Naturally, the Venice Film Festival was swiftly fawning over George Clooney on Wednesday, as the Oscar-winning star arrived (via boat, of course) to pick up his Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award.
Ahead of the glitzy, Jay Kelly-esque honorary ceremony, Clooney sat for a press conference with journalists on the Lido who immediately quizzed him on the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, the allegations of antisemitism faced by Hollywood peer Mark Ruffalo, and his love of Venice, having gotten married in the Italian city in 2014.
Clooney was also asked about the studio no-show at this year’s film festivals, as well as his directing aspirations.
The famed U.S. actor admitted that he hasn’t noticed the studio sit-out at Cannes, Berlin and Venice, which have concentrated their lineups on the best of international cinema. “In fairness, you could make the argument — and this has been going on for 25 or 30 years, this is some of the work that [Steven] Soderbergh and I were doing when we started doing [the 1998 film] Out of Sight and films like that — that studios are doing films that need a launchpad of a film festival less and less,” said Clooney, speaking amid an industry heavily reliant on IP, reboots and franchise projects.
“That’s just the nature of the beast,” he continued. “The films that studios are making are hugely expensive, so I think [this situation is] just the fallout from the films they are making, but that’s been going on, literally probably since Jaws, when everything changed… The studios used to make Bonnie and Clyde and All the President’s Men,” said Clooney. “They don’t really make many films like that [anymore], and so they don’t really need this launchpad as much. I think that would be my only answer to that. I didn’t know that they weren’t really sending that many films over.”
Clooney, famed for roles in Ocean’s Eleven, Gravity and Michael Clayton, is also a filmmaker, and even brought his 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck to the festival in 2005. “I’ve had great experiences,” replied the star when probed on whether he’ll be returning to the director’s chair any time soon. “I’ve been nominated for an Oscar, and I’ve also had really bad experiences, and that’s okay,” he laughed. “That’s part of telling stories. I’ve done films that people hated when they came out, and now they like them, and I’ve done films that people liked that [and] now they look at and they think don’t work anymore.”
The only reason he is not directing, “is because I have two nine-year-old kids,” said Clooney, who shares twins with Amal. “In order for me to spend time with them, I can’t [direct]. If I act in a movie, it’s three months, and I can go and come and go and come back. When [you] direct a movie, it’s a year, wherever you are, and there’s no traveling back and forth. So I can’t do that anymore. The last thing I did was this play last year on Broadway [the stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck] and that took us all away for a period of time. And I can’t really pull the kids out of school anymore.” It’s made him “enjoy” being an actor again. “I’m a character actor now.”
It was a wide-ranging presser — Clooney, a long-standing advocate for human rights, political activism and climate change awareness — managed to say a few words on how “most of the [world’s] powers that decided climate change is a hoax and science is not real.” He remains an optimist: “That won’t last forever,” though he lamented Europe’s summer battles with wildfires. “We were in Como this summer, and there were fires in Como. It’s been an extraordinarily dry and hot summer, and it’s dangerous.”
Clooney confessed that he laughs in response to those who argue climate change is a fad. “Let’s say that everybody who says climate change is bullshit is right,” he began. “The worst thing that could happen by cleaning up the environment is that you create millions more new green jobs, you make the air better to breathe. I mean, there’s no argument against it. That’s the stupidest part of all this. But you know, we’re going to be in it for a while, and then sooner or later we’ll get some governments in there that actually pay more attention to it.”
The Venice festival runs Sep. 2-12.
