CONFESSIONS OF A
DANGEROUS MIND
Q&A with George Clooney and Sam Rockwell		 Search all of phase9.tv






Movie Review by S Felce

George Clooney talks about his directorial debut with CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND and according to him, this was the 'hottest script in town', but it risked never being made. So Clooney decided to use his own company, Section 8, which he runs with Steven Soderbergh, to get the film made, and moreover, he decided to direct it. In fact, as the son of a TV producer, who grew up on TV games' sets, he felt he knew how to tell the story. He decided to work for scale and he asked some of his famous friends such as Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore to do the same. But his smartest move was to get Sam Rockwell for the role of Chuck Barris.

Rockwell is here with Clooney at Claridge's Hotel in London and the two of them take us through the process of making CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, the real Chuck Barris, the problems associated with fame, the state of TV and, thanks to Clooney’s humour, much more!

Here’s the whole story:


(To Sam Rockwell) You were very lucky to meet with the real Chuck Barris before the movie started. Could you tell us what it was like to get close to him and what did you come away with to prepare you for the movie?

SAM: It was great! Chuck is a really warm guy and a very funny guy to hang out with. I spent two and a half months with him, he taped my lines on a tape recorder and we hang out together. He was really generous and very sweet about hanging out. And he trusted George and he trusted me as well.

(To Sam) What did you come away with?

SAM: Well, we didn’t want to know too much about the CIA stuff, because we only wanted to tell the story. Also, we wanted to tell Charlie Kaufman’s version of his story, which takes a little bit of poetic licence

GEORGE: It takes about as much poetic licence as Chuck took with his own life!

(To George Clooney): This movie can be seen as the hottest script in Hollywood that was almost never made. What were the problems to bring it to the screen?

GEORGE: The problem was that, even if it was a great screenplay, it was not cheap enough for an independent studio to make it and it was not quite expensive [enough] for a studio like Warner Brothers to make. The script was around for about five years. A few directors were interested, but they all went to do other projects instead. It ended up getting about 5 million dollars in pre-production costs. We started off once with Curtis Hanson and then we had P J Hogan. There were a bunch of directors attached to the project. I was attached only as an actor in the role I play. Because of that so much was against it that it was never going to be made. So I thought, “If I grab it and do it for scale and I get everybody else to do it for scale, some actually pay us, we can make the film for under the budget it was budgeted for.” So I told the studio how I wanted to make the film, how I thought the aesthetic was and that I could make it 10 million cheaper than anybody else. This was important, because the film wasn’t designed to make a huge amount of money.

Continued on page 2


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