 9:49 AM |
By Fred Topel
George Clooney blasts off in an action-packed sci-fi extravaganza,
except there’s no action, the sci-fi is ambiguous and
the only thing extravagant is the attention paid to the star’s
bare buttocks. The film is Solaris, a quiet, ambling drama about
an astronaut (Clooney) who encounters the apparition of his
dead wife on a space station. We’re never told if she’s
a ghost or an alien or something else, but we see their relationship
and how both parties deal with a second chance. And yeah, Clooney
shows his ass.
“We don’t want to objectify women, just men,”
Clooney joked.
The somber mood of the film suited Clooney’s state of
mind during filming. He had just wrapped his directorial debut,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and was preparing to shoot the
next Coen Brothers film, Intolerable Cruelty.
“It actually helped in a way because I was exhausted.
It doesn’t hurt this film actually. It worked very much
in my favor, the process that I was editing and about to shoot
another film and doing all of that while I was doing it because
I was beat. So, you’d go in and there wasn’t really
any fight left to say, ‘Well, maybe I wouldn’t do
that.’ [Director] Steven [Soderbergh] would say, ‘Why
don’t you do it anyway?’ You go, ‘Yeah, I’ll
do it. Whatever you want.’ Which is how most actors are
supposed to be but sometimes we guard ourselves.”
With such exhaustion, Clooney couldn’t even play his trademark
pranks on the set. “There was nothing. I’m telling
you guys, this was a whole different shoot. This was one of
those things where it was dead silent on the set, nothing like
any set I’ve ever been on, because also this was shot
really quickly. This was an eight and a half week shoot, and
I was editing. Literally, I finished April 17th shooting Confessions,
which was a really tough shoot. We were in a lot of locations,
it was a really tough shoot. I got home and April 19, we started
shooting Solaris. The day after we wrapped Solaris, I started
Intolerable. Everything had gotten backed up and pushed so it
was literally just as hard work as I’ve ever done, and
I’ve worked hard before. But, I’ve also cut tobacco
for a living. That’s a lot harder.” Clooney sought
out the demands of Solaris, because when the script came to
the production company he runs with Soderbergh, Clooney talked
his partner out of casting Daniel Day Lewis in the lead. “We
were doing Ocean’s and I read the script. He had just
finished it and he offered it to [Lewis], who just works and
then doesn’t want to work. He was getting ready to not
work, and in that middle moment there when it was sort of just
sitting there… you know, we’re partners so there’s
a complication. You don’t want to cross the line where
you guilt him into doing something. So, I wrote him a letter
and just say, ‘Look, I don't know if I can do it. I don't
know if I’m the guy for the job and I don't know what
your thoughts are on that. But, I can tell you I’d give
it the best shot. I’d do the best I could and if you think
I can do it, then I’d love to.’ That’s all
I wrote and just said, ‘If not, believe me, I understand.’
He called me up and said let’s do it. You never know if
you were the right guy for the job because you don’t know
what other people might’ve done but it was sure fun to
try. It’s fun. We’re just trying to raise the bar.
That’s the fun part is just trying to go, ‘Okay,
let’s try to make films that last longer than an opening
weekend, and if we blow it, we blew it.’ We’re in
the position now where we can try and that position doesn’t
last very long, so we figured give it a shot.”
With Solaris marking the third collaboration between Clooney
and Soderbergh as actor and director, not to mention several
producing projects, Clooney reflected on their relationship.
“Steven’s so easygoing. Steven’s one of those
guys who just casts the right people. He puts you in the situation.
Having directed now, it really tells you how good he is because
I was unfair to actors. I would go in and say, ‘All right,
I need you to go over here and we’re going to start from
here,’ and I’d build the set around a shot and go,
‘Okay, you’ve got to look right in camera here,
you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.’
Steven walks into a set in general and says, ‘Okay, where
does this want to be?’ And you work and you rehearse and
he watches it on the viewfinder and figures out the shot and
it’s a couple hours before you get going. And it’s
this really much more creative process but much braver, much
more about really understanding film. He’ll suddenly go,
‘You know what? In order to tell this scene this way,
I have to use a different lens.’ Just understanding that
kind of aesthetic is just amazing. And it’s easy. He’s
one of those guys, he’ll be operating the camera and I’ll
do a take and I’ll finish and he’ll kind of look
over like this, go like this with his glasses, and I’ll
go, ‘Okay, all right, all right.’ There’s
not much to be said. You just know when it’s right and
that’s nice. It’s not manipulative.” When
he reflects on himself, Clooney said he learns from viewing
his own performances. “I have to watch them a bunch because
there’s so much of a learning curve to this. As you know,
pretty much every film you do, you’d like another crack
at. There are scenes that you go, ‘Well, that might’ve
been as good as I’ll get,’ but most of the time
you go, ‘I’d sure like another crack at that. I’d
sure like to rethink that one a little bit.’ It’s
going to be really interesting having directed one and throwing
it out there because every couple of weeks I look at it and
go, ‘You know what I’ve got to do’ and you
change it. But at some point, you have to put your pencil down
and hand in your homework.”
And for a tease of Intolerable Cruelty, Clooney said, “I
play a divorce attorney who’s a little unscrupulous and
Catherine [Zeta-Jones] plays a woman who marries men for a lot
of money. We fall in love and it’s very War of the Roses.
We just screw each other over back and forth a lot and meanwhile
fall in love. I loved it. It’s one of those movies where
it’s just as far out there as you can go again.”
Solaris opens November 27.
IMDB
Nov. 14, 2002
Soderbergh Saves Clooney's A**
Director Steven Soderbergh has won his appeal of the MPAA's
R rating of his upcoming sci-fi film Solaris. The movie had
reportedly been slapped with the restrictive rating because
of two scenes in which star George Clooney was photographed
naked from the rear (one, an extreme long shot; the other, shot
in a darkened room). On Wednesday, the appeals group agreed
that the film could be released with a PG-13 rating.
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