{"id":877656,"date":"2026-09-02T17:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/877656\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T17:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T17:10:11","slug":"george-clooney-says-studio-make-movies-that-need-film-festivals-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/877656\/","title":{"rendered":"George Clooney Says Studio Make Movies That “Need Film Festivals Less”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tNaturally, the Venice Film Festival<\/a> was swiftly fawning over George Clooney<\/a> on Wednesday, as the Oscar-winning star arrived (via boat, of course) to pick up his Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tAhead of the glitzy, Jay Kelly-esque honorary ceremony, Clooney sat for a press conference with journalists on the Lido who immediately quizzed him<\/a> on the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, the allegations of antisemitism faced by Hollywood peer Mark Ruffalo, and his love of Venice, having gotten married in the Italian city in 2014.<\/p>\n

\n\tClooney was also asked about the studio no-show at this year\u2019s film festivals, as well as his directing aspirations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe famed U.S. actor admitted that he hasn\u2019t noticed the studio sit-out at Cannes, Berlin and Venice, which have concentrated their lineups on the best of international<\/a> cinema. \u201cIn fairness, you could make the argument \u2014\u00a0and this has been going on for 25 or 30 years, this is some of the work that [Steven] Soderbergh and I were doing when we started doing [the 1998 film] Out of Sight and films like that \u2014\u00a0that studios are doing films that need a launchpad of a film festival less and less,\u201d said Clooney, speaking amid an industry heavily reliant on IP, reboots and franchise projects.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat\u2019s just the nature of the beast,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe films that studios are making are hugely expensive, so I think [this situation is] just the fallout from the films they are making, but that\u2019s been going on, literally probably since Jaws, when everything changed\u2026 The studios used to make Bonnie and Clyde and All the President\u2019s Men,\u201d said Clooney. \u201cThey don\u2019t really make many films like that [anymore], and so they don\u2019t really need this launchpad as much. I think that would be my only answer to that. I didn\u2019t know that they weren\u2019t really sending that many films over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tClooney, famed for roles in Ocean\u2019s Eleven, Gravity and Michael Clayton, is also a filmmaker, and even brought his 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck to the festival in 2005. \u201cI\u2019ve had great experiences,\u201d replied the star when probed on whether he\u2019ll be returning to the director\u2019s chair any time soon. \u201cI\u2019ve been nominated for an Oscar, and I\u2019ve also had really bad experiences, and that\u2019s okay,\u201d he laughed. \u201cThat\u2019s part of telling stories. I\u2019ve done films that people hated when they came out, and now they like them, and I\u2019ve done films that people liked that [and] now they look at and they think don\u2019t work anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe only reason he is not directing, \u201cis because I have two nine-year-old kids,\u201d said Clooney, who shares twins with Amal. \u201cIn order for me to spend time with them, I can\u2019t [direct]. If I act in a movie, it\u2019s three months, and I can go and come and go and come back. When [you] direct a movie, it\u2019s a year, wherever you are, and there\u2019s no traveling back and forth. So I can\u2019t do that anymore. The last thing I did was this play last year on Broadway [the stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck] and that took us all away for a period of time. And I can\u2019t really pull the kids out of school anymore.\u201d It\u2019s made him \u201cenjoy\u201d being an actor again. \u201cI\u2019m a character actor now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was a wide-ranging presser \u2014\u00a0Clooney, a long-standing advocate for human rights, political activism and climate change awareness \u2014\u00a0managed to say a few words on how \u201cmost of the [world\u2019s] powers that decided climate change is a hoax and science is not real.\u201d He remains an optimist: \u201cThat won\u2019t last forever,\u201d though he lamented Europe\u2019s summer battles with wildfires. \u201cWe were in Como this summer, and there were fires in Como. It\u2019s been an extraordinarily dry and hot summer, and it\u2019s dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tClooney confessed that he laughs in response to those who argue climate change is a fad. \u201cLet\u2019s say that everybody who says climate change is bullshit is right,\u201d he began. \u201cThe worst thing that could happen by cleaning up the environment is that you create millions more new green jobs, you make the air better to breathe. I mean, there\u2019s no argument against it. That\u2019s the stupidest part of all this. But you know, we\u2019re going to be in it for a while, and then sooner or later we\u2019ll get some governments in there that actually pay more attention to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Venice festival runs Sep. 2-12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Naturally, the Venice Film Festival was swiftly fawning over George Clooney on Wednesday, as the Oscar-winning star arrived…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":877657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134,38889,3389,391842,69862,447307],"class_list":["post-877656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-george-clooney","tag-international","tag-venice-2026","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-film-festival-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=877656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/877656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/877657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=877656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=877656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=877656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}