As a director at the minute, would you say that you are at a point where you’ve accumulated all this knowledge from everything you’ve done so far, both in front of the camera and behind and you’ve learned a lot of what to do, but also what not to do? You keep thinking you’ve learned what not to do, and then you keep doing some of the things that you think you’ve learned what not to do. I’ve had an interesting career, I’ve had incredible successes, an incredible failures as a director and as an actor. And the funny thing about that is it actually puts you in a position where you don’t get pigeonholed. As an actor, I’ve had success, but I’ve never been a big action guy, I never was a huge comedy guy. So sort of because none of them ended up being gigantic hits, it allowed me to just keep messing around and being able to do very different kind of performances. And directing has been some of the same. Some of the less successful films have allowed me the chance to continue to try other things, which has been fun. This is pretty different from anything I’ve done before.
So George, how are you? Good. I’m fine. We’re stuck in Los Angeles right now. I haven’t moved so this is the closest I get to getting out. I’m wearing nothing from the waist down by the way!
14
How did you first come about this story? Had you read Lily’s book? I hadn’t read the book. The guys at Netflix sent it over to me, to act in it, it’s a good part, it’s a good part for me. I read it and loved it and I thought I’d rather take a swing at directing it. I had a couple of ideas of what I wanted to do. I’d done a couple of space movies, so I knew how complicated the space stuff was going to be but this one felt like a really intimate story about what mankind is capable of doing to mankind in a very personal way. I also liked the idea of a story about redemption and I felt like this was the ultimate story of redemption.
Did you approach almost a bit like two films? Because you do have these two elements to it where you have your character Augustine and his journey on earth and then you have this wonderful collection of scientists who are up there doing their thing? I had to. I shot all of my stuff first with this massive David Letterman beard going on and shaved my head. My wife was really happy when the movie was over. But we first started shooting in Iceland, which was rough, 40 degrees below zero and 70 mile an hour winds, which you can see. It was hard to shoot, physically hard. And then we went to Shepperton in London and shot all of my stuff. So we started shooting in October and we finished that stuff by the first of the year. And then after that it gave us a chance to build the other sets, which we were in the process of building, which was the space stuff, which are much more complicated set pieces. In the middle of it, by the way, Felicity [Jones] called me. I was in the middle of Iceland, really miserable and I get a call from Felicity and she says, ‘So there’s news. I’m pregnant’. And I’m like, ‘Great’. And I go, ‘OK, that complicates things’. And she was so gung-ho, she wanted to do all the wire work and everything. She said, ‘I’ll be all right’. And I was like, no, no, no, we’re not putting anybody pregnant on a wire.
Did becoming a director change anything about you as an actor? Yeah it makes me dislike directors [laughs joking]. I remember I was doing one of those roundtables I think for ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ which I directed. You’re talking with a bunch of other directors and one of the directors there was like, ‘I like to wear an actor down. I want to do 50 takes until they have nothing left’. And I said ‘I’ll never work with you as an actor!’ but I learned from, the Coen brothers and Soderbergh and Alexander Payne - directors who I greatly admire. I learned a lot of what the things that work and why they work. You try to steal from the best, from the people who really know what they’re doing along the way.
It’s incredible when you look at the list of directors that you’ve worked with and interesting to see the characters that they facilitate. It’s a pretty funny thing, you know, the Coen brothers just want me to be an idiot, whatever it is, they just want to make fun of me, which is funny. And then Soderbergh was always sort of challenging the stereotypes in a way too. And then Alexander and Jason were sort of playing off of perceptions of what people thought I was, which I thought was sort of is always fun. It’s fun to do. It’s tricky. A lot of times people go, ‘Oh, you’re just playing yourself.’ And I go, ‘OK.’ I’ve been really lucky. I’ve been able to work with some spectacular directors and more than that, really great people. As we are sitting in this completely changed world, you’re finding that you really are looking for kindness and somebody being supportive and those kind of things around the rest of your life. And they became more and more important and that’s something that the directors that I most enjoy working with have always had that as a quality.
With ‘The Midnight Sky’, for your film within the film, it’s very solitary. Pretty much mostly just you? Yeah, well Caoilinn’s [Springall] there.
Do you feel a freedom in that? Well, it’s weird because there were a lot more lines written and we just took them and we felt like it was more of a silent film. Having Caoilinn there in those scenes allows you the ability to be angry or these sort of long moments of quiet actually play out in a different way than if it was just you by yourself. And believe me, she’s every bit an actress, this is her first real acting job. I think maybe I did more than one take on her, maybe like three times.
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CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW GEORGE CLOONE Y
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