Clooney Talks 'Fox,' 'Goats,' and 'Up in the Air'

There's a massive interview with George Clooney in The Telegraph, which stems from the actor-writer-director-producer having three films in the hopper for this fall. He was doing press for all three - Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and Up in the Air - while he was in England, and discusses Goats and Up in the Air at considerable length. He also reveals another one of his great practical jokes, this one a payback prank against Matt Damon. But the most interesting part of the whole piece is Clooney's attitude toward the type of films he makes these days. Because he got famous fairly late - he was already in his 30s when E.R. debuted - Clooney gained a lot of perspective from his failures, particularly when he found film success.

“I’ve been lucky enough to do a few films that will last longer than an opening weekend and those films are the ones I’m proud of,” he said. “The first of those was Out Of Sight and then I figured out that a screenplay was important and I had a good run with O Brother, Where Art Thou? And Three Kings, and certainly Good Night, and Good Luck was a high point for me career wise...just something I was proud to work on. And obviously Michael Clayton."

Clooney talks about how he chooses to make lower budget films - "in the low 20s or high 19 millions", he says - because they don't cause a big tidal wave for financiers or studios, and they're easier to make profitable. It's really a better system than the Transformers model in a lot of ways, though it's still a little surprising that a guy like Clooney, who could make $100 million action movies if he really wanted to, is one of the leading forces in smaller, respectable studio dramas. Good Night, and Good Luck cost $7 million, Michael Clayton was around $25 million or so, and Up in the Air is a reported $30 million. And the odds are, that film and Goats will have healthy returns based on their budgets, which as Clooney points out, "my livelihood is going to depend on films like Up In The Air and Goats being successful, because if they are, we get to make more of them."