George Clooney mixed gravity and laughter as he landed at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday to receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the opening ceremony this evening.
The actor, director and producer was put through his paces at a press conference preceding the honor on a wide range of topics from U.S. politics to climate change, the role of the press, Mark Ruffalo, the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, studio shying away from festivals and whether he plans to return to the director’s chair.
On the latter, Clooney, who has nine feature and two TV series directorial credits to his name including Good Night, and Good Luck and most recently, The Boys in the Boat, revealed he had put directing aside for now in favor of acting because of fatherhood.
“The only reason I’m not directing, which I love doing, is because I have two nine-year-old kids, and in order for me to spend time with them, I can’t,” he said.
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“You know, if I act in a movie, it’s three months, and I can go and come and go and come back. When you direct a movie, it’s a year, wherever you are, and there’s no traveling back and forth, so I can’t do that anymore. The last thing I did was this play last year on Broadway, and that took away that took us all away for a period of time. And I can’t really pull the kids out of school anymore, so I’m really happy doing this. It’s fun to be an actor again. I’m enjoying it, actually.”
Unsurprisingly, Clooney also found himself being quizzed about U.S. politics and the direction of the country under President Donald Trump.
“I’m always very optimistic about things,” he said. “We’re at a moment in time that’s unfortunate… that’s an understatement. I do believe that we’re going to get through all of this. I’m old enough to have been through 1968 in the states when every city in the United States was set on fire, and we lost Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in the same year. There was tons of violence. The capital was surrounded with tanks. We’ve had some other difficult times, but this is one of them,” he said.
He suggested the midterm elections for the U.S. House of Representatives in November could set the tone for a change of political direction in the U.S..
“There’s a great word, kakistocracy, which is a country run by the least qualified people. I think maybe we have a kakistocracy right now, but we’ll get through it, and we will have an election in November that should be a check and balance, and then in 2028, with any luck, we’ll have some restoration into some normalcy.”
Clooney slammed what he called “the idea of cruelty” at the heart of the current administration, reserving special criticism for U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and his recent post deriding women and Canada’s cadet program.
“You see what the Secretary of Defense just tweeted out a picture about women in the military in Canada, and you’re going, ‘What’s wrong with you? Where’s the sense of decency in all of this?’ And I’m ashamed of all of that, but we will get through it, and we will we will come out better on the other side.”
More to follow…
