George Clooney

…on how the project came together.
“There was a Murrow project, a movie of the week, that I had worked on with a writer named Walon Green for CBS and we fictionalized a lot the characters. And it was probably exactly the wrong thing to do. Thank God CBS didn’t make it. And then Grant (Heslov) and I started working on this about three years ago and we felt like it was a good time to talk about some of the issues again. I thought it was a good time to re-invest in the questions about the responsibility of the Fourth Estate. I thought it was a good time to talk and raise the debate. (To) not answer questions but at least (to) raise questions about using fear to erode away civil liberties. And I thought it was good time to show it in a historical context rather than to try and preach to anybody. I thought it was a great story and I thought it was time to do it.

…on when the decision was made to shoot in black-and-white.
This morning. But we are going to colorize it (Laughs). From the very beginning we knew that we were going to use McCarthy in his own words. First(ly) because that was what Murrow did and secondly because if you had an actor play him, you wouldn’t believe it. He did a perfect job. You would say no-one could really actually have been like that. Knowing that we were going to use that footage and restore that footage, we knew that we would have to then shoot the rest of the film in black-and-white.

…on the cost of archival footage.
The expense of some of it was prohibitive. Believe it or not, all of the McCarthy army stuff was the stuff that was the most expensive. NBC had it and that was the stuff what made it hard to get. But we are wealthy, wealthy people so we got it.

…on documentation that shows the relationships between Fred Friendly, William Paley and Edward J. Murrow?
The one thing that we did through the whole film because is there is this sort of revisionist history now. Some people want to come out and say that McCarthy was right and Murrow was wrong. I talked to my father about it before we started and Grant and I decided along with my Dad in a way that the secret, the way to do this was to double-source every scene that we were doing. Every one. So that the scenes happened; the actual dialogue a lot of times happened because there were recorders and they kept great notes. We used references; not just Joe and Shirely Wershba not just Milo Radulovich or Don Hewitt. We used the (David) Halberstam book, we used (Fred) Friendly’s book. We cross-referenced; we tried to double-source everything. The conversations between Friendly and Murrow are accurate in this sense…
Because we wanted to be able to say that we picked up all the sides in this. But there is documentation on each one of the scenes. In fact, a lot of times it is written in several of the books.

… on gaining weight.
It is sort of a long story but I did a film before that called Syriana that has yet to come out where I put on about thirty-five pounds and was injured. For me, a fairly severe injury. I have had a lot of back surgery and spinal fluid leaks and things so I wasn’t really able to shake all the weight by the time we started the movie which was okay because Fred (Friendly) was a rather big sort of guy anyway so I thought it worked fine for the part.

…on working with Grant Heslov
(He) has such big shoulders for me to lean on. We have been very close friends for about 25 years. He loaned me $100 in 1982 to get heads shots for "Joanie Loves Chachi" that he got and I didn’t. (And I am still paying him back for that. I’m still using those heads shots by the way.) But, it was a difficult time physically for me to do this film and this group (of) Patty and David, you know actors that you can stick a camera on and not move the camera for five minutes and just stay on their faces, you’ve got really good actors. And Grant single-handedly as a producer would literally pick me up off of a board and go: “Let’s go and get this shot.” He was the guy whose shoulders I most relied on and he really made the difference in this film. It was great to have one of my oldest and dearest friends be a part of helping us get through this. I didn’t really mean it. (Pause). I just had to say it because his Mom is here.

… on why the film wasn’t more vigorous in it’s support of the idea that one could be a Communist during those years in comparison to its condemnation of the smear campaign.
Because Murrow (was)n’t in his attacks. The reason it worked and the reason it is timeless is because it is constitutional. He never once got into it. And the beauty of it is that he never once defended any one for being or not being a Communist. It was important. Because if you read Ann Coulter’s book, for instance, and she talks about how Annie Moss actually is a Communist and Murrow got it wrong and Murrow was a traitor. Murrow …says: “You will note that neither the Senator nor this reporter knows. We simply demand that she has the right to face her accuser.” I was a young man in 1982 when Fred Friendly—and those of you who know Fred and some of you have worked with him before—gave me a tiny version of the constitution. If you stick to constitutional issues, you are not going to lose. It is timeless. Those speeches hold water today for any issues. You could change the word “Communism” to anything, to “Muslim”. You could change it to almost anything and say you cannot do that. “Terrorist”, whatever. The foundation and the structure of it was constitutional.

… on perspective in television journalism
I think that we get overwhelmed at times by things on television seeming like that is the end all and be all and it represents so much more than it does. My father as an anchorman always tried to show perspective. There would be skinheads protesting on Fountain Square, (but) there were (just) six kids. And they were yelling everything bad that they could yell. And you have got to go public because it is news in Cincinnati, Ohio and there is five thousand people out there yelling at them. And he says the important thing was he took the camera back about a quarter of a mile and he turned around and he shot it from there. And he said” “Now this is how six people look in this perspective.” And this is the real perspective here. This is what matters. We are going to cover it because they are yelling: “Doodie!” But we are going to show perspective. And I think that is something that lacks at time in reporting, sometimes in television; it’s not good guys or bad guys. It is just mistakes that get made. So I am not necessarily sure that is always required to have the majority to have the leadership along they way. And I think that anybody who has the opportunity to speak on what it is they believe in has the right to speak. That is why we left King George. So…

… on integrating Diana Reeves’ songs
We brought in Allen Sviridoff who was my Aunt Rosemary’s manager and a lot of the band guys on a bunch of her albums. And started pulling out songs that we thought would fit. And then we recorded everything live. There is no lip synching to it. So all the music you see is done livemndash;even those long shots from the elevator, all the way into the room, it’s all done live. There is an energy to it. Even if it messes up, it feels right. It reminds me of live television when I was growing up. We also liked the idea that she was sort of a touchstone that you could come back to and sort of like Joel Grey was in “Cabaret” in a way. A place to land it. Also, having grown up in a newsroom where they would push the newsroom aside and bring in the three thirty Money Movie backdrop and then they would pull that up and lift up the floor and there was a bowling alley underneath it for ‘Bowling for Dollars”. And then they would put it back down for the eleven o’clock news. I like the idea of watching “The Shower of Stars”, which was a real show, sort of pushing off the “See It Now” set and then pushing it back in because that to us always felt very familiar with the constant battles of entertainment pushing news off the air. So we thought that it was an interesting way of landing it. I don’t know whether it landed like that but it was something that we considered when we were doing it.

… on filming in black-and-white
There were a lot of camera tests first. Gavin and I went through a whole series: we started with (Jean Luc-)Godard films and we thought we were going to start with Super Sixteen. We even tried to get a hold of those lenses where they sort of leak the light. And then we began to realize that the words were so important that we were going to focus more on Penebaker documentaries and crisis and documentaries. The first film I directed I made the character in the film, purposefully made it. And this one was one were the camera actually needed not to be involved. It really needed to happen to catch people at the right time and I thought importantly (to) catch them at the wrong time: to stay on too long, to be on the wrong person, a lot of that stuff. But for us Robert Elswit was just a beautiful cimematographer and after we came to terms with not trying to match film stock with kinescopes which was inmpossible. Then all of us had a responsibility to find the simplest, a simplicity. Because that is the secret to it. It is why silences are sort of interesting in this film. Silences you don’t see any more. I think there are the most tense things. It is the same thing here. Walls don’t have anything on them, not pictures to fill up the frame. But we stuck mostly to the format of trying to use it as if it were a Penebaker documentary in a way. But that was also Robert who is such a beautiful shooter.

…on chain smoking throughout the film.
We all did a lot of smoking. (David Strathairn) doesn’t smoke—which was the amazing thing to me. He doesn’t smoke and he was smoking four packs a day. It was insane.

…on being Batman
I was in Batman and Robin so bring on the shit. I can take it. I had nipples on a bat suit! I was standing up for bats everywhere.