George Clooney interview with Empire magazine - Nov 2020 issue

Why George Clooney Went to Space

The actor and filmmaker on how the cosmos reflects our own apocalyptic reality in The Midnight Sky.

The last time George Clooney went to space, it didn't go so well for him. In Aflonso Cuaron's Gravity, he ended up floating into an endless void; earlier in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris, he found himself in a metaphysical one but somehow, despite all that he's been tempted back.

For his seventh film behind the Camera, Clooney adapts the acclaimed 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton, which imagines a mysterious mass-extinction event in the near-future, told from two perspectives: those of Augustine (played in the film by Clooney), a grizzled astronomer stranded at an Arctic observatory, and Sully (played by Felicity Jones), an astronaut whose ship is stranded in space when Mission Control stop responding.

Speaking from his home in Los Angeles, while putting finishing ouches to the film, Clooney explained why such an apocalyptic story felt so urgent - only increased by its accidental timeliness.

Q: This is your first sci-fi film as director. How did it compare to your earlier films?
"It's funny. I didn't ever really think if it much as science-fiction. Unfortunately, the idea that man could destroy man is not so fictional anymore. the thing I loved about it it, and the thing that I responded to, was the relationships between these characters. to me, that was the reason to do it. The genre was less my focus than the interaction between the characters. I thought that my character's relationship with the girl was something that you don't see all that often. It was really beautifully written, and a really unusual way to tie these two worlds together. I also thought that it was a part of me that I hadn't done before [erm, Tomorrowland, cough, cough - Katie]

Q: It's a film about people in self-isolation, while a deadly plague sweeps the globe. did you expect it to be so timely?
"You know, when I got the script there was already this felling of climate change, of anger and hatred, the kind of undercurrents that destroy society. So it didn't feel to far from home that if you play that out, in 20 years, this could be the outcome, that it's all man-made. It's the Cassius line: "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.

"And we can fix them. After finishing shooting and starting to edit, the world blew up with this virus, of course. quite honestly, in some ways, it's still man-made even though the virus isn't. The reaction to it has been less than stellar and made it worse - at least here in the United States."

Q: You're no stranger to space, of course. Did you experiences on films such as Gravity and Solaris give you a head for this sort of material?
"Yeah! We used a lot of the guys that I'd worked with before. Its funny: when we were doing Gravity, Alfonso was doing stuff that the technology was yet to catch up with. we actually had to slow down and wait for it. All that technology now is at a push of a button, basically. So that gave us a real advantage.

"Also, there was one other thing that separated Gravity from the other space films that I'd seen. In general, space films will always kind of play on the same plane - up is up, down is down, left and right are all the space [as on earth]. And in space, none of that really exists. On Gravity, Aflonso was constantly moving the camera, rotating the camera so that up was down. You can't do it all the time, because it'll just make everybody sick to their stomach [laughs]. But there are places specifically that make sense once you get out in to space - there's no ceiling. Afonso did pretty much everything perfectly in Gravity. We wanted to use all the lessons that he taught us"

Q: How did you get on with the CGI? The design of the spaceship is really striking - what informed that design?
"That was working with Jim Bissel, the production designer, who I've worked with on almost ever film I've ever done. He's been around a while. I mean, he did ET! We wanted the spaceship to be a little more unique. We worked with a guy from NASA to make sure that we were using some of their technology. For instance, the idea that the ship itself has an almost Kevlar exoskeleton on the outside - those are things that they're actually working on and building now. Living, breathing ships. We thought that was a pretty interesting way to work. It was just a matter of some imagination and work with the real technicians, to try and build something that was feasible. the rotating centrifuge is to create false gravity - it is somewhat tru that that's the only way you could get any gravity. It's not quite as powerful as [that]. But it is the one way you're able to show it, in cinema."

Q: How was the shoot? Did you hit an roadblocks, shooting in Arctic conditions?
"Oh yeah. We had a lot of roadblocks. It was pretty fascinating, the way it all worked. We started in Iceland to give us the Arctic look. It need a lot of snow, so we went way out and found it. It was just a splinter crew. There were 60- 70-mile-an-hour winds and it was 40 degrees below zero. You could get lost within 15 feet away from the crew. We had to tie strings to ourselves and the camera so that you couldn't actually get lost.

"It was a hard shoot. I lost a lot of weight to play the part, which eats up your energy, but you're also directing, which you need all the energy for. That part made it tricky.

"Also, about three of four weeks into shooting, I got a call, from Felicity [Jones]. We started shooting the Iceland parts in October of last year, and we were going to shoot the space parts in January. She calls me and goes, "Uhhh, I'm pregnant." I was like, "Oh shit! You're kidding!"

"The first thing we tried to do was shoot her and just do head replacement. Meaning we shoot each scene with her three times once with her, once with a body double, and once with nothing in it. But we started looking at it and thought, "She's not comfortable in this sort of thing." And there's already enough space stuff on wires and things. Noe of us felt comfortable putting her in any kind of position of stress. So then it was really simply sitting down and going, "Ok, so you know, people have sex! They're going to be in space for a long time and she's pregnant." I think it ends up adding to the story in a way. It makes it kind of beautiful by the end. "

Q: What about your character? You've played a lot of charismatic guys over the years - but Augustine feels different. At the start of the film, he's basically a misanthrope.
"The point of the movie to me was that this was a film about regret, and redemption. Without giving anything away, there's a proper twist at the end of this movie, and there's a need for redemption. In order to get redemption, you have to have been fairly distraught and lost along the way. That drove what the character was for me. He's dying, without completing any of his journeys. His only journey, then, is to try to save mankind. I just thought he was a really interesting character to play and something completely different. He's not the O Brother, Where Art Thou? character!"

Interview: John Nugent.