The movie George Clooney only made for the money: “I just showed up for the pay cheque”
George Clooney is Hollywood personified.
With a wealth of multi-million dollar blockbusters under his belt, high-profile ad campaigns for coffee, cars, and cologne, a picture-perfect marriage to a human rights lawyer, a glass cabinet overflowing with awards, and now the star of an oddly close-to-home portrait about an ageing Hollywood actor, Clooney is living the so-called American dream.
Fundamentally, Clooney is an actor known for taking on serious roles in serious films about serious people, so it was a surprise to everyone when he was cast as Mr Fox in Wes Anderson’s gorgeous and funny stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic novel, Fantastic Mr Fox.
A charming comedy about a father of a family of foxes whose animal instincts lead him to steal from nearby farms until three farmers rally together to hunt him down, Fantastic Mr Fox is an emotional tear-jerker that remains highly relatable while inhabiting a surreal world of stop-motion and featuring some of Wes Anderson’s usual suspects like Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman.
But while most actors could only dream of working with Wes Anderson on such a film, Clooney was less enraptured. Speaking at the film’s premiere at the BFI in London in 2009, the actor seemed less inspired by the clout of working within the eccentric, quirky and rich visual worlds of Wes Anderson than the huge pay cheque it offered, apparently hearing that it would be a “big one”. Ironically, however, the film was one of Anderson’s least successful at the box office, only grossing £46million with a budget of £40m.
For Clooney, his earnings from the film would have amounted to a drop in the ocean compared to how much he received for Ocean’s Eleven ($20m) and Gravity ($34m), including profits. One of the highest-grossing actors in Hollywood, George Clooney clearly didn’t need the money, and was evidently keen to work with Wes Anderson despite the limited financial benefits, making his pay cheque comment even less convincing.
Clooney did admit that he had been excited to work on the story, which he’d known about for a long time. The film was certainly different from many of his previous ventures, not least due to the process of making the movie itself. The actor explained that the cast “were out in the middle of nowhere, on people’s farms, doing sound effects and rolling around in the fields”, embracing the bucolic landscape of the film. While the animation was made in London and the film itself is set in the English countryside, the fields in question were actually on a farm in rural Connecticut.
Fantastic Mr Fox has been hailed as one of Wes Anderson’s best films from a critical perspective, grounded in a great story, energised by a strong script and brought to life in stunning animation. His most recent film, The Phoenician Scheme, and before that, Asteroid City, have not fared so well, with critics arguing that Wes Anderson has become a caricature of himself, high on his own visually hypnotic supply and losing all sense of substance.
