Payne lands Clooney for next movie

George Clooney will star in “The Descendants,” director-screenwriter Alexander Payne’s next movie.

In an e-mail to The World-Herald on Thursday confirming the deal, Payne said he would start filming March 15 in Hawaii. The Omaha native is in Honolulu, scouting locations and continuing to work on casting the movie.

“The Descendants” will be Payne’s first film since he and writing partner Jim Taylor won an Oscar in 2005 for the script of “Sideways.” That movie also earned Academy Award nominations for best picture, director (Payne), supporting actor Thomas Haden Church and supporting actress Virginia Madsen.

“The Descendants,” based on a first-time novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is about a Hawaiian landowner (Clooney) who learns when his wife dies that she was unfaithful. He takes his three kids along as he seeks out her lover.

Payne told The World-Herald in September that “The Descendants” would be a drama with moments of levity, in the vein of “About Schmidt,” a 2002 Payne movie. He said the title refers to the upper class of Honolulu, “people who had land and money in the family for many generations, often going back to their missionary forebears.”

Clooney, one of the top stars working in Hollywood today, won an Oscar for “Syriana” (2005) and was nominated for “Michael Clayton” (2007). He is widely expected to be nominated again Feb. 2 for “Up in the Air,” a Jason Reitman movie partly shot in Omaha last year.

Though Payne’s production company, Ad Hominem Enterprises, initially hired screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash to adapt “The Descendants” for the screen, Payne has written his own script for the movie. It is expected to be released late this year or in 2011.

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