He’s on top of Hollywood, but Clooney still wants new challenges. Cue The Good German

NEW YORK—Imagine for a minute that you are George Clooney. Life is good. You and your pal Brad Pitt are considered by some people to be the last of the movie stars. Better yet, you have moved on to writing and directing independent films and you have an Oscar for your performance in Syriana sitting on your mantle. You have spent a year dividing your time between making your next hit film, Ocean’s Thirteen, and attending award shows.

The only problem you have is that most critics insist that there is no George Clooney. Instead, you are always being compared to other movie stars, most of whom are long dead. You have always been the “new Cary Grant”, “the next William Holden”, or “the reincarnation of Jimmy Stewart”. You have tried everything in your power to move away from such comparisons, but it’s futile. So you go the other way. You phone up your business partner, Steven Soderbergh, and tell him to put everything on hold because you need to make a movie that is not just a throwback to black-and-white movies but is a black-and-white movie that is shot to look exactly like the movies of the 1940s. The only problem is that it has a story that sounds so familiar you know every critic is going to say “He’s the new Humphrey Bogart!”

In The Good German, which opens next Friday (December 22) in Vancouver, Clooney plays Jake Geismer, an American journalist who returns to his prewar hometown of Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference of 1945. At the conference, the war’s winners are set to formally divide the spoils. Although there is criticism that the Americans and British may have given up too much land to the Russians, Geismer is hearing a different story about their activities. His former girlfriend (Cate Blanchett) is being followed by both Russian and American agents, with both countries looking for her husband, a mathematician who was allegedly involved in making bombs. Geismer wants her to leave the country with him but has come to realize the Americans are collecting bomb makers and will give the husband passage to the U.S. if he wants it. Meanwhile, she is telling everyone that he is long dead and that she should be left alone.

In a New York hotel, Clooney says that he prefers the films of other eras. “My favourite time in American cinema is the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. You look at the films generated during that period of time and it’s pretty impressive. But the ’30s and ’40s were a pretty good time for movies as well. When I was thinking about films and actors that might be interesting to look at for this film, I thought of Mildred Pierce, which I had seen before. I also liked John Garfield, and there was a [Robert] Mitchum film called Out of the Past that I had never seen before that is phenomenal. I am also a big fan of the [Michael] Curtiz films [which include Casablanca].”

Clooney and Soderbergh founded a company called Section Eight after working together on 1998’s Out of Sight. They disbanded it this past summer, although its production schedule will continue until 2008. Clooney says that he knew that if he was going to get The Good German made, he would need to keep the movie under the Section Eight banner and have Soderbergh direct and coproduce with him. He says that he learned with Good Night, and Good Luck., for which he earned Oscar nominations for producing and directing, that the company could get away with things that they might not be able to do as individuals. Eventually, both men felt that they had taken the company as far as it could go.

“We love working together,” he says. “For this one [The Good German], we optioned the book through the company and developed the script together. The good news for me is that over the course of the last few years we have been able to do what we wanted to do, and we all know that that doesn’t last for a long period of time. And we had seen all these other companies where the principals stopped being filmmakers and started being administrators about five years in. We didn’t want to do that, and exactly what we thought would happen happened. We started spending more time in meetings about the ad campaigns and posters and trailers than we did making movies. So the best thing you can do is do things that no one is encouraging you to do. For instance, there was no one at the studios saying, ‘Please make a movie about the Potsdam Conference’ or ‘Give us a black-and-white film about Ed Murrow [Good Night, and Good Luck.]’ or ‘Let’s make Syriana.’ You try to push your luck for a while. We knew that we couldn’t get away with it much longer [as a company], but we will continue to work together.”

And Clooney will continue to look for projects that will allow him to wear several hats. “You want to keep pushing things and growing a bit,” he says. “I write, direct, and produce because I can look at things more objectively than I can as an actor. I can look at things that I would not cast myself in and go, ‘There are guys that could do that better than me.’ I think one of the secrets of being an actor is knowing your limitations and then pushing yourself to do things differently and trying to grow but not thinking you can do all of it. Clint [Eastwood] set the bar for actors who decide to get involved in other areas of the business. He just sort of understood how to do that. He created a pattern on how to do it, and I think it is a smart way. You make a movie that you hope can make money commercially and maybe that buys you two smaller ones along the way, and perhaps it [the system] will work out for you in the long run.”

Clooney’s moneymakers are, of course, the films in the Ocean’s Eleven franchise. He and Soderbergh have both said that the next movie, Ocean’s Thirteen, which will be released next June, will be the last in the series. Clooney admits that although you can never say never when it comes to successful film franchises, it isn’t easy to find scripts and ideas that will keep the series fresh.

“We decided to do it again because we thought we could do it better than Twelve. We didn’t want to go out getting socked on the chin with one, so we really were like, ‘We know how to do this,’ and we found a way of doing it, which was creating a story about revenge. That seemed like a better way of doing it than just having them [the thieves] make more money. It seemed like a good reason to come back. Who knows? Maybe 10 years from now if I need a job again I will make another one, but right now we don’t plan on it.”

He does plan on keeping his fans guessing. He says that after making two political films (Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck.) back to back, he is producing, writing, directing, and starring in a film about football in the 1920s. The movie, entitled Leatherheads, is scheduled to go before the cameras next spring and has a 2008 release date.

“It has taken me about 10 years to get it made,” he says. “I was offered about 30 political films, and I didn’t want to become ‘that guy’. I have another movie after that that will change things up again. I am always interested in changing points of view.”