Here comes Trouble

George Clooney takes on two of America’s most divisive chapters – the McCarthy hearings and the war on terror – to prove to the world he’s got spine.

by Tom Shone - pictures by Mario Testino - sittings editor: Tonne Goodman

It was during the torture scene that George Clooney first noticed something was wrong. He was on location for Syriana a political thriller about the CIA’s war on terror, which was being filmed in Morocco last October. Clooney had put on a lot of weight, fast, for his role as CIA agent Robert Baer – from 172 up to 207 in under a month. After filming a scene in which Baer is captured by terrorist in Beirut and tortured – kicked to the floor with his arms tied to a desk – Clooney came up with a round-the-clock headache (‘like an ice-cream brain freeze 24 hours a day’ he says) and a strange clear fluid leaking out of his nose. That night, with his scenes postponed, he flew to LA., where he spent two weeks trying to figure out what he had done to himself – ‘X rays, M.R.I’s all that stuff,’ he says, ‘a lot of the doctors were like, ‘You’ve got a headache. Go home.’ I understand what they were thinking: Oh, he’s an actor. He’s being dramatic.’ Finally a neurologist diagnosed a torn dura – the wrap around his spine. It was a big deal. His brain was literally sinking, What had been coming from his nose was displaced spinal fluid. After an operation in December, in which doctors shored up his spine with plastic bolts, Clooney was told that if he took it easy, he would be looking at a one-year recovery period, if he didn’t two. ‘What you learn after you’re 40is, it’s just about plugging up holes in the boat,’ says the 44 year old actor. ‘You just hope you have enough corks to plug enough of the holes.’ Here’s the rehab George Clooney-style; six days after his surgery, the tsunami hit Asia, and he says he ‘got kind of roped into the telethon [to raise relief funds].

I was running around in a neck brace yelling, ‘Right. Three guys out there, two guys over there.’ After that, production started on his second outing as a director, Good Night and Good Luck, which he also acted in, writing down his lines on scraps of paper to combat short-term memory loss from his injury. Then, when production ended in May, his Vegas golfing trip with his buddies resumed after a two-year hiatus, and he wasn’t about to miss that. Oh, and then in July there was a quick trip to lobby the G-8 summit in Scotland before returning in time to put the ink on a deal to build a new Vegas casino with Brad Pitt. ‘The guy doesn’t sleep.’ Says Matt Damon, his Ocean’s Eleven co-star who teams up again with the actor in Syriana. ‘When I was staying at his house in Italy, I’d sneak along to the gym thinking I’m the only person around, and he’d be in there dripping sweat, having been in there for two house. I was like: ‘Oh, I see. All right. So it’s not all that easy.’ But he’s fine for the whole effortless myth to remain. Of course he is, because it allows him to do exactly what he wants to do. When people look back, then years after his career’s over they’ll go, ‘Look what that guy Clooney did, and we didn’t even realize it was happening.’

Getting the world to underestimate him may well prove to be Clooney’s smartest stunt. So while everyone was saying he made it look too easy, he was quite literally breaking his back, and while everyone was dismissing him as a throwback, he was busy establishing himself as the go-to-A-list actor for such indie directors as the Coen brothers, David O Russell and Steven Soderberg. ‘George is our favourite idiot’ says Joel Coen, whose films with Clooney have riffed appealingly on the public’s suspicions of self-regard in the actor, his pomaded hair in O Brother Where Art Thou?, his impeccable teeth in Intolerable Cruelty. ‘What’s rare for somebody in his position is that he hasn’t become overly impressed with himself. He doesn’t have the vanity of most stars, and he’s avoided the trap that most fall into. They keep doing the same kind of movies over and over again, to protect their position and they become kind of fossilized.’

With his performance in Syriana Clooney subverts his matinee-idol status even further. ‘He definitely takes some punches here,’ says the film’s director, Stephen Gaghan. ‘It’s new territory. It’s generally not until the second scene that people even realize its George. He really got into the socks of this guy, this aging athlete gone to seed.’ Loosely adapted from See No Evil, Robert Baer’s best-selling memoirs about life inside the ICA, Syriana – a portmanteau of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – follows Clooney as Baer and Damon as an oil-price analyst drawn into a dense plot involving terrorism, torture and multinational oil deals. It’s Traffic in turbans. Gaghan won an Oscar for writing the script to that film but was relatively untested as a director. Only with Clooney’s endorsement did Warner Bros. greenlight the film and its $50 million budget. ‘He’s one of the few top-three movie stars who will put his money where his mouth is,’ says Gaghan. ‘the other guys don’t do it. They pay lip service to it, but when it comes down to contracts they won’t lose the 95-foot trailer and the 40 person entourage to make what is, in our case with Syriana, five interconnected indie films.’

‘It’s going to get us in a lot of trouble,’ says Clooney gleefully. ‘When Traffic first came out and the word got around that girl gets raped by a black guy, you had all these senators come out and condemn the move. Then critics picked up on it and suddenly they were like ‘Important piece!’ We’ll have some of that with Syriana. One of our story lines is about two kids who end up becoming terrorist bombers and the first reaction is gonna, ‘Why are you trying to glorify terrorists?’ And then when the critics see it and catch on, there’ll be a renaissance of opinion going ‘It’s good to be talking about it’ The film makers a considerable achievement for Clooney, bringing together his objections to US foreign policy with his conviction that films can be both engaged by the world without scaring the duty to entertain, complex without being confounding. (That goes back to ER: To this day I don’t think anyone knows what super-ventricular tachyarrhythmia is).
It’s exactly the sort of film he wants to be making, which is to say the sort the studios vehemently don’t want made.

‘George has left a ton of money on the table,’ says Damon. ‘When I look at a career and say, ‘what path do I want to follow?’ his is the model. There are guys out there who try to micromanage it and try to hold the reins too tight. George is spearheading a new group of movie stars who don’t think that way. His motto is – It’s better to be in a good movie than good in a bad one. Clooney is not the first star to have noticed the chasm that opened in the last decade between blockbuster-driven studios and the independents. But he gets frequent-flier bonus points for the ease with which he passes between the two worlds. In 1999 he set up the production company Section Eight with Steven Soderbergh as a director-friendly haven within Warner Bros, aiming for the maverick style of the 1970s film making heyday. The jury is still out on whether or not the experiment has worked with hits like Ocean’s Eleven and Twelve balanced by box-office duds like Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. ‘I had a real big depression when Confessions and Solaris came out and both bombed,’ says Clooney ‘I was proud of both of them. I couldn’t understand what we’re supposed to do. We were trying not to make big dumb movies and were getting punished for it.’

A lot of people in Hollywood will therefore be watching to see what happens with Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck. The latter is a docudrama about Edward R Murrow, the legendary newsman who narrated the blitz from London rooftops and a decade later took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in a series of on-air spats. Clooney co-wrote, produced and directed the film – and then took a supporting role as CBS News producer Fred Friendly, in order to generate the film’s $8 million budget and smuggle non-marquee actor David Strathairn into the lead. Give most A-list actors a movie camera and a bullhorn and the result is some three hour epic involving Kevin Costner or Mel Gibson martyring himself on behalf of Western civilization. Trust Clooney to have homed in, instead, on the stubborn decency of a man like Murrow – and have given the role to someone else. As I found when I visited the Good Night shoot last spring in the Warner Bros lot, Clooney runs a movie set with his usual unassuming affability, interrupting with horseplay at every opportunity.

‘Where’s the ass-hole actor? Is he down there?’ he yells from behind the camera, dressed as Fred Friendly – tan suit, Lucite rimmed glasses. David Strathairn is tucked out of sight and waiting to enter the set, a meticulous 1950s re-creation of the CBS newsroom. ‘No time to reload. Action!’ And then: ‘Cut and print! That was terrible. Who on earth gave you this job?’ Clooney’s impersonation of an imperious director-tyrant – a von Stroheim, a Lang, a Cameron – has his cast and crew laughing so hard that they barely notice that Clooney is also getting what he wants from them: the exact shot, the exact lighting shade, the exact vocal inflection. By the time the laughter has died, he’s onto the next setup. ‘He never loses sight of the prize.’ Says Patricia Clarkson, who co-stars in the movie. ‘It’s all high deceptive. George has this big ebullient personality that fills the room, but when it comes down to it, he is incredibly specific – change this or that, just a few simple notes, but dead on.’

‘All my life I’ve been fascinated by what are probably the great three moments in American journalism,’ says Clooney taking a break between shots. ‘Murrow taking on McCarthy. During Vietnam, Walter Cronkite’s broadcast saying the war was a mistake. Woodward and Bernstein exposing Watergate.’ The fascination with broadcasting goes back to his childhood in Kentucky and Ohio, where his father, Nick was an anchor on the local news. Something of a hometown celebrity, Nick Clooney was always taking a stand, with the snappy retort in any argument. George used to watch him at work, sitting off-camera, stifling the urge to blurt out swear words while his father was on air – a telling picture of filial devotion and fidgety rebellion. Being raised by a political idealist had its downside. ‘He lost his job constantly, or would have to leave because they changed the rules. Sometimes you’d go, ‘Come on, just let it go.’ And he couldn’t do it. My whole life was growing up around the idea – from my father – that integrity was everything. So from very early on Murrow was a big part of our growing up.’

Clooney originally planned to follow his father into broadcasting, which he studied briefly at Northern Kentucky University. When he later announced his decision to become an actor, his father was horrified. ‘I said, ‘Oh Lord! How stupid is that? Are you kidding me?’ says Nick. ‘And every phone call he made I would say ‘Come back to school so you got a piece of a paper, a diploma, something to fall back on.’ And the one time he absolutely stopped me, which is rare, because I talk a lot, but he said, ‘Pop if I have something to fall back on, I’ll fall back.’ And I had absolutely no answer for that. It was the last time he heard that cliché from me.’

Good Night and Good Luck is very much a cinematic valentine to the take-a-stand liberalism that powers both Clooney men. When the film’s insurers rejected Clooney because of his back injury, he responded by offering up his house in the Hollywood Hills, worth $7 million, as collateral. ‘You’re still in a big corporate world with a small picture like this.’ He says. ‘The trick is having somebody who is in the position to say; Well, I’m not playing by those rules’ I played by those rules as an actor. I was wiling to make those sacrifices. But as a director and as a writer you have to stick your neck out a long way.’

Editing on the picture, meanwhile, was completed at Clooney’s villa in Italy, situated right on the shore of Lake Como. The place is palatial, with a Colombo powerboat docked at its pier and a garage full of Piaggio motorbikes. High privet hedges hide Clooney’s garden and pool from the tourist boats. The house itself has fifteen rooms over three floors, from a wine cellar up to a cherub-adorned master bedroom at the top. Clooney reserves that for guests, preferring to sleep in one of the smaller bedrooms himself. Clooney looks pretty good for a guy with a few squirts of Krazy Glue holding up his spine. Still healing seven months after the torture scene, he had daily headaches, kept at bay by Motrin and Xanax ‘but not the scary ones like Vicodin. Our family history is fairly fond of painkillers, so I stay away from those.’ If his injury was a sign that he should ease up on himself, it has been roundly ignored. ‘I’m in a position that I know doesn’t last very long,’ he says. ‘I know that there’s only a very short window of opportunity before they start going, ‘Well he’s a little too old now. We don’t want to see him doing love scenes anymore, so we’ll kick him into the character-actor world.’ And with that goes a lot of your clout.’ At the villa one night, Clooney regales the dinner table with a summary of the day’s exploits the water bomb hurled at the girlfriend of one of the editors on Good Night, a gargoyle smuggled unbeknownst into the suitcase of Hollywood producer Joel Silver, a recently departed houseguest. Something of the fun goes out of the gag however when Ben Weiss an old friend of Clooney’s points out that the person most likely to be carrying the hefty luggage is not Joel Silver but Joel Silver’s assistant. Clooney quickly concedes the point. ‘I had this nightmare the other night that I had outlived all my friends,’ he says. ‘that I was 90 years old, in a wheelchair with a cute nurse and bunch of 30-year olds all around me. And all of the bad jokes that Ben would give me grief for, they’re laughing too much at – Hoo-hoo-hoo! Haa-haa-haa! Oh George. I woke up in a sweat. It was a horrifying dream. I mean, you don’t wanna die, but you don’t wanna outlive your friends. I remember watching Sinatra, Dean had died, Sammy had died, everybody had died. And he had nothing left, and I was like, ‘Wow. That can’t be fun anymore.’

Clooney recounted this nightmare over pizza with everyone howling at his sad-sack self-portrait but even so, it’s a startling image of celebrity senescence. It raises the perennial question with Clooney who along with Weiss is the last of his friends not to settle down and start a family. A wife – surely that would be the person to keep you company in old age and let you know when your jokes get past their sell-by date? Clooney’s last long-term girlfriend was French law student Celine Belitran who told a French magazine when they broke up ‘I wanted to have a real family with children. It will never be the right time for George.’ Nicole Kidman and Michelle Pfeiffer once placed a $10,000 bet on when he would settle down. Says Krista Allen, an actress who dated him a few years back, ‘George is not a guy you catch. He’s just not. You don’t catch him. He comes to you.’ ‘Everybody thinks that because I haven’t a kid I must be W.C. Fields, but the truth is I think it’s a tremendous responsibility,’ Clooney says. ‘I don’t think you can half-ass it. I’ve been very concentrated on trying to get some stuff done and I’m afraid that right now that certainly takes precedence.’

Even so, he has his moments of doubt. The night of his spinal operation, a friend actor Thom Mathews, found Clooney in a rare pensive mood. ‘We talked about a bunch of stuff that night, we kind of unloaded on each other – about being married and family – and he said ‘How do I do it?’ And I didn’t have an answer for him He’s got to learn to relax a little. He’s so busy. It’s tough to focus on another person, let alone a child. He knows that. He knew how painful that was when his dad wasn’t around and couldn’t give him the attention he wanted.’

Recently, Clooney’s parents visited him at his house in Italy, after a trip to Ireland to look up their ancestors in Kilkenny. George took the opportunity to show his father a rough cut of Good Night and Good Luck. ‘He was very moved because he knew it was a tribute to the standards that he believed in. He knew what it was. He turned around and he goes ‘You got it. That’s a newsroom.’ I think we should take an ad out in the trades: ONE OF THE BEST NEWSROOM FILMS I’VE EVER SEEN – NICK CLOONEY.’

Clooney still rings his dad up all the time for advice – ‘more out of deference than efficacy’ insists Nick. At the height of the clashes between the pro-Iraq war lobby and Hollywood’s liberals Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly claimed that Clooney’s career was over because of his anti-war views. ‘Harvey Weinstein rang me up and asked ‘What the hell is going on?’ and so I called my dad – a man who knows about hardball politics form his failed 2004 congressional run – ‘Am I in a little dutch here?’ And he said ‘A lot of people have gone to jail for saying things they believed in, lost their jobs their livelihood. You’re getting scared because you lost a few popularity points. Stop being a baby. You’re a man – take it.’ And he was right.’ He looks down, shakes his head and looks up again through his eyebrows a gesture familiar from umpteen episodes of ER. ‘It’s a funny thing because part of you as an actor is trying to please. You want people to like you, get along with you. The idea that you’re purposefully picking a fight that will have 50 percent of the country mad at you…. ‘He trails off, the debate still unresolved in his head.

Next up for Clooney is an other film with the Coens, Hail Caesar, about a bunch of actors in the 1920s putting on a play about Ancient Rome, with Clooney running around in a toga and a pencil mustache, thus completing what he calls his ‘idiot trilogy’ with the filmmakers. Then there is The Good German, which is to be directed by Soderbergh from a screenplay by Paul Attanasio the writer of Quiz Show and co-starring Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire. ‘Its Chinatown in World War II Germany,’ says Clooney. ‘Nobody gets away clean. Steven’s going to shoot it like an old studio film in black and white with rear-screen projection. Really do it right. If it works it’ll be our swan song. And if it doesn’t then well fade off into the sunset.’

It is late morning and the lake I looking pretty good at this hour. His friends are already out on the boat, cutting through the haze. ‘The truth of the mater is what is taking it easy?’ he says ‘I’m in the middle of the most creative time in my life. I will not come here and just sit in a chair for a year. I’m just not going to do it. So today is sunny and beautiful and we’re like ‘We’re getting on the boat and going.’

source: US Men´s Vogue Premier Issue, Septemberr 2005
Thanks to Tess for passing me over a copy and my warmest regards to Merlin for the transcript!