VIEW FILM STILLS: Michael Clayton

READ MORE: Michael Clayon review

WATCH THE TRAILER

Director Tony Gilroy on the set of Michael Clayton. Myles Aronowitz/Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Veteran scriptwriter Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Ultimatum, The Devil's Advocate) makes his directorial debut with Michael Clayton, in which George Clooney plays an in-house "fixer" for a prestigious New York law firm, cleaning up the indiscretions of corporate clients by eliminating any possible public embarrassment, politically damaging scrutiny, or incriminating evidence. A former district attorney who hails from a working-class family of cops, Clayton sold out and opted for a fat monthly paycheck and corporate security. A decade later, he is burned out, dissatisfied with his lot, and slowly coming to the realization that he has sunk into the same murky morass from which he has spent years extracting others. When an agrochemical company called U/North is faced with an internal sabotage crisis, Clayton is called upon by his boss (Sydney Pollack) to "handle" Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the law firm's ace litigator who is threatening to expose the truth behind a $3 billion class-action suit being brought against U/North. Meanwhile Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the tightly wound in-house chief counsel for U/North, dispatches a pair of troubleshooters of her own to pacify the whistleblower.

In writing Michael Clayton, Gilroy became fascinated by the type of person who would put his personal life on the backburner in order to toil away at sanitizing a corporation's wrongdoings into the wee hours of the morning. The director discusses his determination to direct his own script after both Pollack and Clooney had expressed an interest in helming the film, the difficulties of infiltrating New York's legal corporate world, and seeing George Clooney in bed with Jon Stewart in the house in which he grew up.

Is it true that the genesis of Michael Clayton came when you were writing The Devil's Advocate? What is it about corporate offices and their setting that inspire you?
It's not that. It's that you're always looking for something that's fresh. You're always looking for some environment that people haven't [mined]: fresh ground, anything that's interesting that you haven't seen in a film before that might be dramatic. There's all this drama that is happening in these law firms. But no one ever goes into the document room. No one ever goes back with the word-processing people. I didn't end up doing that entirely, but this is really fertile territory for something else that's going on.

Did you speak to paralegals and advocates and legal office workers?
I did, yeah, a lot of people. I spent a lot of time. There was a long period of time where I was really enamored with the idea. There are a lot of writers and sculptors and actors that moonlight, and they keep these document centers going all night long. They type up all this stuff. There was a long time there where I'd played with a version of this that had a lot to do with that. Freshness, you're just looking for freshness.

Is there any part of the lead character that is vaguely autobiographical?
Sort of. It's not hard to find a personal metaphor there. It's not an analogous situation but I waited a long time to direct a film. I worked for a long time for other people and I spent a lot of time cleaning up scripts. There is a moment where you sort of wake up and you go: "Well, wait a minute — I wanted this to be something else." And that's the part of it that's the most personal, I guess: the waking up. Now this is a much, much, much more extreme case. The consequences are much more dire. But it's not hard for me to identify with that character.

You held on to this script for a long time because you specifically wanted to direct?
I did. I wrote it to direct it, yeah. So I set it up that way.