People really respond to Everett McGill
in O Brother.
I'm a Dapper Dan man.
Danny Ocean comes up a lot, 'cause I did three of them.
And going back to Frank Sinatra,
it's kind of an iconic role.
I'm George Clooney.
I've been an actor for 40 years
and a director for, I don't know, about 20.
I've learned very little, but what it is,
this is what I've learned.
I lived in a small town in Kentucky. Augusta, Kentucky.
Mostly, I would work on farms,
cutting tobacco for $3.33 cents an hour.
I also did other jobs.
I sold ladies' shoes,
which is not a job anyone should ever do.
And my cousin, Miguel,
and his father, José Ferrer,
who's an Oscar-winning actor,
they came to Kentucky to do a horse racing movie,
and Miguel got me, basically an extra part,
a couple of lines, in the movie.
And then, afterwards Miguel said,
"You oughta come to Hollywood and be an actor."
And I said, "Okay."
So, I moved to LA in 1982,
and I didn't have a job,
didn't have a car,
slept on the floor of an apartment
of a buddy of mine
and rode a bike to auditions.
And then I got a couple of Japanese commercials,
which were pretty funny.
But my first job I got was a movie called
Grizzly II: The Predator,
which was a total sham.
The director was a sham.
The producers stole the money.
The movie never came out.
Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern and I had a tiny part in it.
You could literally see
the guy holding the paw of a bear going like this.
And we're like, "Ah!"
And I mean, I saw Jon Rhys-Davies
who was coming off of Indiana Jones.
And he was, "What you got there is a devil bear."
But, someone is releasing it,
and there are like, trailers out,
of me when I was 23 years old with a bad Kajagoogoo haircut.
Then, ER hit.
That was the career changer.
You know, people have to understand what kind
of numbers we were doing at the time that show came out.
40 million people watching us.
That's not like the old days when Charlie's Angels
was doing 35 million people with three channels.
There was 150 channels out there, then.
And the show was the star,
this has nothing to do with me.
But all of us had just a massive ride.
And for me, it changed my career.
I think before NYPD Blue, and then ER,
television was pretty saccharine.
Films could push it in all different directions,
the language, the violence.
You be cool.
And you had more time to do it.
So, the difference was often times just the quality.
Now, that's literally flipped on its head.
There's this thing, the AFI Awards,
and they would always show the 10 best films,
and the 10 best TV shows,
and they'd show a little clip,
and you go there if you're one of the shows.
We would go there as ER,
and we'd sit there, and there all the film guys,
and there would be these great,
you know, Saving Private Ryan,
all these great films.
And then later, when I was on the film side and,
you know, you go there for Michael Clayton,
you're feeling pretty full of yourself,
and you'd watch the 10 clips from the TV shows
and they were so much better than everything
you were seeing on the film side.
But it taught me that the delivery systems
themselves, aren't what's important.
They really aren't.
There are roles that have stuck with me that I didn't want.
You know, I get a lot of crap for Batman & Robin still.
This is why Superman works alone.
I was offered to play Batman & Robin
in a three-picture deal for a lot of money,
and I'd never made a lot of money.
I'd always done okay,
but this was like, "movie star" money.
I call all my friends,
"I'm gonna be playing Batman."
And you know, we'd scream and yell.
Up until that point, I was just an actor,
and actors get offered a part
and they can't believe it.
I realized from that point on,
I was also being held responsible
for the movie, and you know, it bombed
and it taught me, I'd better now realize
that it's not just about taking a part,
it's about making sure that the scripts were better
and the next three films I did were
Out of Sight, Three Kings,
and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
You have been invited to participate in this piece,
not to approve this piece.
Good Night, and Good Luck,
that was the one for me.
I had been very vocal about the war in Iraq
and they picketed my movies
and there was a real sort of sense of like,
you're not allowed to speak up about these things.
The lesson for me was,
you can't demand freedom of speech
and then say, "But don't say bad things about me."
So, then I started thinking about
when speaking truth to power,
particularly to our government, was important.
I knew about the Murrow story with McCarthy,
and I wrote the movie about that.
The idea that the most patriotic thing
you could ever do is to question your government.
To have it have the success it had
was, incredibly rewarding, I have to say.
Good night, and good luck.
I always prefer directing over acting.
The director is the painter,
and the actor is one of the pieces of paint.
As an actor, you have to understand
what is actually happening in a scene,
not what's written.
And as a director, you have to understand it
for all of the actors.
This is Barbeau Observatory,
are you receiving this?
With Midnight Sky, the directing part,
the only thing that was hard about it was
the size, 'cause it's a big film.
The space stuff was, of course, complicated.
I mean, I watched Alfonso Cuarón go gray on Gravity.
Can't beat the view.
Everything that he was trying to do,
they were inventing the technology as he was doing it.
And now they've really refined them.
so some of the stuff was a little bit easier to do.
Is anyone out there?
I knew that the part itself was going to be difficult.
I lost about 25 pounds for it.
And I started growing a beard
which is up there with David Letterman look.
And then, I shaved my head with a thing
and it's all sort of badly done
which I thought was the right way to look.
But more than anything, he needed to be weak,
and it also had to have no charisma.
So, I was the right person to play.
Every time an actor comes in to audition,
we, on the other side, are sitting there praying
that the next person that comes in the room
is the answer to our problem.
If you think that way as an actor coming in,
you'll give a very different performance.
Confidence is a very big part of what we do.
If I'm about to hire an actor,
and there are two of them there,
and they're both equally good
and equally as interesting,
I'm going to cast the one that
I feel the most confident in,
that I feel I can trust with the show.
You can't lose a job you don't have.
So, every single time you go in for an audition,
you're gambling with house money.
Swing for the fences, do what you want to do,
if you don't get it, you didn't have it before,
so you didn't lose anything.
That's Æther.
It's a spaceship.
I hope everybody watches
The Midnight Sky on Netflix.