The George
Clooney legal drama Michael Clayton (expanding to
more cities this week) heralds the debut of a new directing
talent. Tony Gilroy is a longtime Hollywood screenwriter who
cut his teeth penning 1992's ice-skating cult classic, The
Cutting Edge; several films for director Taylor Hackford
(Dolores Claiborne, The Devil's Advocate,
Proof of Life); and all three Bourne
movies.
Now, with Michael Clayton, Gilroy directs a script he
conceived more than 10 years ago. Clooney plays a conflicted
''fixer'' at a corporate New York law firm forced to dig through a
dangerous conspiracy after a star litigator (Tom Wilkinson) goes
bananas. (Check out
Owen Gleiberman's rave review.)
EW.com sat down with Gilroy — a lean and gracious guy who looks
like he could pass for David Strathairn's handsome grey-haired
brother — to talk about wooing Clooney, how to make a '70s movie in
2007, and Chuck Norris.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How did Michael Clayton
come about?
TONY GILROY: The idea came during [1997's] The Devil's
Advocate. We were tailing all these law firms in New York, and
I was really kind of shocked and fascinated by all this stuff that
was going on behind the scenes — that there was this whole back of
the house, the kitchen area of the restaurant. And I thought,
God, that's really untouched. Nobody's done a movie about
that. And I started talking to people, and soon I said to
myself that this is a whole ecosystem that hasn't been tapped in
the movies.
What took so long to make it, then?
A bunch of times, it seemed like it was going to happen. I knew I
needed a movie star. That was the plan, to get a movie star to sign
on and cut their fee. And that's a very, very time-consuming
process, even just to get [a big-name actor to] pass.
Why?
You don't even want [stars] to say yes after a while — you want
them to say no quickly, so you can move on. To wait four months to
get a pass is really debilitating. Along the way Sydney Pollack
came on as a producer, and I was working with Steven Soderbergh,
and he wanted to do it very quickly and wanted George to do it.
George wanted to direct it, but wouldn't meet with me. Sydney
wanted to direct, George wanted to direct... George said he loved
it and he didn't want to work with a first-time director. And two
years later, I got the meeting. It was two years to get the
meeting. All I wanted to do was have the meeting so [George] could
pass. Just get me the meeting so he could pass.
What happened when you did meet him?
It was a one-day meeting. A nine-hour, one-day meeting. And we came
out with a movie.
How'd you get him? What happened in the nine
hours?
We loved all the same movies. It was all the movies that we loved
in the '70s, that we loved growing up. It was a really a
conversation about these movies that we loved that people weren't
doing anymore, and what an ordinary movie this would be in 1976, or
1975, and how unusual it is to see something like that now. We
talked about all the Alan Pakula films, and Hal Ashby movies, and
why isn't anybody doing stuff like that anymore.
Filmmakers love the '70s.
There's a level of ambiguity that you're allowed. You're allowed to
have things not round off. Once a film costs a certain amount of
money, things have to round off.
Was it a trick to get the ambiguous stuff into this
movie?
That's an interesting question. You wanna know the trick? The trick
was to hang tough with it and not bring to bear all the things that
you're trained to do in [regular studio rewrite/script work]. I'm
trained to button scenes and round things off, and I get rewarded
for doing that. And you have to keep navigating and be brave.
So Michael Clayton is entirely different kind
of writing for you than studio work?
I've never turned in [a script] I didn't like. I've never taken a
job on anything I didn't want to do. The Bourne movies
were a real vindication of something that I was trying to do for a
long time, which is bring intimacy to action. I keep trying to get
people to do it and no one would do it — you know, to make a
chamber action piece instead of an orchestral action piece. So
Bourne was a real vindication. The gravitational pull of a
$70 million movie is to button everything up.
Clooney is so low key in this movie — it feels like a
'70s movie in that it's so controlled.
That's the one thing we talked about with pretty much all the
actors along the way: keeping the temperature down, keeping it
contained. I like emotions, but I really don't like sentimentality,
and I don't like when things break their spell. When you cast a
spell on something like Devil's Advocate, you do an opera.
And you have a much larger color palette. Here, it was really was
just a matter of saying to the actors: Stay here.
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Tony Gilroy: On the Cutting Edge
Continued
Tony Gilroy: On the Cutting Edge
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How'd your career get started in
the first place?
TONY GILROY: I grew up, and my dad [Frank D. Gilroy, a
writer and director who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, The
Subject Was Roses] was my dad.
When did you start writing?
I left home really early. I was a musician in Boston from the time
I was 17 until probably around the time I was 22 and 23. I started
writing songs and lyrics, then I decided I was going to write
serious fiction. I wrote a bunch of stories and started a novel,
and I came down to New York still playing music, doing both. And
then I thought, Well this is ridiculous. I'm going to get out
of this, and I'll write a screenplay really quick and get
rich. And I spent five years tending bar trying to figure it
out.
How old were you then?
I think after the first sale I had of anything, I quit tending bar
when I was 30. I got my first gig writing a movie that never got
made for Chuck Norris. So I quit tending bar, and I was a
screenwriter.
Was the Chuck Norris premise good?
Oh dude, please! [Laughs]
Your first credit is The Cutting Edge. How long
was the trek from Norris to Cutting Edge?
A couple of years. I had a script that was a great writing sample.
It was called RSVP, and it was a bickering Preston Sturges '80s
romantic comedy. And Robert Cort at Interscope read it and said,
''I want to do a movie about figure skating.'' Figure skating! I
was like, Oh no. [Laughs] But he could greenlight
a movie, and I really liked him, and I said, ''If I really [nail]
it, are you going to make it?'' Because you get burned all the
time. And we did it.
That movie was your first big break?
Oh, totally. Definitely.
How did you come to working on The Bourne
Identity and its sequels?
I gotta be careful here. I got sent a very, very — what's a polite
way to put it? Something got sent to me that was a really, really
poor script, and [The Bourne Identity director Doug Liman]
had passed on another film of mine six months earlier. I only went
to meet him because I was curious why he was doing this and not my
movie. And in the course of that conversation — explaining why I
didn't like it — there were enough ideas that people got excited
about, and it started a whole [thing]... but it was really under
false pretenses.
I always wonder: How do writers like you get your arms
around the international-espionage stuff in scripts like
Bourne?
I've been a freak for all that stuff for 30 years. I have a huge
library of stuff that always interested me. And for those kinds of
movies, it'd be hard to write them if you didn't have a sense of
their physical world. There are a lot of great writers who have
difficulty with that because they're not mechanical. You need a
physical understanding of the world you're writing
about.
For a screenwriter as successful as you've been, how
hard is it still? Is it still really easy to lose control of your
own scripts?
The truth is, you wake up every morning with infinite creative
rights. You trade them away as the day goes on. You cash a check;
you trade 'em. It is shocking sometimes how important you
are until the moment you deliver. Even with A-plus writers, that's
still a shock. You're important, and extremely well paid, and
pampered and catered to, until the moment you deliver. But I can do
whatever I want.
Was that true on Michael
Clayton?
I had final cut. That entire movie is what I wanted to make. I
didn't get burned.
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