Getting it Right
Gilroy on Clayton, Bourne and on Making His Debut Behind the Camera

For acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter Tony Gilroy, strength comes in accumulation. From research of the film’s environment to massive dossiers on his characters’ likes, dislikes and idiosyncratic foibles, nothing is off-limits as Gilroy prepares for a new project, and his directorial debut Michael Clayton starring George Clooney was no different. 

“I write hundreds and hundreds of pages of dialogue,” states the filmmaker as he describing his process to me. We’re sitting in one of the conference rooms in downtown Seattle’s Hotel 1000 talking about his film, and after a few moments it becomes increasingly clear the sharply dressed Gilroy is just as plain-spoken and direct as the characters – think Jason Bourne – as he creates. “That’s the phase where everything is in the most state of flux. That’s the stage where I really want to be free.”

Writer/Director Tony Gilroy on the set of Warner Bros' Michael Clayton

But those early stages can only get you so far and at some point you just have to start moving forward. “At a certain point I get afraid that I can’t go on anymore,” chuckles Gilroy. “[But then] my wife yells at me or I need the money or, something, whatever the thing is, and I realize I can’t fuck around anymore and I have to get to work. At that point, I try to do [things] very quickly and make an outline, something very clear cut, and then I turn that into [the script].”

And how does this apply to Michael Clayton? “The script in the final film resembles the first draft structurally,” he states matter-of-factly, “but along the way there a lot of things that are different. It’s about the same thing and it is about the same idea; [that] didn’t change.”

In the film, Clooney plays the titular character, an in-house “fixer” for a major New York law firm headed by Academy Award-winning actor Sydney Pollack. After their star litigator, played by Tom Wilkinson, has a mental breakdown trouble begins brewing between the firm and their client, an agrochemical company called U/North. Clooney is sent in to manage the situation, the client’s chief in-house counsel (brilliantly played by Tilda Swinton) unfortunately setting up unintentional roadblocks which could spell his doom.

It’s a complex, old-school procedural legal thriller, and one of the first things you notice about it is that there are no prototypical good guys or bad guys but instead a bunch of people living somewhere haphazardly right in the middle. I couldn’t help but wonder if this sort of moral ambiguity appealed to the filmmaker. “Yeah,” Gilroy says without hesitation. “Pretty clearly.”

“That said,” he continues with a hearty laugh, “I’ve been going out now and talking about [the film] for six weeks and you find out all these things you weren’t aware of about your work. I certainly was blissfully unaware about so many things. People say, ‘Oh man, there is so much paranoia in your work. There’s paranoia in The Devil’s Advocate. There’s paranoia in the Bourne movies. There’s paranoia here. What are you so afraid of?’ But, they say this, and that misses the point for me. The actual linkage of all those films really is the fact it’s a pretty strong effort to put the hero inside the villain.”

Matt Damon in Universal Pictures' The Bourne Ultimatum

“The problem is always inside the hero. The danger within is the real great danger in all of those movies, in this movie as well. With the exception of the boy, everybody [in Michael Clayton] is guilty and everybody is up for grabs and everybody has been bent to the wheel. That is one of the things which isn’t a conscious place [I] start working from, but is a thing that is probably consistent with my view of [the world].”

And yet, as fantastic as this paranoia gets it still remains, like the best story’s in this particular genre always do, plausible. “I hope so,” says Gilroy. “I really wanted people to be able to believe in this [story]. To my mind, and I hate to get in the way of an interpretation that is working for somebody, to me the real villain here is the victim herself, and that’s Tilda’s character. I don’t see the law firm as being culpable, and I don’t think Sydney Pollack’s character is aware of [events] or how far they go.”

But isn’t placing the blame and sorrow on one character’s poor decisions letting both the firm and Michael Clayton himself off the hook for some of their more unfortunate choices? “[Clayton] is willing to walk away from something that has already happened and that is to his grave personal disappointment in himself,” proclaims the filmmaker. “But he’s been doing that for 15 years, been cleaning things up for people.”

“I guess in the larger sense, my interest is in how human behavior leaks through all that stuff. My world view is that there isn’t anything that human behavior in its best and worst forms doesn’t corrupt. It all seems to leak through in the end. It all seems to rust out. It’s hard to believe in too big a conspiracy because in the end it’s people, and whether it is greed or self preservation or fear or love, whatever it is these really complicated human sort of things leak through all these structures that people build up for them.”

“What really passes for the thriller aspect in this movie is a big mistake. [Tilda’s character] has gone out on her own. She’s just not ready. She is not up for the game that is happening, and her mistake of not going to her boss or not involving anybody else and being a good soldier, and her mistake of wanting to be so a part of the tribe that she’s going to replicate what she thinks male behavior is, that’s what gets things rolling.”

It’s all a big game impersonation, in a way, a journey to become what a person think those around them want them to be instead of being who they really are and playing to their strengths. “They are all fronting,” explains Gilroy. “Half their lives are pretending to be grown-ups. Everybody is fronting, and she is fronting for an illusion of what she thinks guys would do. She’s trying to be a good soldier, and she takes too much responsibility upon herself and she fucks up.”

“Tilda describes [her character] best. She describes her as bad actress who is badly cast in her own life. That’s my interpretation of it. I don’t want to get in the way of anything that is working for [people] but that is what interests me.”

It comes as no surprise that this fascination with taking people’s facades and then slowly ripping them away from them is something that has permeated just about all of Gilroy’s work. “Identity,” he explains, “is the kindling for all drama. That’s nothing I invented, believe me. People have been working on that scene forever. I mean, that’s what you’ve got. I don’t know what else there is to work on. I mean, what’s Oedipus? I mean, go all the way back. It’s always there, all the time.”

“There’s a scene where [people] are all walking down the street that’s all sort of ‘Wild Kingdom’ and they’re al walking like a pack with their phones and they’re all on their way to a meeting, like something out of the jungle. Then all of the sudden [Tilda] is cut off from the herd, she pulls back and you watch the rest of the herd pull away and she’s left behind. It’s very much on my mind the cost of belonging and the price of being exiled.”

“Again, I reiterate I think it is people. I mean, people are like, corporations are doing this and governments are doing that and, you know what? It’s two guys sitting in a room. Or, it’s somebody saying I really want to hang onto my job and I’m going to bury this.”

“I’m afraid of us. I’m afraid of us not them.”

As this is a thriller, there are certain things inside the genre that must be done, particular beats needing to be hit in order to get the audience’s pulse racing. Thankfully, much like the filmmaker’s previous work this action and suspense is organic to the characters, blossoming out of their choices and not added just because some producer or studio executive thought the picture needed another explosion. The current mentality in Hollywood always seems to be bigger is better, something Gilroy appears to eschew.

“If we hadn’t done it in Bourne than someone else was going to coma along and do it sooner or later,” he states without hesitation. “You can only get too loud. It’s like Spinal Tap, it’s up to 11, and another 50,000 Uzis isn’t going to make that big of a difference.”

This statement can’t help but make me wonder what the director thinks, then, of films like Shoot ‘Em Up. “I actually liked Shoot ‘Em Up,” immediately responds Gilroy with a laugh. “Did you like [it]? I went with my son. My only problem with Shoot ‘Em Up is that it was one of those rare movies where they should have spent another four or five million. It was a movie that would have been really helped by that. I read some reviews of Shoot ‘Em Up where it was like I should have agreed with [them], but I actually had a good time.”

“But that’s a different thing. That’s a different transaction with the audience. They’re not asking what I am asking for. I ran around for years trying to get people to do something that was more of an intimate action picture and couldn’t find the right place to do it and couldn’t get anybody interested. Then the sort of confirmation for me that it could really work was doing Proof of Life and the final action sequence in that film I am really proud of.”

“It is one of the best action sequences I’ve ever been a part of. It’s really hard and it’s really accurate and it’s really real. It’s also character driven. You get to the point where you’ve really know all the people, you’ve invested in the people, and you know exactly where you are, and it becomes that much more exciting than [seeing] 75 helicopters with machine guns coming over the horizon.”

Yet that film didn’t fare well with either critics or at the box office, and while the fireworks at the end of the picture were certainly thrilling the film’s inability to find an audience left the filmmaker still trying to get his ideas for reinventing the action genre heard. “I was still looking for a host shell to inhabit,” says Gilroy, “and then Jason Bourne came along and it was a place to sort of highjack the whole project and make it into a character action piece. I think sooner or later somebody else would have done this. There is a lot of money sitting on the table waiting for someone to pick it up. It was an inevitable turn of the wheel.”

Which is a very retro way to look at the genre, a 1970’s ethos born of Alan J. Pakula, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin and Sydney Lumet. “Well, definitely in the making of this [film],” interjects the filmmaker. “When it came time to how we were going to make it and how we were going to shoot it and how brave we were going to be and what the temperature was going to be, [their] films were of critical importance.”

“In writing [Michael Clayton], the influence was probably just that those were some of the movies I loved the most and that’s the era of filmmaking that is the most inspiring. You had a tension in that era, you had really muscular filmmaking, really hard-assed professional movie making sort of grafted onto really interesting topics. There was complexity to them and everything didn’t have to be rounded off. People were really trying things, but they were tough and they were urgent and they were pro. That’s sort of been kicked across the street.”

With that in mind, what was it about this particular script that made Gilroy know this was the one he was going to make his debut behind the camera on? “The sorry truth is that it would have been a lot easier to raise $80-million and do an action picture,” says the filmmaker with a sigh. “That would have been a much easier struggle. But because I had waited so long, the stakes were personally a lot higher. It sounds sort of shitty but I didn’t want to make a first film. I mean that in a way to say that I didn’t want to struggle to make it through the day.”

George Clooney and Sydney Pollack in Warner Bros' Michael Clayton

“I knew that there was only one way the movie was going to get made and that was if a movie star decided to wave their fee and work for free, and I knew if I could get that partner there was enough meat on the bone here that it would be really rich and interesting but that I also could do something visually stylish with it. It had enough simplicity to it that it could really swing. And, every director who read it along the way tried to steal it so I knew I had something pretty cool. Honest to god, though, if I had known in the beginning how long it was going to take I don’t know if I would have been that patient.”

Needless to say, it's a long way from the writer’s first produced script The Cutting Edge. “Yeah,” agrees Gilroy with a large laugh and a huge smile, “a very long way indeed. What a strange trip. I know my credits don’t make much sense, but you know they reissue that movie all the time. I get residuals [from it] all the time. It is a very popular film.”

After he his comment I can’t help but reply to my own partial embarrassment how every time I run across the picture on cable or on network television I can’t help but watch it almost like it's an addiction. “It’s the 13-year-old girl in you,” responds the filmmaker with a chuckle. “I’m sure you’re not the only one.”

After we finish laughing about the past, things turn once again to the present as subject of what actors like Clooney, Wilkinson and Swinton bring to the table when they show up for work. “Someone is always saying how it must really be tough, that it must really be intimidating,” states Gilroy ardently. “You want tough, go work with Joe Piddly who doesn’t know what they are doing. These people come from the John Huston school of just get the script right and cast it really well and pick the right takes and then get out of the way.”

“These are people you make sure they have the clothes that make them feel comfortable and answer any question that they may have about what they need and then you give them as much space, as much sane quiet space, as regularly as possible so they can do their jobs. Then you make sure there is film in the camera.”

As our talk continues we start diving into minute details of the film, finally coming to what is sure to be the iconic moment of Michael Clayton, a morning visit by the character to the top of a country hill just as day begins to break above the horizon. Three horses stand there, their visage remarkably similar to a picture Michael has looked at before and it is a sight that gets him thinking exactly what it is he’s made of his life.

“For the last month,” starts explaining Gilroy, “and this is no shit, I have been presented with the most extraordinary, beautiful, worked out, the most remarkable spectrum of ideas about that scene. I can’t believe some of the stuff I’ve heard. Some of it is so beautiful and so powerful; I’m not going to get in the way of any of this. I’m not saying a single thing.”

“I’ve never worked on anything where one scene or one sequence seemed to have so many different possible really cool [interpretations]. And, they’re all valid. All of them.”

And what went through Gilroy’s mind when he was actually filming the scene? “It was the location we sweated above all else,” he explains. “It was the part of the film that was the most impossible to shoot that totally warped our entire production schedule. I mean, [cinematographer] Robert Elswit and my brother and I videotaped and cut that sequence on cardboard cutouts of horses on that hill three different times. A huge amount of attention went into that one little sequence. It was all very considered.”

George Clooney in Warner Bros' Michael Clayton

Talking about the visual esthetic of the picture can’t help but get the filmmaker excited. His work with the Academy Award-nominated Elswit (Good Night, and Good Luck) catches your eye immediately and Gilroy knows it, his happy pride as he talks about the photography obvious.

“I was obsessed,” he says with excited exclamation. “That was my dirty secret before doing the movie. I would have been much happier to have a film that looked really good even though it didn’t work. Honest to god. That was my little guilty secret. I’ve been a closet camera geek and cinematographer geek for years and it’s sort of been closeted away. I was more excited about getting my head near a camera and in getting a partner like Robert more than anything else. But, you needed someone like [him]. Robert Elswit is another unbelievable filmmaker/collaborator.”

“We were really lucky and had a month before pre-production to just sit and get to know one another and we sat at my place and just watched movies. And, Robert is a big deal. The camera world has its own hierarchy and we started watching [these] films like Point Blank and we know we’re going to shoot the film anamorphic and [he’s] like, ‘You know, that built that lens just for John Boorman. We could get that lens.’ And, I swear to god we’re doing camera tests at my house in New York and these boxes show up at my house and it is literally uninsurable priceless lenses; lenses that Klute was shot on, that Point Blank was shot on, and Chinatown, most of them all of Gordon Willis’ old anamorphic lenses.”

“So, it’s one thing to talk about what you want to do and talk about it and agree on [things] and it’s a whole execution part of it. And, it isn’t just why don’t we do that, it’s why don’t we just get that. Why don’t we have that. Why don’t we use that. So, my camera department was pretty much a Ferrari thanks to [Robert].”

All of which probably made it easy for the freshman director to inspire the troops that his project was going to be worth spending their time on. “People who work on movies want to be inspired,” says Gilroy without irony. “Crews are beaten down by directors and by bum projects and by crazy things that don’t make sense and by making movies without scripts. People want to do great work. [They] want to do something cool.”

“People got into [this] movie because they got into it. They were waiting to do something really cool. We had our cast and crew screening the other night in New York and we invited about 300 people and Warner Bros said they usually only get about 75. We had 300 people show up. We had to add another screening. Everybody wanted to see it. They brought their wives. They brought their kids. It was like, fuck yeah. It was really great. It’s a great feeling. It really is.”

Additional Links:

-  Michael Clayton Review by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  Michael Clayton Theatrical Trailer
-  The Bourne Ultimatum Review by Sara Michelle Fetters
-  Proof of Life Review by Mike McLarney