George Clooney is making it his mission to charm the entire Lido at this year’s Venice Film Festival and is, so far, succeeding.
It’s a task the actor-filmmaker has accomplished many a time before, including in 2005 with Good Night, and Good Luck, which premiered at the Italian festival to great acclaim and won Venice’s screenplay prize, solidifying Clooney’s reputation as a competent director.
The Hollywood icon, who picked up the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement Wednesday night and made a powerful speech as he collected the honor, covered a broad range of topics at a Venice masterclass on Thursday, chief among them politics, his career, his wife, Amal, and the death of the movie star.
Early on in the session, he spoke a little about his role — the smooth-talking escaped convict Ulysses Everett McGill — in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), a film that Joel and Ethan Coen described to Clooney as being about “a trilogy of idiots.” The star said: “The first day I was shooting, I did the scene, and then Joel came over. He goes, ‘[Your character thinks he] is the smartest guy in every room you walk in.’ And of course, because all idiots think they’re brilliant, right? It’s simply the truth,” he said. “Look, we have a president [like that],” he added, prompting laughter from the audience. “They think they’re brilliant. So it changes how you perform it, right?”
