Which serves him well in his new movie, “The Good German,” opening Friday. In the adventure-drama set during the last days of World War II, Clooney plays Jake Geismer, a U.S. war correspondent in Berlin whose coverage of a peace conference gets sidelined by his discovery of black market activities, the dead body of a sneaky American soldier, and a reunion with his German ex-lover, Lena (Cate Blanchett), who’s as haunted and ruined as the city she’s trapped in. Filmed by director Steven Soderbergh in crisp B&W, the entire movie feels like it was made in the mid-1940s, from the opening credits to the final, “Casablanca”-like fadeout.

“It’s funny - I’ve been trying to discuss a black-and-white melodrama, and all the TV interviewers ask is, ‘Who are you dating?’” Clooney says with a wry smile as he pours himself a soda. What would the perfect answer be? Something retro seems in order: “That’s right - I’m only dating in black and white,” he jokes.

But whether he’s in silvery two-tone (”Good German,” his Oscar-nominated directorial success “Good Night, and Good Luck’) or lifelike Technicolor (the caper flicks “Ocean’s Eleven” and “Ocean’s Twelve,” the ’70s-style conspiracy thriller “Syriana,” which got him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar), Clooney has perfected a classic style both on-screen and off that’s as rare as it is unexpected.

“It’s a weird thing, because things happen to you as time goes on, and I don’t think people thought that about me seven years ago,” Clooney says, leaning forward in a chair and playing with the soda glass on a table, so that a one-on-one chat feels like a riff in a saloon.

“But things change, and maybe you do a couple of parts that get into that area, and so you kind of become that. So I think right now, I have a nice slot in the world for jobs - there’s a lot of good, fun jobs out there for me, which is nice, because I’m sort of booked forever.

“And part of it, too, is that you get to a point in your career where you say, ‘What is it that I’m interested in?’ And you have two ways of playing it: You can either try and protect what it is that got you success, or you try and continually move to whatever you consider the next level to be.”

For Clooney, 45, whose appeal on television’s “ER” didn’t translate to the big screen until 1998’s “Out of Sight” (after misfires “One Fine Day,” “The Peacekeeper” and “Batman & Robin”), that “next level” meant looking back to a movie persona that was popular before he was born.

“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) was a Depression-set lark from the Coen brothers, and features a supremely silly Southern-fried performance by Clooney, sounding like Foghorn Leghorn after he’d swallowed a thesaurus. “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) was a remake of the archetypal Rat Pack movie, and in it, Soderbergh, who first collaborated with Clooney on “Out of Sight,” surrounded the actor - in the big-daddy role of Danny Ocean that Frank Sinatra originated in 1960 - with equally cool cats like Pitt, Damon and Don Cheadle, and made “Ocean’s” a box-office hit.

As a director, Clooney followed his countercultural-style debut, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), with last year’s “Good Night, and Good Luck,” about the newsman Edward R. Murrow’s confrontations with Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1953. The film got six Oscar nominations, including for Clooney’s direction and his and Grant Heslov’s script.

“The Good German” continues his old-fashioned streak. “George knew what was required, because he knows all those old movies so well,” says Soderbergh. “There are other stars out there, but there’s no one like him, and I really don’t see anyone else coming up.”

“George’s glamour and personality are so strong that it’s easy to miss how hard he works on characters,” says “Good German” screenwriter Paul Attanasio. “That was true of actors like Cary Grant as well. To go from screwball comedies to a dark Hitchcock film like ‘Notorious’ shows tremendous range.”

“As soon as I saw George on ‘ER,’ I said, ‘That guy’s a movie star,’ and that was why I wanted to direct ‘Out of Sight,’” says Soderbergh. “He had been attached to it first. And I thought, selfishly, that if that was something he was going to do, then I wanted to be a part of it.”

This ability to rally the troops is also part of Clooney’s classicism: Never one to take his fame seriously (except in terms of his work goals), he wears his celebrity so lightly, no one is intimidated. It’s the same kind of confident charm Grant and Newman had at his age.

“I think when you’re young and getting started, fame is like a bug light - you’re driven toward success so intensely as an actor because you’re pointed that way,” says Clooney. “And when you get it, you realize most of the things that you thought would be great are not.

“And that’s not whining, or saying ‘Woe is me.’ The greatest thing about being in the position I’m in is, I can walk into a movie studio and say, ‘I want to make a black-and-white film noir,’ and they’ll make it because they don’t want me to go someplace else. And that’s great.

“There are other parts that aren’t so fun. But you know, when someone comes up to you and gets you at an awkward time, it’s just as easy and quick to sign an autograph as to argue why you shouldn’t.”

He even riffed his way good-naturedly through a People magazine interview earlier this fall for his Sexiest Man Alive honor (he joshes about being a two-time “non-consecutive” winner, as if he’s the Grover Cleveland of Sexiest Men Alive), sounding like he was receiving a belated “Most Likely to Succeed” award from his high school back in his home state of Kentucky.

As with many things in his life, to illustrate why he can go with the flow, Clooney mentions his father, anchorman/TV host Nick Clooney, and how he’d view it.

“I think the secret is always to remember - and my father [believed] this - that over a period of time, people are going to be incredibly kind to you, as well as incredibly cruel to you. And they’ll probably be overly kind and overly cruel. So you have to find a way to define yourself, and not worry about the rest of it.”

His self-definition has included speaking up recently to help save Darfur (he’s worked with UN officials to bring attention to the African region), and ramping up a very busy slate of movies; next year will bring “Michael Clayton,” about a lawyer having a crisis of conscience; the inevitable “Ocean’s Thirteen”; and the next entry in his directing career, “Leatherheads,” a romantic drama set in the world of the 1920s NFL that he describes as “‘The Philadelphia Story’ with football.” He has at least three other projects lined up after that.

Describing his accelerated pace, Clooney explains, “What it is, is … they’re going to take things away. All the toys can go back into the toy box, you know? Watch the old TV show ‘This Is Your Life’ - that’s everybody. But you don’t want [that dismissal] to happen because of inaction. Creatively, this is the best time of my life.

“Right now, I’m at this point where I’ve got a lot I want to get done yet, and I don’t have time to indulge in other things. I don’t have time to get in fights, or deal with other stuff. I’ve really got to work.”

Because even a Sexiest Man Alive twice over recognizes that 45 is, at the least, a halfway mark. “And if this is the halfway point in life, it’s not like the last 45 years are really good, comparatively,” Clooney says, grinning. “It’s not like they tack on your 20s again at the end!”

You’d have to go back to Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, who did seven films together (including The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen). Or there’s Jimmy Stewart and Frank Capra, of It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and You Can’t Take It With You fame.

The “golden age” comparisons resonate as Clooney and Soderbergh release The Good German, an almost achingly-retro homage to films such as The Third Man and Casablanca. Their sixth film together (counting the upcoming Ocean’s 13), The Good German is shot in black-and-white, almost entirely on a studio set with rear-screen projection backgrounds, mono boom-mikes and brutally stark lighting.

It’s a $32-million film geek’s experiment, the kind of thing you can get away with when your first two Ocean’s films alone have grossed about a half-billion dollars worldwide. (For the record, their other actor-director films together are Out Of Sight and Solaris. And that’s not counting things they’ve produced together such as Rumor Has It and the TV series K Street and Clooney’s own directorial debut Good Night And Good Luck, which Soderbergh exec-produced).

“Any chance I get to work with Steven, I take,” says Clooney. “It’s fun to work on these things. We don’t do them thinking they’re going to be giant box-office hits. We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time we have getting films we think are interesting made. It’s a chance to aim a little higher than the low bar.”

“If you’ve ever been on one of Steven’s sets, we’ve never had a time that wasn’t fun and easy. It’s a crew I’ve worked with on films I’ve loved. Nobody gives you a hard time. It’s really not a dark, imposing thing.”

Set in Berlin weeks after the fall of the Third Reich and just before the Potsdam Conference in which the Allies divided the spoils, The Good German is loosely based on the novel by Joseph Kanon. It follows an American journalist (Clooney) as he investigates the murder of his secretly corrupt military driver (Tobey Maguire) and reconnects with a mysterious fraulein ex-girlfriend from before the war named Lena (Cate Blanchett, accessing her inner Marlene Dietrich). It gets progressively darker as its plot about war-criminal German rocket scientists evading the Nuremberg trials unfolds. And a happy ending is definitely not a given.

For Clooney and Soderbergh, the movie has been a four-year project that overlapped with several others. “Steven would be researching (wartime) stock footage and I was reading the drafts (from scriptwriter Paul Attanasio) and it was getting better and better. And then there was the horrible day when we had to sit (Warners boss) Alan Horn down and tell him we wanted to shoot it in black-and-white. That was fun as you can imagine.” The Good German, in fact, violates two unwritten laws of Hollywood for keeping young theatre-goers away from your movie — it’s in black-and-white, and it has subtitles.

Clooney is, of course, one of Hollywood’s most visible political activists. But though it would seem a likely launching pad for a political allegory or two, he says The Good German is not a political movie. “We didn’t set out to make a message movie. I remember thinking when we started it that it depends on where we are politically when it comes out, in terms of whether it’ll be about how to screw up an occupation,” he says wryly.

“It’s more a love story, murder-thriller like Chinatown, set inside a real world that we thought was sort of fascinating. I remember we watched this documentary where we saw all the German scientists basically trying to surrender to the Americans and not the Russians ’cause there was a much nicer two-car garage that you got at the end. It’s really fascinating subject matter. And watching (ex-Nazi-turned-American rocket pioneer Werner) von Braun getting the Medal Of Honor is always sort of fascinating.”

And then, “Steven gave us films to look at to get in the rhythm. I watched Humoresque, because John Garfield is an interesting actor that people don’t talk about much when they talk about that era. I watched Out Of The Past with (Robert) Mitchum — films like that just to get a sense of that kind of guy. I really like those characters.”

In fact, the press, the adoring female segment in particular (Clooney was recently renamed People’s Sexiest Man Alive) seemed to see some Clark Gable in Clooney’s persona. He’s gotten that before. “They did it on O Brother Where Art Thou because I was doing a bad Clark Gable impression. I think that just happens if you’re doing period pieces, people see you in that context.

“And,” he quips modestly, “I think Clark Gable, just literally, just now, turned over in his grave.”

What he recalls of the shooting was fun, including a Casablanca homage in the film’s final act. “It’s never fun to be shooting at night in the rain, but the plane and Cate, the whole thing, it was one of those kind of nights you drive home and the sun’s coming up and you think about how you don’t get to do something like that very often in your life.”

After that, however, it becomes a blur. “In fact, I was really swamped through the whole shoot. Good Night And Good Luck was coming out. Syriana was coming out (again exec-produced by Soderbergh). I was doing all the press for that at the same time. So I was up to my neck in work and didn’t get a lot of chance to screw around. It was seven days a week.”

That was, of course, Clooney’s Oscar year — two nominations for Good Night, and a best supporting actor win for Syriana — a source of pride for Soderbergh.

“George and I met each other at just the right time,” he says. “We were both viewed as people who had potential but hadn’t really put it together. I really believe in him, I thought he was a movie star from the first time I saw him on ER. We just found each other at the right time and believed in each other. And when that happens you just know. You have a bond in a business as strange as this one and you hang on to that.”

Already wrapped: Ocean’s 13, which Soderbergh is editing now. Just another buddy experience for Clooney. “I love those guys,” he says of his all-star castmates. “They’re sweet and funny and all having great years — Brad (Pitt) with Babel and Matt (Damon) with The Departed. Ellen Barkin’s in Ocean’s, she and Al Pacino work together and she and Matt have a very funny sequence”

And then? Don’t expect Ocean’s 14, 15 or 16 soon. “I think we’ll stop after this one,” Clooney says. “We had a good reason for making it. We felt 12 didn’t quite catch it. It was two-thirds of a good film that came up short in a few places. Then we came up with an idea for a good film, which was revenge.

“But there’s no telling, 10, 15 years down the road we might come back to it.”

The Good German is a heavy-duty saga of an American journalist (Clooney) lured into a murder mystery in postwar Berlin. Soderbergh used actual 1940s lenses and a single camera, attempting to replicate both the limitations and technical and artistic triumphs of the era. References to director Michael Curtiz’s classic Casablanca abound.

“The thing is, we’ve seen movies in black and white before,” noted co-star Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane in TV’s Deadwood). “You know, Woody Allen, George’s movie (Good Night, and Good Luck). But this is a whole other type of black-and-white film, that you really haven’t seen. You haven’t seen images like this for 60 years, you know what I mean. And it’s really striking, when you start to watch the movie, how different that look is.”

Co-star Cate Blanchett fit right in with the Egyptian theme, wearing a strapless beige Versace dress with gold metallic trim.

“He’s incredibly collaborative, and enormously generous to other actors,” Blanchett said of Clooney. “He’s really invested in other actors’ careers, and you can see that by the way he casts films that he directs. He’s interested not in what an actor is perceived to do publicly, but he knows what they can do privately. And he does that off-camera.”

The Good German marks the continuation of Clooney’s eight-year association with director Soderbergh, with whom he has collaborated on such films as Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven and Solaris.

“I learned a lot about cameras,” Clooney said of working with Soderbergh in The Good German. “Watching him work this way, without any long lenses or zoom lenses or anything like that, which is fun because I’m doing a film now that takes place in 1925, where they didn’t have access to that.”

Clooney was referring to Leatherheads, a romantic comedy he’s directing that’s set in the world of 1920s football. The Good German, which also stars Tobey Maguire, opens in limited release Dec. 15, and then wide on Dec. 22.  (The Chronicle Herald)

In fact, along with his longtime collaborators Soderbergh and writer-producer Grant Heslov, Clooney is doing exactly what he wants when it comes to making movies, and together they are taking big risks with the kinds of stories they tell; thus “The Good German,” a black-and-white post-World War Two tale of intrigue and murder.

“The fun news for me was that for the last few years we’ve been able to push and do what we’ve wanted to do,” Clooney told reporters earlier in the week at the New York press day to promote “The Good German.” “Now you know as well as I know that doesn’t last for a very long period of time. So you try to do what you can to do things that no one is encouraging you to do. There is no one at the studio going, ‘Please, make a black-and-white film about the Potsdam Conference, or give us another black and white about Edward R. Murrow in 1954, or give us ‘Syriana,’” he continued, laughing.

“So we get to just push it for a while. You know that they won’t let us do it for much longer, but we’re going to keep doing it for as long as we can. So for us it’s an exciting time because we feel like we’ve gotten away with a few.”

“The Good German” is a dark film noir homage to the great postwar films of the late Forties and early Fifties, filled with intrigue, drama, and the all-important femme fatale, played deliciously by Cate Blanchett. But it is Clooney’s performance that is the center of the film, and one that he admitted was particularly difficult for the veteran actor who started his career in television sitcoms over twenty years ago.

“This is as hard as anything that I’ve ever done as an actor and you had to commit to it. You could never sort of stand outside and wink. You had to lay in and be overly earnest and be overly, achingly, painfully direct and not internalize things. That’s really hard to do and try to find a level that it’s believable at,” Clooney said.

And that’s the whole point, as Clooney has already succeeded in carving out an enviable Hollywood career by making a series of successful mainstream movies (”Oceans Eleven” and “Oceans Twelve” for instance, along with Soderbergh) that have allowed him to look outside the safety of typical Hollywood fare to more interesting projects.

“It’s fun to work on these things. We don’t do them thinking that they’re going to be giant box office hits. We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time we have pushing to get films we think are interesting made as opposed to the other. We want to aim a little higher than the low bar,” he said.

Being named “People” magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” again this year certainly doesn’t hurt Clooney’s ability to get films made on his own terms, nor does his continuing bachelor status, a topic that the tabloids love to speculate over. But Clooney, who jokingly told “Vanity Fair” magazine recently that he was going to date a different woman every night until the paparazzi got tired of it, admits that his life is actually all about keeping his career on track and moving forward, not about chasing women.

“I do actually have to work. I have a job to do, and I’m busy. So that wasn’t really something that I meant. I don’t really have the time to do that!”

704 words
5 December 2006
Fashion Wire Daily
English
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