Whatever the future prospects for the Batman movie franchise, there is one certainty. George Clooney, who played the Caped Crusader in the dire Batman and Robin, can be ruled out of contention for a return to the role. When we met recently, Clooney rarely missed an opportunity to take a sideswipe at the series.
The urbane and stubbly actor was in the middle of extolling the virtues of the Coen brothers, who directed him in the imminent O Brother, Where Art Thou?, when he contrasted that experience with working on Batman and Robin. "I was on the road promoting Batman," he says, "and you get to a point where you've got to sit down with journalists and look them in the eye and say, `It's a good movie, isn't it?'
"Actually, I didn't say that in the case of Batman. I found adjectives to cover myself. I said things like, `It's a big movie'. After finishing a month and a half of trying to find ways to dance around the obvious - which was that there was no script, that I wasn't very good in it, and all those other things - I just decided I didn't want to have to do that anymore. And I was in the lucky financial position to be able to stick with that decision. It's a better place to be, I can tell you, to be able to do only what I really want to do."
It has taken a long time for George Clooney to reach that "better place" - an unusually long time, perhaps, for someone who grew up in a show business background. His father, Nick, was a successful TV presenter and newscaster in Kentucky and Cincinnati. His aunt, Rosemary Clooney, was an internationally successful pop singer in the 1950s And her husband, Jose Ferrer, was twice nominated for the best actor Oscar.
"I had the great luck of having very famous people around me when I was growing up," George Clooney reflects. "In the world I grew up in, which was Kentucky and across the river in Cincinnati, my father was a big star in that little microcosm. So we were always under the looking-glass. And my aunt Rosemary was a very big star, and then not.
"In 1950 she was on the cover of every magazine in the world, and by 1960 she was finished. She hadn't become less of a singer in those 10 years. She didn't lose her talent. When she was 19 years old and everyone told her she was brilliant, she thought she was brilliant. So, when rock 'n' roll came in and women were gone from the music scene, she thought she had lost it. She had no self-esteem.
"So, luckily, I was groomed to understand how little it has to do with you - and that you're never as good or as bad as people say you are. If you can find somewhere in the middle of your own self-esteem, you're fine, you've a better chance of surviving."
It helped to be so philosophical in Clooney's case. When he was 21, he moved to California and stayed at his aunt's home in Beverly Hills as he set about finding work as an actor. After over a decade of minor TV roles, and working in construction for a living when acting jobs were not available, he finally landed the role of the paediatrician, Doug Ross, in the TV series, ER.
"Television was my life," he says. "I grew up in television. My father had a talkshow when I was a kid. I played characters in a variety show and did commercials for potato chips when I was seven years old. Then, as I got older, I did 15 years in television, but I couldn't get a job in a feature film, with the exception of Return of the Killer Tomatoes. I still go back to television. I did Fail Safe for television this year. I sneaked back for the final episode of ER, for Julianna's last episode. So I haven't abandoned television. It's been a great part of my life and I'm not going to let that go.
"It's hard to do a television series, especially an hour show and one where you have to learn to speak Latin like ER and you have to learn all these medical techniques. But it was fun to do and it sure changed my life, and I learned so much about acting and pacing yourself. I remember the first year of ER, Spielberg was on the set all the time because he was the executive producer of the show. He was standing next to a monitor looking at a scene I had just done with Julianna. He tapped the glass with his finger and said, `Hold your head still. You're the star'."
Clooney's first movies as a leading man were inauspicious - the over-the-top, ultra-violent From Dusk Till Dawn (banned in Ireland), the plodding thriller The Peace- maker, the quite engaging One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer, and of course, Bat- man and Robin. Over the last two years, however, he's been on a roll, starting with the role of fugitive bank robber Jack Foley in Steven Soderbergh's sharp Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out of Sight, and the anarchic Gulf War black comedy, Three Kings with Mark Wahlberg.
Clooney and Wahlberg are reunited in the current US hit movie, The Perfect Storm, which trounced the Mel Gibson epic, The Patriot, at the box-office over the busy July 4th weekend. Based on the speculative best-selling book by Sebastian Junger, the film deals with the factually based story of a Massachusetts fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, which, in 1991, became caught up in a raging storm when Hurricane Grace converged with another storm and a cold front coming down from Canada.
The boat's skipper, a lonely, divorced man who's missing his children and down on his luck, is played by Clooney. "I spent about three weeks taking out our Andrea Gail," he says. "I had to parallel park it at a few different docks. Fortunately, I didn't screw up and wipe out the dock. We did some longline fishing as well, and spent a few nights at sea. It gave me a new appreciation for how fishermen make their living."
It was Clooney who persuaded the movie's director, Wolfgang Petersen, to cast Mark Wahlberg - the former rap singer and underwear model who broke out as an actor of note in Boogie Nights - as one of the six fishermen aboard the boat. "Mark and I are going to do a third film together," Clooney says. "I don't know he handled it, how he stays as normal as he has done. He's been famous for 10 years and he's only 29 years old. I know I would have screwed up badly if that had happened to me when I was his age."
While Clooney expected The Perfect Storm to succeed at the box-office, he doesn't believe that the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? will attract a mass audience in the US. "It's a weird thing," he says, "but having seen that movie, I think it will have a tough time in the United States. We're a funny country. You can sell things to us very easily.
"I was watching the trailer for The Perfect Storm. I've seen the film and I'm very proud of it, because it's exactly what we set out to do, which is hard to do - to tell a real story that is heartbreaking and still combine it with powerful action. But the trailer has this moment in the middle of all the action when this weatherman goes, `It's like the perfect storm'.
"There's just no need for that. It's already so clear from what the trailer is showing. But the trailer guys said that this is the moment in the trailer that tests the highest! In the United States we still like a little cheese in our souffles, so we just cheese things up. I think it's very hard to sell films there. Three Kings made $60 million, which is good. We made money, but it wasn't a huge hit. It should have done better.
"In a funny way I've been very lucky that the films I have done haven't been gigantically successful, so I haven't been pigeonholed into one specific acting genre - like only playing men in rubber suits! There's no similarities at all between O Brother, Out of Sight, Three Kings and The Perfect Storm, and I'm very happy with that. I think I'm choosing well right now, but who knows? I could be trying to sell you Ishtar 2 next!"
Joel and Ethan Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou?, takes its title from the film planned by Joel McCrea's idealistic director in the Preston Sturges classic, Sullivan's Travels - and credits Homer's The Odyssey as the basis of its screenplay by the Coens. Set in 1930s Mississippi, this eccentric tall tale follows the quirky exploits of three escaped convicts, played by George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who are advised by an elderly blind man that they will find their fortune at the end of a long and difficult journey.
As one would expect from the Coens, the film is inventive, imaginative and unpredictable, featuring such splendid set-pieces as a Ku Klux Klan rally choreographed and shot like a Busby Berkeley musical, along with a lovely bluegrass soundtrack, gorgeous widescreen location cinematography - and a delightfully droll Clooney as the vain convict with the Clark Gable moustache.
"The Coens did not write the script with me in mind," says Clooney, "and then they saw me in Out of Sight. I was filming Three Kings in Phoenix, Arizona at the time. They sent me the script of O Brother and flew down to meet me. I agreed to do it immediately. That was in February of last year and the really unusual thing was that when we started shooting the film in June, there was just one page of changes in the entire script after all that time.
"We shot everything that was on the script, and they only do one or two takes of every scene, so you really have to be on your toes, and there's never a harsh word on the set. I'd never seen anything like it. When we were doing Three Kings the director (David O. Russell) would change the lines on camera and shout them out. That's not much fun. I prefer to learn the lines. But every film I've been on, the script changes a lot, sometimes too much. Batman, not quite enough."
The Coens are "easy, easy guys to work with, very friendly and easygoing," he says. "If you're an actor, working with the Coens is one of the great goals in your life. And I got to do it. Hopefully, we'll do another project together. We're already talking about one.
"When you make a film with them, you're working with two directors, which is very unusual, especially since they don't ever disagree. And when you start to work with them, immediately you're able to change your acting style and raise the stakes a little bit - because you know from what they've done before that they'll protect you. Being those guys must be a really fun place to be."
BEING George Clooney must be a fun place to be these days, now he has the power to be selective about what he does. He and Steven Soderbergh have set up a company and they will remake the Rat Pack comedy, Ocean's Eleven, in the autumn, with Clooney joined in the cast by Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. And Clooney is proud of the TV remake of the nuclear power drama Fail Safe, which he produced earlier this year with Stephen Frears directing.
"Fail Safe is one of my favourite films," he says. "We did it live on television, in black-and-white and letterbox, which were all things they wouldn't do unless I forced them to let us do it that way. So if I can't find a good script I can go off and do something like that.
"It's a good time for me right now, being able to sit back and wait for scripts I like, for movies I'd like to go and see. Those are my criteria. If my taste is bad, my taste is bad. I can die by my own stupidity. It's just other people's stupidity that I'd hate to die by."
And yes, of course, there are downsides to fame, however hard-won, he says. "Nobody wants to hear them because I lead a very privileged life. I used to cut tobacco for a living in Kentucky, so I learned the value of things very early on. It would be nice to be able to go down to the cafe and just sit outside and have a drink without being the entertainment.
"But that's okay, that's part of the job. Anyone who has any idea of the history of this understands that it goes away - and I will sit down one day at the cafe and have a drink and wonder why I'm not the entertainment anymore. I'll deal with that quietly."
The Perfect Storm opens across the country next Friday. O Brother, Where Art Thou? will be released here on September 15th