George Clooney leads team behind historic new prison movie

George Clooney and his business partner Grant Heslov have made history as the first producers to shoot a movie in a working maximum security prison – with inmates.
The filmmaking duo have wrapped filming on director Madeleine Sackler’s new movie O.G., which was shot at the Pendleton Correctional Facility in Indiana – the only prison that gangster John Dillinger didn’t escape from, according to Deadline.
Shooting took place around the 1,700 inmates.
Ambitious Sackler also filmed a documentary, It’s A Hard Truth, Ain’t It, at the prison.
“Madeleine has crafted a beautiful and thought-provoking film, providing a window into the world of incarceration and the effect it has on countless Americans and their families,” Heslov tells Deadline.
Jeffrey Wright stars in O.G. as a convict close to the end of his sentence, who must choose whether or not to put his freedom at risk to help a young inmate involved in gang activities.
Theothus Carter, who is serving a 65-year sentence at Pendleton, co-stars and more than 120 inmates were cast as background actors in the movie.
While researching the film, director Sackler led a moviemaking masterclass at the prison. She and the inmates she taught collaborated on It’s A Hard Truth, Ain’t It.
“It was a collaborative filmmaking dream… that enabled us to make two completely different films that share some of the real-world experiences of being in prison today with people living outside the prison’s walls,” she says.