"Good Night, and Good Luck" Interviews: George Clooney and David Strathairn

George Clooney stars in Good Night, And Good Luck

George Clooney knows his news. From growing up as the son of the respected broadcast journalist Nick Clooney to calling out the irresponsible actions of the paparazzi following the death of Britain's Princess Diana to locking horns with conservative commentators like Ann Coulter and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, Clooney has never shied away from exploring the issues surrounding the Fourth Estate.

In his second directorial effort Good Night, and Good Luck, he not only explores a watershed moment in the history of broadcast journalism, when pioneering newsman Edward R. Murrow took on the Anti-Communist witch-hunt tactics of the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy, the film also puts many current media ethics issues in sharp relief, in gloriously photographed black and white.

You won't find chatter about his Italian villa or his Ocean's Eleven buddies in Hollywood.com's no-nonsense interview with Clooney, but you will find plenty of food for thought.

What was it about Edward R. Murrow that fascinated you and made you want to make a movie about him?
Clooney: "He was a big part of my growing up. My father was an anchorman, doing news his whole life, and Murrow was always the high water mark for broadcast journalists. Growing up that's always what my father would refer to as sort of what the standard was set at that no one could ever reach again--[although Walter] Cronkite did pretty well. He did pretty well in Vietnam. So anyway, that was a big part of my growing up, first of all. Then I revisited some of those speeches that I was pretty familiar with. I knew the 'Box of lights and wires' speech really well. Most people who studied any journalism at all always heard thatI hadn't heard all of the television shows. I hadn't heard his rebuttals to McCarthy. But I started watching those speeches again, and I thought that they were incredibly inspiring. I miss that kind of clarity at times. It's sort of like when was the last time you were watching network television and you heard Paddy Chayefsky's words? And you go, 'Wow.' So they sort of represented us at our best, and I'm always the guy in the car going, 'You know what I should have said?' So I really enjoyed the idea of talking about Murrow again."

Did the recent attempted rehabilitation of McCarthy's reputation, particularly by Ann Coulter in her book Treason, play any part in your decision to work with this material?
Clooney: "Yeah. Did you read that book? It's interesting with her. The problem with her is that she's a bad journalist. She sort of has her own market and does her own thing, but you can't get the facts wrong, and the facts were wrong. She can say that Murrow got it wrong because there weren't three 'Annie Lee Mosses' in the phone book. [NOTE: Clooney is referring to the low-level Pentagon code clerk McCarthy subpoenaed and accused of being a dues-paying Communist, whom Murrow in part defended by pointing out that that there were multiple women with the same name in the Washington, D.C., phone book] 'So Murrow is wrong and she was a communist and we can prove it!' That's not the point, and if you watch the broadcast and if you watch what Murrow says in that specific broadcast, he says specifically, 'You will note that neither the prosecutor nor this reporter know or claim that she is or is not a communist. We simply demand that she have the right to face her accuser.' That was always the point. That was Murrow's point. It was never about defending communists. We can always argue about the fact whether that was something to talk about because it was certainly using fear to attack civil liberties, but the question was much more and always was with him constitutional and Fred Friendly too. When I was kid in school I was a big fan of Fred Friendly's. Some might remember the 'Ethics in America' that Fred Friendly did. So I read a lot stuff about Fred Friendly. He always carried a copy of the constitution, a little copy of the constitution in his bag. I have one here too and I always kind of keep it in my bag with me. It's kind of a great foundation to go back and look at. So it was always constitutional issues."
Are you prepared for the attacks that are sure to come from those on the other side of the issue?
Clooney: "Page Six ran a story a few months ago, ran a story that I'm going to do a big liberal piece about McCarthy, and attacking McCarthy when we know that McCarthy was right about some of the people that he named. Look, he may end up at the end of the day being right about two of the thousands that he named--that might end up happening. An infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters…He might end up getting a couple right, but that's not the point. The point was that he was wrong about the technique and that was a concern that I also saw happening in other issues. And for us, what the question was, and what [co-screenwriter] Grant [Heslov] I started talking about when we started doing it was is that it's not easy, democracy, and that it requires constant diligence. It also requires an understanding of the complexities. And the complexities are that it's not black and white, really. Murrow talks about protecting, the problems of protecting, the individual and the state at the same time, and they seem to all be present things to talk about again. To me it was an interesting to talk about again. I worry about polarizing issues. I mean, we all know what the world is like out there right now and we also know that there are a couple of ways to do this. I had to be very careful about how I campaigned for my father which I couldn't do because it was Hollywood versus the heartland. Somehow we sort of lose the moral argument lately. Fair enough. We'll take those hits. It's all cyclical, but I didn't want this to be a polarizing piece."

What were you going for, exactly, and how did you get there?
Clooney: "I wanted it to be a factual piece. I tried to treat this as my father did and he talked to me about it for a long time. We double sourced every scene in the movie. Every scene in the film is double sourced. It was infinite numbers of things. It might've been other documentaries that we used. Everything that we could to source each of the scenes and basically the content in each of the scenes because we wanted to be able to say, and that's why we used McCarthy playing himself, for the same reason - wanted to say, 'Look, you tell us what we did wrong.' I know that there are people out there who are going to try and marginalize it because all you have to do is find one thing wrong and go, 'Well, it's all horseshit. It's all crap.' So then I thought that I had to be very careful with the facts. That's important and so that was my job. So what I found to do was to go and look at all of the other arguments, the arguments against Murrow. We just felt that it was important to constantly balance all the other arguments and say, 'Fair enough. Lets have those discussions.' And not say that we're right or that we're wrong, but that we can have discussions."