BY GEORGE, WE THINK HE’S GOT IT
Talking with Leatherheads director and star George Clooney
Interview by Fred Topel
George Clooney is such a handsome guy, he really shouldn’t deprive his fans of seeing him on screen. Fortunately, even when he directs movies, he’s appeared in them. His third film, Leatherheads, actually stars Clooney, where he only played cameos in Good Night, and Good Luck and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.
“The truth is, I did it because this was a part that for a long, long, long time I wanted to play and I thought I was the right guy to play it,” said Clooney. “And I also thought, ’I’m 46. If I don’t do it now, I’m done. This is it. This is my last shot at it.’ [Steven] Soderbergh was going to do it in 1998 when we were going to do it and I was very excited about that sort of prospect and things sort of moved on and the script wasn’t in shape. We were sort of in pre-production, but we had an outline. We had two or three scenes that we loved and characters that we loved, but we didn’t have a plot.”
Leatherheads stars Clooney as Dodge Connelly, an aging football player in 1925, before football was even a professional sport. He hires college athlete Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski), a war hero, to attract attention to the game, ultimately corrupting the sport with rules and regulations that keep Dodge from having fun. It is a comedy in the style of ’30s Hollywood screwball features, and that inspiration helped Clooney fix the script.
“I spent a summer stealing from The Philadelphia Story, homaging the hell out of those films,” said Clooney. “The thing I came up which was horrible really, was the whole John Kerry/Swift Boat thing, where I came up with the idea that he’s holding a secret. Not that I thought that John Kerry wasn’t, but what if he really wasn’t a war hero and if there was an innocent way to do it where you didn’t make him a bad guy. And then Hail the Conquering Hero and films like that sort of helped with that too.”
The actor/director thought he would do double duty one last time, but Leatherheads proved more challenging than he expected. “I was sort of stuck in this world where I was going to direct it and I was going to play the lead. What I hadn’t really paid attention to was that I was also going to play football and it hurt. The first day I got hit by some 21-year-old who knocked me on my ass and I was like, ’Okay, I’m in trouble because I have four more months of this.’ I would never, by design, do a film that I would play the lead in ever again. It was one of those things where it all came together very quickly. It was a dumb move in some ways. It was a little too much to take on.”
With his knowledge of both political and film history, Clooney may have been the only director to resurrect the screwball type of banter and teach his actors how to deliver it.
“We called it ‘front foot acting.’ The tendency actually since Montgomery Clift came on the scene is to internalize and it’s great and made for some of the most amazing work ever, but what gets lost in that is that ability to you’re almost answering like you just as if you couldn’t have heard the question. It has to be sort of that quick. The difference is you can’t do it exactly like Rosalind Russell. She was brilliant, but if you took that performance and put it into a modern film, even if was supposed to be an older film. ’Sure, whatever, I don’t care.’ It would just be like an impersonation.”
Female lead Renée Zellweger and costar Krasinski were chosen partly for their ability, but also for their look. “With someone like John or someone like Renée, they are actors who don’t feel contemporary which is important. A lot of actors just feel like it’s 2008 no matter what you do. We had the same problem with Good Night, and Good Luck. You had to have actors who didn’t fill everything with ’Y’know.’ That are good at being very crisp and clean and both of them are very crisp, clean actors. And then you had to go. We rehearsed the scene as if you’d heard it all and then I’d go, ’Go, go, faster, faster, faster.’ To the point where it’s too fast and then you just slow it down. It’s just one of those things were you have to understand that it’s a rollercoaster and you go really quick and then slow down. And that finds itself when you rehearse it a few times on the set.”
Clooney’s buddies The Coen brothers have experimented with similar styles, including their oft-derided film The Hudsucker Proxy. Clooney gives credit where it’s due.
“I certainly watched The Hudsucker Proxy, because I’ve stolen…er…homaged the hell out of those guys over the years and certainly there were things about this film that I was using more along the lines of other films they have done. Hudsucker I love. I know people love to smash that film, but I really love that movie. You have to be careful that it doesn’t leak into an impersonation of any kind.”
Also known for his political beliefs, Clooney decided not to insert any major statements into Leatherheads. Even though Zellweger plays a reporter looking for the real story, this was not Clooney’s doctrine on the integrity of the press.
“I had already done a film about that,” he joked. “This one was more about the idea that I wanted to give John Krasinki’s character a secret. In the original draft of the film, John’s character and Lexi were boyfriend and girlfriend in college and they came out together. So, what happened, was she wasn’t active. She had nothing to do and there was nothing to get. And I was now too old to be stealing the college girl. Unfortunately, that happened. So it felt as if that needed to be changed and she needed to have something to do. So, really it was more about going, ’Okay, let’s give her [something to do]. Obviously, there weren’t women sportswriters in 1925 and they are fighting to do it now even, so we felt like that was a great ballsy thing to be. But it wasn’t a comment on the press on that one. I was just having fun.”
The Leatherheads football team does include African-American players. That was not too progressive for 1925. “They were all integrated then. That was the interesting thing. It was like 1940. There was a lot to do with that actually. There were quite a lot of black players in football in the ’20s and then when the rules came in and when money became an issue then they got rid of them all and they weren’t back until much, much later. That was one of the really interesting things we found out. There was a lot of interesting things. We couldn’t use actual teams, NFL teams because we had the kids smoking and drinking and they were like, ’That never happened.’ And you’re like, ’OK.’ So, it’s not the Duluth Eskimos – it’s the Duluth Bulldogs.”
Get all your gazes at Clooney in now, because he is gearing up to direct another film, and this time he will stay behind the scenes. “There is a play that is about to get made in New York that we are working on a screenplay of called Farragut North. It’s a really interesting. It may be the next one, but it would be next year. I think there are a lot better actors for that then me. It’s actually interesting though. It’s about running for President. This was a play that was coming out long before people were talking about the election. It’s not the same thing. It’s not about Barack and Hillary and all that or Elliot Spitzer.”
The entertainment news has been abuzz with rumors that the original cast of “ER” would return for the final season. As of this interview, Clooney had not been contacted. “All this stuff came up on the Internet. I got calls yesterday saying, ’I heard you are going back to ’ER’.’ I never heard of that.’ It would depend who asked me. If it was John, John Wells is a good friend. I have a funny feeling it’s not really fair to the other actors on the show necessarily but who knows? It’s not something I’m against. Literally, my office is, I saw them yesterday, my office is 50 feet from the ’ER’ stage. So they are still family there. It’s not like I’ve gone away.”•••
Fred Topel is a regular contributor to EDGE Publications.
