And you start to realise that creatively you need to continue doing and trying things, that doesn’t mean that you are not going to do that as an actor, but you want to continue being creative in this industry and if directing is something that you are interested in or writing is something that you are interested in it’s an incredibly creative process.
Acting is one element of a film the director is sort of the painter using all of those elements, using sounds, music, camerawork and putting it all to work - and it’s all creative and fun.
And you fail and it’s incredibly upsetting, much more so than when you are an actor, and when you succeed it’s incredibly exciting - I like the risk involved and I want to keep on doing it.
- Evan do you have any ambitions to direct?
Maybe. I don’t know if I am there yet but I do love story telling - I have visions of what I would love to do. People keep telling me that is what I should be doing but we will see. There need to be more female directors so maybe I need to step up.
- You are very convincing as a politician, I don’t know whether that is a compliment, do you think that you have too many skeletons in your closet to run for office? And off the back of that in the film they talk about loyalty is that one of the most important things in your personal relationships?
George: Loyalty yes, I find it to be my favourite quality in people I find it to be a tremendous quality.
As far as skeletons in the closet I think we are going to have to start getting to the realisation that there are so many different medias and so many ways of getting information out we have to get to the point where we just have to start every candidate with phrase ’Yeah I did it.’ It’s going to be very hard to find people who haven’t smoked a joint or drunk some bong water along the way.
Evan: You are never going to find anyone who hasn’t done anything wrong - it’s impossible.
George: We are at a strange state in our world where we have that strong belief that if it is written down, I grew up with it, then there has to be some truth in it we haven’t quite got to the spot where you go ‘well it doesn’t mean it’s true. It could be made up and made to look very nice’.
So we have to get to a point where scandal are going to become less and less of the reasons you stay out of politics - otherwise we are not going to have any politicians at all.
- Could the same be said about Hollywood?
George: Sure. Hollywood can be a little more forgiving because they don’t really expect us to be saints along the way. It depends if you are trying to make a career off of your personality or you are just an actor.
- George what motivates you to be quite a political person is it something that you would discuss with your parents when you were a child?
My great grandfather was a mayor and my farther was an anchorman for forty yeas - if you were an anchorman in Cincinnati, Ohio then you were very politically involved. I grew up in a time when most people had a social and political conscious - some of the biggest changes in our country’s history happened while I was growing up.
So I was raised to be a part of those things and I will continue to do that - sometimes that makes you very unpopular but I haven’t changed, the attitudes in the States sometimes will change, but I don’t change and I continue to try and be involved as much as I can.
- With the title of the film, which evokes that line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, do you feel there are ties to Shakespearean drama in this film?
George: The Ides of March actually means 15th March so part of the reason that we did it was because the primary took place on 15th March - Farragut North was the original name for the play but that was a little to local specific for a general film.
But we always thought that it was interesting idea for a good friend and an enemy conspiring to take you out and we always thought that those themes were interesting - and we will let people decide who is Caesar along the way.
We weren’t really trying to tell anyone that this is Shakespeare we were just telling them that it is about backstabbing and those sorts of thing and that seemed to make sense.
The Ides of March is released 28th October. Read the first part of the interview here
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw
Tagged in George Clooney