Ahead of the release of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Viewlondon reviewer Matthew Turner had a chat with the director, and Hollywood star, George Clooney.

Mr Clooney this, in some ways, could be regarded as the hottest script in Hollywood that was almost never made. What were the problems in bringing it to the screen?
Well, it was a Warner Bros script. The problem was it was a great screenplay but it wasn’t cheap enough for a real independent studio to make and 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, so they used it as bait for about five years - bringing good directors in and then going “Hey, that’s great, but why don’t you take a look at this?” And they’d go do another project.

It had got into that thing where it was put into turnaround and it wasn’t going to get made. And I thought if I grab it and do it for scale and get everybody else to do it for scale we can get the film made for under the budget, way under. That was sort of my pitch to Harvey. I could do it about 10 million cheaper than anybody else – and that was important, I thought, because it wasn’t a film designed to make a huge amount of money.

There are quite a lot of famous faces that pop up in the film and I was just wondering…
Well I had to pay Brad and Matt twenty million – that was rough – and they both had to audition for the roles, which I thought was embarrassing. The other two, you know, Julia and Rutger – but especially Julia and Drew – you have to understand that when we were green-lit to go to work I got a call from almost every single A-list actress in town, I mean literally almost every one, talking about the roles; because everybody’s knowing about these things. And they weren’t calling because they wanted to work with me as a director because they had no idea: these were great parts.

What’s the stranger experience: being told how to make love on a film like Solaris or telling other people in your own film how to actually get it on?
I like telling people how to get it on…It’s much more fun, you know, to sit back and watch them act. Well it’s always weird. I know you always hear that, but it is weird – hey you guys, hop in the sack!

All of that stuff was a little awkward, you know? More awkward was – there’s a scene that we cut out with Sam where he had to, you know… Chuck is masturbating in a shower and Chuck was on the set that day and he’s sitting behind me and Sam’s in the shower, we’re shooting and he’s kind of in the shower and it’s a weird shot and we’re shooting and we’re all feeling kind of uncomfortable and all of a sudden I get a tap on my shoulder in the middle of the shot and Chuck’s going “Faster!” Way too much information.

How great a bearing did your upbringing as a son of a chat show host have? And was that part of the attraction?
It was a huge part of it. I grew up on game show sets. My dad had a game show called The Money Maze – there was this giant maze and the husband would run through and the wife would stand above it shouting directions. Which was sort of this great statement on American pop culture at the time, I think.

I was at the back of the set at the exact same time period in the 70s so I knew what they looked like and what they felt like. And I certainly had an understanding of fame and some of those trappings, some of the ideas of waking up and having other people’s perceptions being much different from your own perception. So the reason I felt like I could direct wasn’t that I was looking to direct and then look for a script, I felt like this was a screenplay that I knew how to tell the story, so I wanted to try, because I don’t know if there is another film that I would have this sort of personal understanding of.

Take any reference from the Coens and from Steven?
Both Joel and Ethan Coen and Steven have a great way of running a set that I like too. It’s fun and it’s loose and easygoing. They are both, as directors, very responsible with other people’s money and I felt it was important to finish ahead of schedule and under budget because I didn’t want them to edit the film by pulling pages on the floor. I wanted to edit it in the editing room.

Steven is famous for bringing back none linear storytelling and I felt that, since this was a non-linear story, I had a clear understanding because of what Steven did and what Quentin did in Pulp Fiction. The way Joel and Ethan use the camera as a character is a great thing and a great lesson, but who I was really ripping off, and I’ve sent letters of apology to, were Mike Nichols and Sidney Lumet, the guys who I grew up loving. Directors like that, who I really paid attention to growing up - that’s who I was trying to emulate.

How much do you believe Chuck’s story?
I don’t know how much I believed him. I didn’t officially ask him because I didn’t want him to say ‘I made it up’ because I still wanted to tell the story. I think it’s fairly obvious in the film where all that falls. We didn’t have an answer completely because we wanted the question to be out there. But how interesting, if it is all made up.

Why someone as wealthy and successful as Chuck Barris would have to do that; that was an interesting thing to explore. I didn’t want him to say ‘that was a period I was going through’. Whatever his reasons for writing that, it was pretty fun. Comparing the CIA to bad television made me laugh the minute we started.