Does George Clooney cut it as a director?

The actor has charmed audiences in front of the camera but as a director he hasn’t yet imposed a personal stamp on his work. Ahead of Clooney’s new film, ‘The Midnight Sky’, Geoffrey Macnab investigates why his movies have been such a mixed bag

George Clooney directing ‘The Midnight Sky’ (Netflix)

In his new film, The Midnight Sky, George Clooney plays Augustine, a misanthropic, star-gazing scientist, alone in a remote Arctic outpost in the wake of an apocalyptic global catastrophe. He has a white beard, close-cropped hair and wears a beanie. The Lily Brooks-Dalton novel on which the film is based describes Augustine as a 78-year-old man “on the rind of civilisation” who feels no love for humanity. Only the cosmos inspires any real emotion in him. He has no company other than a little girl left behind. Romeo or Cary Grant he is not.

Clooney doesn’t just star in The Midnight Sky (out on Netflix next month). It is also his seventh feature film as a director – and yet another opportunity to prove that he actually has a distinctive vision behind the camera.

The actor is one of the most popular male stars of his era: charming, debonair, socially and politically conscientious. However, his status as a filmmaker is far less assured. He may have won an Oscar as a producer for Argo (2012) but critics are still hard-pressed to spot a consistent style or shared themes in his directorial work. The movies he has made are a very mixed bag. As yet, he hasn’t emulated actors like Clint Eastwood or Greta Gerwig, who are as acclaimed for their work behind the camera as in front of it.

When the 59-year-old was asked about his directorial career during an online BFI London Film Festival talk last month, he admitted there had been as many highs as lows but argued that this gave him creative freedom.

“I’ve had incredible successes as a director and incredible failures as a director and as an actor,” Clooney reflected. “The funny thing about that is it puts you in a position where you don’t get pigeonholed. As an actor, I’ve had success but I was never a big action guy; I never was a huge comedy guy. Because none of them ended up being gigantic hits, it allows me to keep messing around to do very different kind of performances. Directing has been some of the same. Some of the less successful films, in a way, have allowed me the chance to try other things, which has been fun.”  

Clooney also talked of “stealing ideas” from other directors he has worked with, like the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne and Steven Soderbergh.

However, as he flits between genres and storytelling styles, the actor hasn’t yet been able to impose a personal stamp on his work.

Clooney’s directorial debut was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a project that many other filmmakers including David Fincher and Curtis Hanson had unsuccessfully attempted to film before him. The dangerous mind belongs to outrageous game show host Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), who claims to be a CIA assassin as well as a media personality.  

Before Clooney came on board to direct, Charlie Kaufman’s script for the film had been doing the rounds. It was very highly regarded but, as Clooney stated, “it fell right in that area where it wasn't cheap enough for a real independent studio to make and it wasn't expensive enough for Warner Bros to make, and it didn’t fall into any of the categories that they knew how to sell”.

Showing considerable ingenuity, the actor worked hard to get the supposedly unfilmable film made. Calling in favours and using all his trademark charm, Clooney persuaded big-name cast members to work for “scale”. By bringing the budget down, he enticed Harvey Weinstein and Miramax to back him. He talked of the film as a passion project: his father, journalist and newscaster Nick Clooney, had presented the ABC daytime game show, The Money Maze, where George had spent a lot of time as a kid.

“The reason I felt like I could direct was that I felt this was a screenplay that I knew how to tell the story of. I don't know that there's another film that I would have this sort of personal understanding of,” said Clooney, making it seem as if this project meant so much to him it might be the only one he would ever direct.

There was rancour behind the scenes. Screenwriter Kaufman expressed dismay at the way Clooney “took the movie from me” and made changes without involving him. On a long-gestating project like this, such spats are commonplace. Clooney had achieved a minor miracle in completing the film.

Confessions received largely respectful reviews without doing much business. It revealed, though, that Clooney was ready to hustle to achieve his dreams. He was more of an operator than his clean-cut image might have suggested. While one doubts that Clooney is keeping all those New York premiere photographs of Harvey Weinstein, whose behaviour he later called “indefensible”, in his scrapbook, he did acknowledge that the disgraced mogul had given him his “first big break” as a director and helped him as an actor.

Clooney’s second feature as director, Goodnight, and Good Luck (2005), was superb. It combined passion and idealism with originality and exemplary craftsmanship. Presented in newsreel-style black and white, it gave a gripping and uplifting account of the battle for America’s soul between CBS 60 Minutes journalist Ed Murrow (David Strathairn) and anti-communist bigot and bully, Joe McCarthy. The film, which received six Oscar nominations, was formally innovative, using real-life footage of McCarthy. Although set in the 1950s, it had a topical impact at a time when Clooney and others were being vilified in the media for their opposition to President Bush and the war in Iraq. Clooney elicited an exceptional performance from Strathairn as the courageous and decent Murrow, a character with whom he clearly identified. Its success really did seem to herald Clooney’s arrival as a major director.

However, as if wary that he was becoming too earnest in his filmmaking, Clooney followed up Good Night, and Good Luck with the misfiring sports comedy Leatherheads (2008). This was set in the 1920s, during the Jazz Age and the early days of American football. Reviewers were unforgiving. The movie was accused of “dullness and timidity” and of striving “so strenuously to approximate some of the old screwball spirit that it winds up in traction”, as The New York Times witheringly put it.

It wasn’t clear why Clooney, whose acting career continued to blossom, was directing such a hotchpotch of different films. There was no sign of an emerging Clooney “touch”.

Unlike fellow actors-turned-directors like Jon Favreau and Kenneth Branagh, Clooney hasn’t made Marvel movies to buy clout and credibility with the studios. Given his experiences as an actor on Joel Schumacher’s high camp Batman & Robin (1997), in which he freely admitted he was terrible, he seemed unwilling to go anywhere near the superhero universe again. He helped the Russo brothers early in their career by producing their low budget crime caper Welcome to Collinwood (2002) but while they went on to earn billions at the box office with Captain America and the various Avengers films, he was directing such earnest movies as political thriller The Ides of March (2011) and Second World War picture, The Monuments Men (2014).

These were both decent but stolid pictures without much zip or originality. Clooney and his producer partner Grant Heslov worked with the very best collaborators but didn’t always take advantage. On The Ides of March, for example, their screenwriter was Beau Willimon, soon to create the US version of House of Cards for Netflix. Just as he had kept Charlie Kaufman at arm’s length on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Clooney declined to get too close to Willimon either.

“I wrote a few drafts, sent it to George and [producer] Grant Heslov and they did their work on it – significant work… the majority of the screenplay was their work,” Willimon later explained his part in the movie.

Monuments Men, about Allied soldiers tracking down art treasures looted by the Nazis, was crying out for some Dirty Dozen or Inglourious Basterds-style vulgarity and abrasiveness. It was just too tasteful and restrained.

Clooney’s next directorial assignment, Suburbicon (2017), was much more fun. Co-scripted by Joel and Ethan Coen, this satire about Fifties suburban America had much of the Coens’ mischief and macabre eccentricity as well as a very lively performance from Matt Damon. Even so, after its premiere in Venice, many critics gave it a battering. It was as if they felt he was trespassing on the Coen brothers’ sacred turf but this was still Clooney’s least pious most energetic and entertaining film behind the camera.

Now, having been praised for his work on the miniseries version of Catch-22, Clooney is trying out yet another genre, turning his hand to sci-fi.

Clooney can still talk a good movie. He has been pitching The Midnight Sky as a cross between The Revenant and Gravity. The part featuring Augustine in the icy wilderness was shot in Iceland, in “40 degrees below zero and 70 mile an hour winds”. The space part, featuring Felicity Jones as an astronaut, was made at Shepperton Studios.

When asked during the LFF talk whether there was a “pivotal moment” when he decided to direct, Clooney gave a surprising answer. “The thing about acting is that you’re still subject to a lot of other things – an editor, a director, pretty much anybody. You can give the performance of your life… and then it’s gone,” he made scissoring gestures to show how an actor’s best work might end up on the cutting room floor. “I always like the idea of having more control over everything.”

This doesn’t cut it as a filmmaker's mission statement. It makes him sound like an actor looking to protect his own work rather than someone passionate about making movies.

“Directing is the painter… acting, writing, you know those are the paints,” Clooney recently told GQ. To borrow his own metaphor, the challenge for Clooney now is to prove that he is more than a weekend watercolourist and that he really understands how to use the full palette.

The Midnight Sky premieres on Netflix on 23 December