You're not being paranoid if your star really is out to fire you.
Just ask the directors who clashed with Mel Gibson on Payback or Kevin Costner on Waterworld. Or ask the schlep who toiled for months on Jennifer Aniston's rom-com Rumour Has It only to be replaced and rewritten.
More potentially troubling for Tony Gilroy, first-time director of the conspiracy-themed drama Michael Clayton, was that his leading man, George Clooney -- who has a credit or two behind the camera -- had already once expressed a desire to helm Gilroy's script himself.
"I've been around enough movies to see how a movie can crush someone and run away from them. It's a horrible thing," says Gilroy, the scribe behind The Bourne Identity trilogy.
In the end, though, there were no last-minute firings, hired-gun replacements or unsolicited rewrites. ("There was no manipulating him," Clooney says, tongue-firmly-in-cheek. "I tried.")
Which isn't to suggest getting the film made was terribly easy, either. Without Clooney's involvement -- Gilroy calls the 46-year-old actor "the big prize" -- the film would probably still be languishing in development. For years, the script had circulated in Hollywood, attracting the interest of director Sydney Pollack (who took on a supporting turn as Clayton's boss), then Oscar-winner Steven Soderbergh who, Gilroy jokes, wanted to shoot it on "digital video with crayons."
All the while Gilroy resisted the urge to hand Clayton over. He wanted to direct it himself. Naturally, there were no takers. Even Clooney, who'd learned of the project through Soderbergh, balked at working with a first-time director until Gilroy "literally begged for a meeting. And it was a good meeting -- a really good meeting," the director remembers.
Thus in the film, Clooney stars as a corporate fixer at a prominent New York law-firm caught up in a class-action lawsuit against an agrochemical company. Tom Wilkinson portrays the firm's chief litigator while Tilda Swinton co-stars as the agrochemical company's morally-deficient in-house chief counsel.
Given its themes of corporate malfeasance, the story might seem a snug fit for the politically active Clooney. Yet the Ocean's Eleven and Syriana star says he was drawn to the character, not necessarily to the story's politics. "It's a story about flawed individuals, one of whom comes to the conclusion he's looking for redemption, which is always kind of interesting ... At what point do you keep moving that line of morality forward?"
And while the storyline is fictitious, it is not infeasible. "Tony won't really want to talk about the things he showed me," Clooney says.
"But these were actual law documents and inter-office memos from one department to another (that said) 'If you want to recall this, it will cost $300 million or if you don't, it will kill 300 people a year and the class-action lawsuit will cost you $300,000' ... Those are real documents that are passed around."
For his part, Gilroy doesn't consider the film as much a political thriller as a moral one. Yet -- as with the Bourne franchise -- Michael Clayton recalls the post-Watergate paranoia of such 1970s thrillers as The Parallax View, All The President's Men and Three Days of the Condor.
Likewise, both Bourne and Clayton seem perfectly attuned to our post-9/11 world. "All these films are about the evil totally within. The real danger in Bourne is what's inside him. The real evil in Michael Clayton is the morality laxity he's capable of," Gilroy says. "Right now, (the U.S.) is starting an introspective moment. In the 1970s, we were trying to figure out what the hell just happened and who are we? And I think it's the same now."
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