George Clooney Q&A: ‘The Boys In The Boat’, Matthew Perry Memories, The $150M SAG-AFTRA Offer & ‘Wolfs’ Sequel With Brad Pitt & Jon Watts
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EXCLUSIVE: In a tense moment during the protracted SAG-AFTRA strike when guild negotiators weren’t talking to studios/streamers as film workers faced home foreclosures with no paychecks for six months and no end in sight, George Clooney led other top A-listers in offering to uncap dues and contribute $150 million over three years to guild coffers to help qualify more actors for health benefits and other things. While he has long enjoyed the spoils of an above the line life, Clooney has never forgotten the struggling showbiz underclass he was part of before ER changed his life.
Just in time for Christmas, Clooney taps squarely into those themes with his new film The Boys in the Boat. An adaptation of the Daniel James Brown bestseller, the film tells the underdog story of the 1936 University of Washington rowing team that came together under a stern coach who promised those who made the team food and an education at a time those opportunities were out of reach for most as America reeled from the Great Depression. The unheralded squad bested better-funded schools to win Olympic Gold at the Berlin Games in 1936. Is there still a place for a moving uncynical and inspiring sports story in the theatrical marketplace, and the Oscar race? Clooney sure hopes we have room in our hearts to make this a success.
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DEADLINE: The Boys in the Boat is at its heart an inspiring true sports story, but it has the tug of what’s great about America. Unless you are a recent immigrant, you might not understand what was facing youngsters who grew up in the Depression, no jobs and no prospects. Your movie shows that we can rise to the occasion when necessary. But it’s about a group of guys rowing a boat, which is not what we usually see on a movie screen.
CLOONEY: I tend to do things that I haven’t done before. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. But I enjoy the idea of, let’s do something really cynical, or let’s do something that’s really just pure emotion. This is a book Grant [Heslov] and I chased for years. We lost out to a bunch of people, and then we went over to MGM. They had this book, and a screenplay that we didn’t even read. We had this writer Mark L. Smith, who is terrific and we just love.
DEADLINE: He did The Revenant and then Midnight Sky for you.
CLOONEY: Great writer, and I just love the book. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, my father and mother are Depression-era kids. They talked about what it was like, three people sharing a bed and all that stuff. The idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a really nice idea, unless you don’t have bootstraps. That was how our kids in the Depression really had it.
I’ve always loved that period of time, and this idea that we had to do stuff together to succeed. I can be cynical at times, but I’m always pretty optimistic about who we are, even as a country, as humanity, even when we go through really terrible periods of time. The idea of this story is, we’re in this together and the only way this works is together. You can’t do it on your own. Even if you were the best athlete, you’re going to lose unless you were willing to be part of a system. That reminded me of so many other parts of American society. We do consider ourselves still an underdog nation, which is funny, because we’re a superpower. But we were not born to royalty, so there is always a room to advance, there’s always a chance. That wasn’t necessarily the case in 1936. I love Hoosiers, Rudy, going back to Pride of the Yankees and films like that. But there’s also, you ever watch those 30 for 30 films on ESPN?
DEADLINE: Seen ’em all.
CLOONEY: There’s one I’ve seen 40 times I bet you, called Survive and Advance. It’s Jimmy Valvano and NC State. It’s the one I use as an example for this movie. If you’ve done any research, you know the rowing team wins the Olympic Gold medal. So it’s the coming together, the journey that matters. You watch that Valvano thing, you’re crying and you’re laughing and you’re going, there’s not a star in the team, and they’re going to beat Clyde ‘The Glide’ Drexler, Hakeem Olajuwon, Ralph Sampson. The greatest era of college players, ever, and they beat all of them. Greatest underdog sports story ever. And that’s what this felt like to me. And we kept driving this home, which is, they’re going to beat these giants and they’re doing this to eat. They’re doing it to stay in school, to put a shelter over their heads.
DEADLINE: We’re in an age of spectacle. Is it just harder to get these kinds of films made now?
CLOONEY: I think it is. It’s not a big budget film. It was a pretty fascinating process. Some good came out of Amazon buying MGM that helped us. When we were doing it as straight up MGM, the budget offer was so low that they made me give my directing fee back, a week before we started shooting. They were like, the budget, you haven’t met the budget, so the only way you can do it is if you give your fee back, which I did.
We had to build these boats. We had to train these kids, and shooting on the water always slows things down. And this is not a Marvel film and there aren’t big stars in it. So the advantages of not having the expenses of big stars, they also guarantee that get you a budget. They were like, here’s what we’ll spend. And we were like, well, shit man, I don’t know if we can do it for that. Grant and I sat down with cinematographer and first AD Martin Ruhe, and planned out a very specific, very detailed shooting schedule. Rowing is hard. Teaching them to row is hard. Also, you can’t row ’em for very long because they’ll fall apart. And we needed to keep training them. They had to train for five months altogether to get to the place we needed them by the end. You’ve got short days in London in February. We had to be so specific because Grant and I were on the hook for the overages. If we came in massively over, if we came in over at all, we had to pay for it. We came in under budget and they gave us our money back eventually. But it was really tricky to get it done. And I suppose it was because the book is the star, Daniel James Brown is the star, and there’s a panic that happens when you don’t have other things. To me, it’s a great story, but studios, it’s hard to get these less grand films made.
DEADLINE: When was the last time you made such a personal gesture, being willing to give back your directing fee for a movie that you just had to do?
CLOONEY: Well, it’s a funny thing. It was kind of irritating, I will tell you, because we were screwed. We were cornered. We’d already trained everybody. We’d already hired everybody. And we were a week before we were about to shoot. So there was no way we weren’t going to shoot now. And I said, all right, well, okay, we’ll do that. But I don’t know, I’ve done this a bunch. I got paid minimums for everything on a lot of things I did, starting with Good Night, And Good Luck. I just wanted to do the projects, and I have a day job where I can get paid pretty well if I need to get paid. So I don’t mind doing that. It is not about the money at that point. I’m lucky enough to have sold a tequila company, so I’m able to afford it. It can be a little obnoxious at some point where you go, all right, I’ll give you the money back, put myself at risk. Then, the first week we started shooting, the whole cast and I got Covid.
DEADLINE: The Covid Boys in the Boat? No way.
CLOONEY: Yeah. So I’m shooting, I’m directing from an iPad in my bedroom. The only one who didn’t get it was the lead, Callum. We just shot a bunch of stuff with him, only his side of everything, just to stay on schedule. And I would direct him, on an iPad.
DEADLINE: Everybody else in that boat was convalescing?
CLOONEY: We didn’t shoot the boat stuff right away, because we needed them to get them better at rowing. None of those guys rowed. What’s so fascinating about this is, we felt like our biggest challenge was to make sure that we treated rowing really well. You haven’t seen much rowing in films; technology has helped in a way that we’re able to shoot it in a more fascinating, more compelling way. Fincher did about a minute of that, with the rowing in The Social Network. That’s just one of the most spectacular montages I’ve ever seen in my life. But the rowing itself, the actual rowing, is not as elegant as you’d want the rowing to be. We were told by all the rowers, too. We had to get that right. We worked our way to that moment where the guys could really row. So we shot all the other stuff, but if Callum and one of the other actors was still sick, we’d shoot with whoever was available on their side. Two months later we’d come back and shoot the other side. It was a real scheduling nightmare.
DEADLINE: Are you up the creek without a paddle with a tight budget, when everyone in the boat gets Covid?
CLOONEY: You got those old fashioned storyboards, you pull them down and say, owe that shot and have to come back and get it. I was talking with Callum last night about how he wasn’t even there for the other side of the scene he was in, in five or six scenes. When Joel Edgerton says, we’re going to take the junior boat instead of the senior boat, that big scene with those people, that was shot two different ways, two very long months apart with the boys all there when they got better. We were all inoculated, it was just bad luck. It was the Delta one that came in the second round and nailed everybody. Thank God we were inoculated. I have asthma and I would’ve been properly in trouble; I was pretty sick just with it. My son and I, we have the Irish lungs, an Irish liver, so I can drink all I want. You got to pick your vices. So yeah, listen, every movie has a complication. For us, it was water for the most part. As you know, water’s a big deterrent for doing films. I did Perfect Storm 20 years ago.
DEADLINE: I remember how hard you said that was. What was the challenge here?
CLOONEY: Go out, jump in your pool and just try to run. Everything just slows down. It’s molasses. That last race, there’s eight boats lined up, and these boats are huge, 60 feet long, and the oars stick way the hell out on either side. You can’t get close to the boats you’re in. We’ve got eight or nine motorboats around. We have to stay behind them because if we get in front of them, we capsize their boats. I can’t get close to ’em because the oars are there and because the boats are so long. So we’re on an 80 foot arm on our boats on a two or 300 millimeter lens down low, trying to make these shots look dynamic. And it was, thank God that we had the technology now to be able to shoot that because that’s not the easiest thing in the world to shoot.
And then we had to try to keep up with them because once they get going, they get moving pretty fast and you’ve got to get all these eight boats lined up and the wind is blowing and they’re not anchored, and they’re all flopping around in different directions. And there’s historical accuracy every time you hear ’em go, well, they’re coming up on Hungary. We have to make sure that we’re behind the Hungarian boat as we come up. So there’s an advantage when it’s factual. You know exactly what you have to do, but the disadvantage is you can’t cheat it. For me, this was the most paint by numbers technical film, not the emotion, but just getting in there and going, I need 11 shots of this to make this piece work. The rowing sequences, it’s 600 cuts. I mean, the whole film Gravity I think was 450 cuts.
DEADLINE: The trick is convincing jaded audiences to come out to the theater and be moved by this story…
CLOONEY: You liked the movie. I’m a sports film dude too. And this is a film that we really want people to check out. We just had a packed house for an Academy screening, and the whole audience was just…rowing. They’re rocking back and forth, rowing, and they stand up and cheer at the end and it just makes you feel good. And that’s what we wanted.
DEADLINE: The film on Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin played up Hitler and his Nazi thug squads being incensed when Owens ran the German sprinters off the track. The specter of WWII hung heavy in the air. You didn’t go there so much; your film is more a wholly American underdog story. Why that choice?
CLOONEY: It’s a tricky thing, how we tell stories. We have to look at what was known and when they knew it. We suspected Hitler was a pretty shitty autocrat, and some people had better knowledge. Some had read Mein Kampf. But we couldn’t be as smart as we were by 1942 or 43 or 44. There were great things. The Americans didn’t salute Hitler, they didn’t do the Nazi salute when everybody else did. It was clear they were obnoxious and the Americans were not friendly with them, but it had to not make it that they understood how bad this was going to get; it would be historically inaccurate by such a long stretch. Those are tempting things; when you need bad guys in storytelling, you got the rich kids, and you got Hitler. What more do you need?
DEADLINE: Callum Turner we saw as a kid in the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and next in Masters of the Air. Why was he the right choice for the lead?
CLOONEY: It’s funny, I only met him doing an American accent, and only the last week have I heard him be a Brit. And it really messes me up because now I feel like I don’t even know him. He did the American accent on the set. There’s a bunch of qualities that made him the right guy. Let’s forget the athleticism, which he has. And he’s a big kid, 6’ 2.” He’s got a Gary Cooper quality about him. He needs to be a guy who didn’t talk about their feelings. That’s why we like old war films. They don’t sit around and go, man, I love you, man. There’s stoicism to these guys. When we did Good Night, And Good Luck, we had that thing where you can’t hug each other, you can shake each other’s hand. It was just a different level of what we were willing to show as particularly as men at that moment. You need a guy that you can cut to and that without saying anything, you feel the urgency, you feel the anger, a lot of burning anger. That’s Gary Cooper. We had the same thing with Joel Edgerton, who plays the coach. We don’t have the big rousing speech at the end. He just says, ‘I’m proud of you.’ Anybody who’s ever played sports and has a coach as sort of a father figure, that moment when he punches you in the shoulder and says, I’m proud of you, is the most beautiful moment you’ve ever had in your life. These great things you never forget.
DEADLINE: You took a punch or two from a coach?
CLOONEY: Yeah. Big athlete. I played basketball, baseball in school and had two tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds.
DEADLINE: Did you tear something?
CLOONEY: No, I just lacked skill. I had everything else. I had a good hat, I had a good uniform. I just lacked the ability to play the game.
DEADLINE: Vexed by the curveball?
CLOONEY: Curveball got me. I remember I went out and basically they just care about speed and arm. They can teach you how to hit. So after the second year when I came back, I could throw pretty well and I was really fast and I got to finally make it the next round, which is to take batting practice. It’s a minor league pitcher, and he’s throwing me 82 mile an hour fastballs, down the middle. I’ve got a little 32-inch Louisville slugger. I was a leadoff hitter and I’m just poking those pitched all over the field. Just playing great. And I was like, I’m going to be playing with the Cincinnati Reds man. And this guy’s looking at me like I’m an idiot. And I’m thinking, this is it, man.
He throws an 82 mile an hour curveball, at my head. I literally fell backwards, and the ball ended up on the outside part of the plate, and everybody laughed. The sound it made and the movement on the ball, from a minor league pitcher… I was like, oh dude, I’m not going to be a professional baseball player. This is a different level. I didn’t understand that until right then. But sports are so important to me. I still play a lot of hoops, and I have such great affection for the people who do it at a level that is insurmountable to most of us.
DEADLINE: The movie comes out for Christmas, and it is like a throwback holiday film, a bowl of chicken soup about overcoming the Depression. This business has been through the ringer. What is your feeling about the strike and where it leaves the picture business?
CLOONEY: I don’t think anybody really knows. I’ll say there’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s not just the strike; we’ve all been at each other’s throats for quite some time now. I liked the movie for Christmas because it reminds us that we’re all kind of on the same side, and we all kind of root for one another for the most part. These [negative] things on the fringes that we see, they’re not the majority of us and they’re not the driving force of all of us. I like that idea for the film, and that’s why we really thought it was a Christmas film. I think this is a film that people will really actually enjoy, and sports are a pretty interesting unifier. Even when people don’t get along, there’s nothing better than when it’s the Olympics and we were rooting for the United States or whatever. So I think there’s that. Talking about the strike, it’s an interesting time.
When I looked at the strike, I thought about the great issues. One of ’em is obviously healthcare, which is a big part of it. It also felt like when you look at what happens with the streamers, and I think the streamers are a very important thing, there’s a lot of really interesting work gets done that wouldn’t be made in films anymore. But what was happening is if you did a series five years ago, six years ago, you get 22 episodes. Say you made 20 grand an episode, you did all right, now you do seven episodes, you’re taking the same amount of time. It still takes you nine months to do it. So you’re getting paid basically a third of what you used to get paid with no residuals on the backend. So it was getting to be, when you look at it, unfair. Particularly for people who were working kind of on the fringes, meaning they were working actors who were able to make their insurance, and all of that was being taken away.
It’s a pretty large number. Some might go ballistic about this, but I’m not as concerned as others about AI at this moment for a number of reasons. One of ’em is that when they’re talking about AI for replacing actors, the cost of having an AI actor is so much more expensive than having someone on a weekly or a daily rate that it’s prohibitive. If you’re talking about background actors, I mean Gone with the Wind used dummies. We’ve used these things called sprites, for years. We’ve all been supplementing that. You shoot plates and tile people in, that’s something we’ve done for a long period of time. There’s a few actors, I would put myself probably in that category that we worry about being put in a tampon commercial in 20 years or when I’m toast that I wouldn’t like, and I like to keep my eye on that.
I think where it’s really plays out is in voice actors. You can steal a lot. I have friends of mine who do Walla Walla work, all the filling in of background noises. It feels like it’s going to just get cataloged and used in any way they want. So there’s going to be a big hit to the industry, slowly. But I don’t think it is what the grand panic was. I think that that was just one of the talking points. I think the bigger panic was just that although there was more work, and there’s infinitely more work, you can’t deny that the ability to make a living while doing it has become trickier and trickier. I think that the big raise in pay scale, it’s a big deal that’s going to make a big difference.
I don’t know how the pool of money is going to work. I think that’s going to be a trickier thing. We had a couple of ideas as well of how to try to fill some of those buckets with money, but how do you dispense it? I think that’s going to be complicated, and I think that’s going to be hard for the union to figure that out. But I think they’re in very capable hands, Fran and all those guys, they know what they’re doing. And I feel like we’re in a fairly good place in terms of everybody’s back to work. We’re getting along. I worry about how many shows have been canceled and how few have been picked up. And I feel like that’s a sign of how much damage went through six months of people being unemployed.
And I think after every strike like this, it takes a year to get back on your feet. And that’s what it feels like to me. But I’m also pretty optimistic that people need content. Actors are really the ones that are going to bring that in and the writers are going to have to write the stories. I understand AI for writers is a very different thing. If you want to go to AI and say, okay, write me a concept of All in the Family, but in the style of Shakespeare, AI does it and then you bring in somebody else to fix it and make it work. But the created by credit suddenly goes away, which is how people make a good living. So I think AI for writers is a lot trickier, and that’s going to be infinitely more complicated as time goes on. Have you felt that at all in your business?
DEADLINE: Not so much, but it will take six minutes to have this interview transcribed through an AI program. I suppose it expedites things, but you need people in journalism. Hustle, character, skepticism, empathy, judgment, are all human traits.
CLOONEY: I look at technology. I am the son of a journalist. I worry about tons of things being too fast and not able to be checked, and things being able to be faked and that is terrifying. Having said all of that, I also have a great admiration and great fondness and great belief in the human spirit. And I think we will, as we’ve found ways to move forward, I think we’re going to continue to have to do that and find our way through this mess.
DEADLINE: You and a number of your a-list peers made what I thought was the most generous gesture, offering to uncap the dues you pay to SAG-AFTRA and have them use the money as a way to help more working actors qualify for benefits. Is that a standing offer? And why wasn’t it embraced immediately? It was $150 million over three years…
CLOONEY: Fran [Drescher][said that that was against the rules, and there’s some union rules against it. But you adjust things. That wasn’t the only thing. The other thing we talked about was a piece that Ben Affleck had worked on, because he started a company with this idea of paying all the actors back end, creating these sort of buckets of ways of getting to those residual payments that are not really residuals as much as a profit participation. We thought it was a pretty good plan, and would be very helpful.
Fran and the team had other ideas. That’s okay. I mean, we were just trying to help out. We didn’t want to be part of the people sitting on the sidelines. We all gave a million dollars to the SAG Foundation. We all wanted to help out, to make sure that we were part of the solution. And we have direct lines with some of these other people and we wanted to see if there was some shortcut because people get into these arguments, and they stop talking. And the one thing I don’t like is this negotiating tool of people not talking to one another, when there’s a hundred thousand other people who aren’t actors or studio heads, who are losing their homes. And so we just wanted to keep the urgency going. I have no doubt that all of those guys have the exact same feelings, the same sense of urgency. We just felt like if we could be part of the solution, we wanted to be part of the solution. We stood back and said, listen, if you don’t like it or don’t want to do it, fair enough. We are offering ideas. That’s all we could do. It is a union. We are still part of it. And we’ve all been broke unemployed actors for long periods of time in our careers, so we understand what it’s like to struggle. You don’t get to start the clock on us only when things worked out. I had no insurance for nine years, so I know what it’s like to struggle. And so we all wanted to be part of the participation.
DEADLINE: Matthew Perry’s death must have hit you hard. ER and Friends launched the same year. Both Warner Bros, NBC shows, on the same and Thursday night. Each a huge hit.
CLOONEY: We were side by side on the soundstage. We were the 10 o’clock show and we were doing 25% bigger numbers than they were the nine o’clock show. And for the 10 o’clock hour show to be doing those kinds of numbers that quickly? We had 40 million people watching us. It was a real, and hourlong shows tend to peak about year three. It starts to run out of storylines and then you start to repeat ’em a little bit. The show went on for 10 years and there was a lot of really wonderful quality, we were changing the way television was. And then the next show to come in to do that was The Sopranos. There was a big difference in the way we told stories at the speed we were telling it. And then Friends. There’s a thing about really good sitcoms, going back to Jack Benny. The really good sitcoms get better with age. Felix Unger walks into a filthy room and you just start laughing. Once we get to know the characters, it’s situational comedy, so you don’t have to do punchlines anymore. We know them. And all you knew about Jack Benny was that he was cheap and that he was always 39 years old and he was bad at the violin. And anything after that didn’t matter. You could watch it. So half hour shows can really develop into much better shows as they go that our shows have trouble doing for the most part. Shows like The Wire were interesting, they would shake it up, but most of the time, half hour shows are the shows. And Friends, man, that was a fun time to watch those guys. We were all really close. We were at the Upfronts in 1994 in New York.
DEADLINE: That must have been something. Hard to believe next year will be the 30th anniversary.
CLOONEY: They brought us up. They’d picked us up for Thursday night at 10 o’clock, and them up at Thursday night at nine o’clock. Those were the Cradle of Love time slots because Seinfeld was there and we knew it. We all knew it. We knew that that was the time slot that we knew we were going to have a year, anyway, if people liked to show. We were backstage and there were six of them and six of us.
For us, it was Noah Wyle and Tony Edwards and Eriq LaSalle and Sherry Stringfield, and Julianna Margulies, and myself. And for them it was their six and we were all sitting backstage and none of us were stars but Tony Edwards was the most famous person and Courteney Cox. They were the two people who everybody knew, and the rest of us were kind of unknowns. They showed a trailer for both shows. And then we came out on stage. And I remember at that moment thinking, this is a really special moment. It ended up being one of those crazy, I can’t explain it things. Two weeks after we debuted, we were on the cover of Newsweek. Everything changed for us after that.
DEADLINE: Sounds like a little fraternity there, and Matthew was first to die.
CLOONEY: I knew Matt when he was 16 years old. We used to play paddle tennis together. He’s about 10 years younger than me. And he was a great, funny, funny, funny kid. He was a kid and all he would say to us, I mean me, Richard Kind and Grant Heslov, was, I just want to get on a sitcom, man. I just want to get on a regular sitcom and I would be the happiest man on earth. And he got on probably one of the best ever. He wasn’t happy. It didn’t bring him joy or happiness or peace. And watching that go on on the lot — we were at Warner Brothers, we were there right next to each other — it was hard to watch because we didn’t know what was going through him. We just knew that he wasn’t happy and I had no idea he was doing what, 12 Vicodin a day and all the stuff he talked about, all that heartbreaking stuff. And it also just tells you that success and money and all those things, it doesn’t just automatically bring you happiness. You have to be happy with yourself and your life.
DEADLINE: You’d been on so many pilots and short lived shows. How much did that help when success did happen for you?
CLOONEY: Two things, Mike. First is that when the show hit, I’d already been on seven series, seven. I’d done 12 pilots. So I knew when we got Thursday night at 10 for ER…first we were getting Friday night at 10, which is a bad time slot. They gave that to Homicide and switched us at the last minute. They did a test screening. It’s funny because the guys always take credit now for it, but Don Ohlmeyer and Warren Littlefield could not stand the series when they saw it. That’s a true story. They were like, what did you do with our money, our two and a half million dollars? It’s too dark and it’s too fast and no one knows what these words are, and all this stuff. Then they tested it, and then they didn’t believe the testing. So they brought in a Jay Leno audience and tested it again and it tested off the charts.
And then they moved us from Friday to Thursday at 10, and it became what it was, which is we were head to head on Thursday night with CBS with Mandy Patinkin and Chicago Hope. Everybody picked Chicago Hope to just destroy us. They said that they would double us and instead we doubled them. That was one of those crazy flips that almost never happens because their show had Mandy and famous people and we had nobody that was famous. It was just one of those surprising things that doesn’t happen very often in your life. But when we look back at it, and particularly with the Friends cast who we have this great affinity for because we’re close to them still, is how incredibly lucky we all got.
I was lucky, I was lucky that I’d failed in all those other ones. I wouldn’t have gotten to ER if they were moderately successful, and ER changed my career. That’s not because of my brilliant acting. It is because I was part of something that is a little bit like Boys in the Boat. I was part of a really wonderful team of writers and directors and actors and crew doing something really unique and special. And I knew it immediately and was able to appreciate it. I remember Noah Wyle, we were doing 40 shares and Noah’s like, is that good? And I was like, yeah, that’s good. You can buy that car you want.
I also said, you’ll never have that again, which was true. I didn’t know that all the numbers would change so drastically. I also had another advantage. I had an aunt named Rosemary Clooney, who was a big star. I didn’t really know her very well. She lived in LA and I lived in Kentucky and I had a cousin, Miguel Ferrer, who I was enamored with, but I’d seen him five or six times in my life. He came to Kentucky to do a movie. When I moved to LA I stayed at her house for a period of time, and I really got a good lesson in how little success has to do with you. My aunt was the biggest singer in the business in 1950. And female singers, I think they made up about seven of the top 10 singers at the time.
And then rock and roll came in. She was on the road and she believed it when everybody told her how brilliant she was. And then when she came off the road and she was ready to record again and they’re like, where have you been? And she’s like, what are you talking about? I’ve been working the whole time. But now, rock and roll was a male dominated sport. And she was done. For 20 years she did a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking. She ruined her life for a period of time because she believed the first part where she thought she was brilliant when she was 19, then she had to believe the second part, which told you how she’d lost all her talent. Of course, she didn’t do any of those things. She ended up having an incredible career later as a wonderful jazz singer, but she had to come to terms with all that stuff.
And so I had a good example of what not to buy into. So I know what Matt Perry had, and maybe part of it is what he didn’t. I know his family was in the business, but maybe there wasn’t that thing that said, this is going to go in waves where our careers are concerned. The people who I loved and got to know, Paul Newman and Gregory Peck, they’d always talk about how your career is not constantly going up. There are down moments, and struggles. And then it comes back up and you got to ride it all out.
DEADLINE: From what I’ve read, he got hooked on several drugs including Vicodin and Oxycontin for an injury on a jet ski. From what we know now about the latter, once you fell into the grip of addiction with that drug, it was very hard to get free. And it was heavily marketed and dispensed so aggressively.
CLOONEY: The Sackler family, who’ve been working their way to get out of it forever, they should actually go straight to fucking jail for the things they did. They paid off everyone and they put people on their board who were at the FDA and they did everything you could do to be part of spreading one of the great killers in our history. We’ve had these horrible, addictive moments going back to morphine after the Civil War. And when a million guys came home with one leg and they were all addicted to morphine, this is that same idea, where they paid people to say it’s not addictive. Are you kidding me?
DEADLINE: A question about streaming series. You did all those series and kept afloat until you hit with ER. We read all these stories about seminal Netflix series like Orange is The New Black, and castmembers saying, oh yeah, I got a residual check and it was $27. Was it a better world for a young actor when you were hustling for the big break than now, where these streamers are vamping and cutting to curry favor with Wall Street and stock value? Back then if you were a hit and went five seasons, chances are you were set with syndication sales and residuals. Now, good shows get scrapped all the time. In this course correction moment, what ought to happen?
CLOONEY: I don’t know because I’m obviously not well enough versed on all of it now. But I remember there used to be a bar in the Valley called Residuals where you could go in and if you had a residuals check for under a dollar, they’d put it up on the wall and give you a free drink. You would always get some really shitty residual checks. I mean, that was part of it, but they were in cycles. When I was doing Facts of Life, let’s say 15 episodes in a year, all of a sudden in the mailbox I’d get 15 checks each for $1,200, which is spectacular. All stacked together. And then the next time you get a check, it’d be for $500, then the next time it’d be for $200, it would go down, but then it would cycle back.
That was a way you could make money to pay for insurance because insurance was a really big deal. That’s what it was for me. Now, I don’t know about how Orange Is The New Black worked. The argument is always that from the studio’s point of view, or from the streamer’s point of view, they’re paying more. They’re paying the residual in the front end as opposed to the backend. But I don’t think that that necessarily was fixing the problem. Because part of this is about, what you really need is for money to come through during the lean times. That’s how you can continue your insurance. Maybe it’s a little bit more money in the beginning, but that’ll solve the problem for that year. But then the next three years that you’re not working, you’re not able to help your way through getting insurance.
You have to make a certain amount of money to get the insurance and that price has gone up. It’s a tricky thing and I don’t know what the solutions are for it. Somehow, you’re going to have to figure out how to understand what people are watching, because people watch things for 30 seconds as opposed to watch it all the way through. I always thought that because we are taking so much longer to do an episode of television on those shows, that we should forego the idea of paying per episode on those shows and go back to weeklies, almost like a studio system in that sense. Because if you’re going to work for nine months on seven episodes of television, rather than getting paid seven checks for seven shows, you should be paid for nine months of work. Because when you’re doing 22 episodes for nine months of work, it’s a very different pay scale. It probably wouldn’t be a very popular thing. And I’m sure there’s a million reasons why that’s a bad idea. But I see people really getting messed with. My buddy Richard Kind does series work still, all the time. And he’s like, I’m doing these streaming series now and I am making a third of what I used to make. And it’s not because I’m being paid less, it’s because we’re doing less shows.
DEADLINE: You and Brad Pitt teamed with Spider-Man’s Jon Watts on Wolfs, with Apple paying a big premium for it. All the traditional distributors wanted it and Sony will give it a big theatrical. We seem to have realized that aside from money generated by a theater run for films like Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon, films with P&A spends become stamped as a tangible pop culture thing, which increases the wannasee from streaming customers. The ones that premiere directly on places like Netflix don’t create that kind of awareness. Is this the solution?
CLOONEY: I think that was the mistake that everyone was making. They were like, this is our direct to video thing. Grant and I have a deal over at Warner Brothers. We met with David Zaslav and he was like, look, I think every movie we do will go to streaming, but we want it released first because there’s an actual benefit in having your movie out, be successful, be promoted. And it actually changes how many people watch it in streaming.
Brad and I made the deal to do that movie where we gave money back to make sure that we had a theatrical release. At the time, that wasn’t as popular an opinion as it has become in the last year and a half now. I think Netflix is considering buying theaters even, I’m not sure. But you look at Oppenheimer and Barbie, and establishing them as massive box office hits makes them massive hits on streaming as well. We made The Boys in the Boat for MGM, but then MGM was bought by Amazon, which means they could have said, okay, well it’s just going on to streaming.
And we were like, don’t do that. We actually put it in the deal when they sold it to Amazon, said, yeah, we’re going to give you a theatrical release. Because first of all, this is a movie you want to see with other people. You don’t want to see it just at home. You can, it’s fine, but at least give it a chance with other people. You also want to see it on a big screen. You want to spend the holidays going out, doing something fun like that. And then after a couple of months, put it out on streaming. It works out fine for everybody.
DEADLINE: It seems the best future course for all these star packaged films that are being snapped up by streamers and studios…
CLOONEY: We’re already talking about a sequel for this film I did with Brad and Jon Watts. It was a great shoot and Jon is an extraordinarily talented guy who’s also really joyful. He loves what he does. We had a blast doing it and we’ve seen it. It’s an off the charts great film and it’s fun to work with Brad again. We had a really good time.
DEADLINE: Last question. You mentioned Richard Kind, and I can’t help but recall that prank you pulled on him when you lived together, he was giving his cat medicine and you took dumps in his cat box and he was sure his feline was dying. When you direct a movie like Boys In The Boat, is there room for a good prank on these young actors?
CLOONEY: Not really. I mean, you don’t have time anymore, you’re so busy on a film like this. Tight schedule and they were training all the time But I have two six year olds, and now I just teach them. I had them putting Nutella on their shoes and they come in to a crowded room and I ask if they’ve stepped in poo. They say, let me see and start eating it. That just brings the house down and they love getting a laugh. My evil thoughts are still alive, I’m just living them vicariously through my two children.
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