| Satirical
Clooney and Cheadle chime in on character-driven caper
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It's 10 a.m. on a Wednesday
at Planet Hollywood San Francisco and already George
Clooney and Don Cheadle have had an wearing day.
Up at 5 and to Los Angeles
International Airport by 7 to catch their ride here,
they've already been conducting interviews for an hour
and they will spend the afternoon signing autographs
for a throng of fans forming a line outside the restaurant.
As they sit down to talk
about their new Elmore Leonard-adapted film "Out of
Sight," Clooney orders a big Coke and Cheadle slouches
in his chair, pulls his baseball cap over his eyes and
says, "Goodnight, everybody."
"What time did you guys
get up this morning?" I ask.
"5 o'clock," says Clooney.
"4:45," says Cheadle, sitting
back up. "Fresh as a daisy!"
"It's all the acid we took
on the plane," Clooney jokes, nudging Cheadle, who shoots
back, "I think it was the crank that really did it."
And they're off. This kind
of satirical by-play has apparently been going on since
the two actors became friends on the set of "Out of
Sight."
Cheadle, an up-and-coming
star best known for playing Mouse in "Devil in a Blue
Dress" and the cowboy porn star in "Boogie Nights,"
seems to be the straight man.
He takes hits from the
wise-cracking Clooney all morning and sits by drowsily
while Clooney takes the bulk of the question from interviewers.
Asked why they paired up to promote the film, Clooney
says it's part of his job as the star and Cheadle came
along because "we had pictures of him with a goat."
But the soon to be ex-"E.R."
star doesn't play everything for laughs. He's refreshingly
frank about his tenuous position as a box office draw,
acknowledging that most of the films he has carried
have "under-performed," and accepting partial culpability
for the meager success of the last "Batman" movie.
"I think we buried that
franchise," he says when asked about rumors of a "Batman
5." "I think Warner Bros. and I put that one to rest."
It was while working on
"Batman and Robin" that Clooney was offered the role
of Jack Foley in "Out of Sight," a notorious bank robber
on the lam who falls for a beautiful, brassy, young
Fed assigned to bring him in.
"I was just finishing the
shooting of 'Batman' and I kind of knew I had to find
a script that was a little more on the ball. I read
a bunch of scripts, I passed on a bunch, I didn't get
a few, and this was the one that...well, luckily I think
Travolta was busy," he grins.
Both actors call themselves
big fans of Elmore Leonard, the character-conscious
crime novelist who wrote "Out of Sight" and two dozen
other novels, including "Get Shorty," "Fifty-Two Pickup"
and "Rum Punch," which last year became Quentin Tarantino's
"Jackie Brown."
Clooney says he was instantly
attracted by the idea of working an a Elmore Leonard
picture -- especially one adapted by Scott Frank, who
also wrote the script for "Get Shorty" -- because Frank's
scripts put Leonard's characters ahead of everything
else.
"The first thing that got
me excited (about this movie) was Elmore Leonard, who
I thought wasn't well represented (in film) until 'Get
Shorty,'" Clooney says. "(In) the scripts from his books,
the story doesn't really matter. It never did. Oh, it's
a diamond heist! We've never seen that before. What's
important with Elmore Leonard is characters."
The character banter in
"Out of Sight" is pivotal. Jack Foley's attempts to
seduce his pursuer without getting caught is the crux
of the film, and his partnerships with fellow criminals
played by Cheadle and Ving Rhames keep the film clicking
when it's not focused on sexual tension, which is why,
according to Clooney, this film works.
Being such big fans, I
wanted to know if Leonard had visited the set while
they were filming.
"Call me 'Dutch,'" Clooney
says, imitating Leonard, then breaking into laughter
with Cheadle. "Yeah, Dutch was there. I really loved
him being around because I'm such a huge fan of the
guy."
"You gonna wear that?"
Cheadle pipes in, using Leonard's voice again and causing
the two stars to lean into each other and crack up again.
Obviously Leonard was a big presence on the set.
But Clooney insists what
really solidified the project for him was the signing
on of director Steven Soderbergh. Known for low-budget,
high-impact, character-driven fare like "sex, lies and
videotape," this is Soderbergh's first mainstream film,
and Clooney says his direction helped make this "the
classiest project I'd certainly ever been involved in."
He also had high praise
for co-stars Cheadle and Jennifer Lopez ("Selena," "Anaconda"),
who plays the U.S. Marshall that makes his heart go
pitter-pat.
Lopez, he says, had all
the qualities he and the producers were looking for
in a leading lady, not the least of which was "you have
to believe she could pick up a gun and shoot you, and
you still have to want to chase her around the couch."
Cheadle became attached
to the film during a table reading of the script at
the home of producer Danny DeVito.
"Don came in as a favor
and read his part, just read it," says Clooney, "and
all we did was watch Don..."
"I was wearing a dress,"
Cheadle chimes in.
"Exactly, and a blonde
wig." Clooney plays along before continuing more seriously,
"At the end, instead of all of us sitting around talking
about the script, we were all in a corner going, 'How
are we going to get Don Cheadle to do this movie?'"
After a pause, he adds,
with his trademark head down, eyes up Cheshire grin,
"So we got the pictures of him with the goat."
Clooney seems always ready
to joke, even about his highly-public battle against
the tabloid press. Even though he takes his privacy
seriously, he claims to have been misunderstood when
he spoke out against the paparazzi after Princess Diana's
death and says he would does not support proposed legislation
to reign in freelance photographers.
"I'm a public figure. If
I do something stupid and they get a picture of it,
I deserve it."
"But come with me through
an airport one day and watch what they do to the people
I'm with," he adds with all semblance of light-heartedness
temporarily absent. "When 17-year-old kids with video
cameras go 'Who's the fat chick?' and so you go 'F---
you,' and then they sell that -- that's creating news.
And that to me is the problem."
Clooney realizes that,
for the moment, this kind of thing is the price of fame,
and he says he knows fame and success are fleeting in
his line of business.
"It all depends on when
you get killed whether you end up being a success or
not," he says, noting that if he'd died during his early
career, he would have been best known for "Return of
the Killer Tomatoes."
"I only did movies, up
until very recently, that had the word "return" in the
title," he says with a laugh. Then he and Cheadle are
back in their verbal game of ping-pong.
Cheadle: "Out of Sight
Again!"
Clooney: "Really Out of
Sight!"
Cheadle: "Further Out of
Sight!"
Goodnight, everybody. |
