George Clooney's two new films tackle high-level corruption in the US government. He tells Emma Brockes how his father's legacy of protest drives him to this day
George Clooney's handshake belongs to what I believe is known as the Bill Clinton school; firm grip, level gaze and that "special" touch, a discreet squeeze under the elbow that implies, "If you think it's exciting meeting me, just imagine how exciting it is being me."
Actually, I imagine that a lot of the time it's kind of embarrassing being George Clooney. The path to his door is littered with the corpses of female journalists, who after spending half an hour in his company - smart, funny, so suave as to practically curve at the edges - simply expired on the way out and were left to petrify where they fell, on the green patterned carpet of the Dorchester Hotel.
Clooney remains unimpressed. It is part of his regular-guy charm that, at 44, he has lived for more years in obscurity than fame and regards the excesses of the entertainment world with a sort of good-humoured condescension. His image as a rebel has as much to do with his manner as his politics; when he attacks Bush it's with a heavy irony that takes into account the fact that people don't, generally, like being preached at by actors.
It is what separates him from other, politically outspoken celebrities whose laudable views are undermined somewhat by the exceptional self-regard that holding them seems to inspire.
Clooney is as vain and materialistic as the next guy in Hollywood - "F**k it, I love my house in Italy. It's big and audacious and ridiculous, and nicer than any human being has the right to have" - but he is also one of the few really grown-up movie stars. "I have Irish Catholic guilt," he says, smiling, "and want to make up for [ my successes]."
The way Clooney atones is by making, alongside the romantic comedies and heist numbers, a range of films that bring him a different kind of attention altogether. He has just made two in a row, Good Night, and Good Luck, which he co-wrote and directed, and Syriana, which he says makes Good Night look like "a Disney film".
They both tackle corruption in the US government; the first by telling the story of Edward R Murrow, the CBS journalist who took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; the second, more directly, with an adaptation of former CIA man Robert Baer's memoir, in which al-Qaeda-type terrorism is alleged to be partly the result of corrupt US policies in the Middle East.
The atonement has paid off in critical terms at least, as Clooney has received Oscar nominations for both films - in the category of Best Supporting Actor for Syriana, and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Good Night, and Good Luck, which also received a Best Picture nomination.
Clooney relishes the battle these politically charged movies will undoubtedly provoke. "I'm pretty good at the fight. Which is to say I've learned, over the years, how to fight these things . . . My father is a journalist who went directly at Jimmy Carter when the Opec nations raised the price of gas, directly at Gerald Ford when he pardoned Nixon . . ."
Clooney's father is a silent presence throughout Good Night, and Good Luck, which was inspired partly by the memories Clooney has of hanging around as a child at the TV studio where he worked in Kentucky. Clooney Snr believed, as Murrow did, that McCarthy's anti-communist hearings compromised basic civil liberties in the US, in a way that his son parallels with Bush's anti-terrorism laws. It is a very good film, shot in black and white and romantic about the golden age of TV, when everyone smoked and drank Scotch ("and died of emphysema" drawls Clooney) and a news show like Murrow's could collar a 40-million strong audience. The end of the film lifts the hairs on your neck, when Murrow addresses the annual TV industry gathering and makes what has become known as the "box and wires speech", in which he says that television has the power to enlighten but "it can do so only to the extent that humans are allowed to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box." Clooney recalls his father standing on a chair at home and reciting it.
He resisted the temptation to play Murrow himself. Instead he plays Murrow's producer, Fred Friendly, because, "the secret to Murrow is that there is a sadness to him. You always felt that he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and that's not something that you can act, it's something that you just sort of are. David Strathairn has it . . . that sense that everything he does he'll do for your benefit, but it hurts. No one thinks that way of me. Also David's face; there's this elegance to him that's not pretty at all, but it's stunning."
CLOONEY'S METHODS AS a director had an almost Mike Leigh-ish tinge to them. Each morning before shooting he would gather the actors, including Robert Downey Jr and Jeff Daniels, and give them copies of the newspapers of that day in 1953. They'd spend an hour and a half on old manual typewriters, copying stories from the paper. Then Clooney would hold an improvised "news conference", filmed by hidden cameras, in which the "journalists" would pitch stories in the traditional way. "I'd go, 'OK, what's your story? OK, that's not a story; what else?' "
He was extremely nervous showing it to his father for the first time. "I mean dad and I, neither of us are good at taking compliments. And [ after watching it] he got up and just patted me on the shoulder and said, 'You got it right.' "
Not everybody thought so. When Good Night, and Good Luck came out in the States, Clooney braced himself for the right-wing backlash.
He is fairly accustomed to it by now. His first high-profile departure from the official version of history was in the film Three Kings in 1999, in which he played a cynical (but ultimately good) renegade US soldier in the first Gulf war. But it was his visible attendance at early peace demonstrations against the current war in Iraq that really made him a target.
"Oh yeah," he says, "they put me on the cover of a magazine with a banner across my chest that said 'traitor'. And they organised a picket for the movie I was in. Sean Penn and Tim Robbins were on the list, the usual guys, and Woody Harrelson, who calls me up and goes, 'What do we do?' And Michael Moore's going, 'What you have to do is . . .' and I said, 'Let me handle this one.' Because some of them tend to be heavy-handed. And I find that humour is a much better way to do it."
Clooney is quite sniffy about Moore, whose modus operandi he finds obnoxious and counter-productive. He uses his name as a verb - "I don't Michael Moore this s**t," he says. "I don't come out and go, 'Look what these f**kers do.' " He thinks subtlety - class - gets better results.
He is no doubt right, but it seems a little unfair given that dissent is a lot more palatable when it comes in the shape of George Clooney. His response to the traitor incident was to put together a montage of prominent people on the anti-war side, including the pope, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Pat Buchanan (a hard-right commentator in the US) and drape the word "traitors" across them, too.
"I made 800 fliers anonymously and sent them to everyone in the media. And I waited. And Dan Rather [ CBS news anchor] called me and said, have you seen this flier that's going around? And I said, 'My quote would be, the Pope and I can take it, but don't pick on Pat Buchanan.' " He grins. "You know, the truth is . . . it is not merely your right but your duty to question your government. You can't demand freedom of speech and then say, 'But don't say bad things about me'. You gotta be a grown-up and take your hits."
Still, when the pro-war lobby fought back he was initially unnerved. "I remember when they were picketing the movie theatre for me and I called my dad and said, 'Er, so, am I in trouble?' I mean, you know. And he's like, 'Shut up. Muhammad Ali went to prisonfor protesting against Vietnam, and you're worried about making a little bit less money? Grow up. Be a man.' And he was right."
Inevitably, he says, his dad has become a little "more Catholic" as he's grown older and they fight now about different things. "Like gay marriage to him is not OK. We've had some knock-down drag-outs about those kind of things."
Clooney is sufficiently battle-hardened these days to shrug it off when people have a go at him. "I was at a party the other night and it was all these hard-core Republicans and these guys are like, 'Why do you hate your country?' I said, 'I love my country.' They said, 'Why, at a time of war, would you criticise it then?' And I said, 'My country, right or wrong, means women don't vote, black people sit in the back of buses and we're still in Vietnam. My country, right or wrong, means we don't have the New Deal.' I mean, what, are you crazy? My country, right or wrong? It's not your right, it's your duty. And then I said, 'Where was I wrong, schmuck?'
"In 2003 I was saying, where are the ties [ between Iraq] and al-Qaeda? Where are the ties to 9/11? I knew it; where the f**k were these Democrats who said, 'We were misled'? That's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: 'We were misled.' F**k you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."
IN HIS 20S and early 30s, Clooney just wanted to get on in his career. After moving from Kentucky to his aunt Rosemary's house (as in Rosemary Clooney, the singer) in LA, he got a few low-profile TV parts and for the next 10 years made a good living on the outer shores of fame. He seemed always to be on the brink of a breakthrough. When the big time finally arrived, with a part in ER that exposed him for five years to an audience the size of Ed Murrow's, he wasn't devoured by it. He was 33.
"I was very lucky to get well known much later in life," he says. "You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you."
Clooney handled working on ER cannily. By the time he left, in 1999, he was by choice the lowest-paid star on the show. "If I have a five-year contract and make $30,000 an episode, and I want to make half a million an episode, I have to give them two years more. Well, to me that doesn't make sense, because I'm getting offered much bigger deals than that in film."
On days off from the show, instead of relaxing, Clooney would line up more work. "I thought, this is my shot, this is it. So I wanted to honour my contract and then move on. Five years of doing the same thing, you run out of tricks." And so he became a big star. He dated beautiful women, with whom - is this unfair? - one assumes he probably didn't discuss the finer points of Iraq's nuclear threat and CIA involvement in the oil trade. And he hung out with other big stars.
One thing the non-famous don't realise about the famous, he says, is that they can themselves be star-struck. On the set of Ocean's Twelve he would sit around the table with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle, playing poker and thinking how cool his life was. Then his Catholic guilt kicked in and he made Syriana.
He hopes that both it and Good Night, and Good Luck will nudge him into the tradition of the great campaigning film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s - "Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Hal Ashby, Kubrick."
He is having the time of his life now; everything that came before was just prologue.
"I've taken on my dad's battles. I'm fighting the fights that he fought. Oh, it's trouble," he grins. "Trouble big-time."
Good Night, and Good Luck is on general release, and Syriana will open on Mar 3