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George Clooney One of the Leatherheads
By Fred Topel | Images property of Universal Pictures
George Clooney is an international movie star, but he shot his latest film domestically. Leatherheads, a comedy about football in the 1925s, utilized locations in North Carolina to simulate old school pigskin playing.
George Clooney Talks Leatherheads
"I never really was in North Carolina," joked the actor/director. "No, it was really fun actually. The scout was easy because we were looking for a place that would have something of a change of seasons, but not quite the Minnesota change of seasons to shoot in February. It just didn’t seem fun to us. It didn’t seem that we would catch everything we wanted. We needed some scenes with trees. We knew that digitally we could change the colors from green to orange and red if there leaves on the trees, but that the area would be great for old stadiums which were important to us and also a bit of a change of season. We ended up getting caught in some pretty cold weather, shockingly, which was unfortunate, but I’m telling you, we loved both the Carolinas."
A southern boy himself, Clooney felt right at home. "I grew up in Kentucky which we think of as the south, but Carolina’s think of as the Yankees somehow, but I still think of us as the South and I always appreciate. It’s a very different way of life down there. People have a very easygoing nature with you there and I found it to be every bit the case. We had to use hundreds of hundreds of extras, background artists sorry. It was important that we sort of had an understanding. They are not just people in the background. We actually used them. We used their faces. We had long talks together in big groups of people and it was easy to do. They were really open and friendly and fun. I couldn’t tell you what a great time we had."
Leatherheads
Leatherheads
Leatherheads
Creating the 1920's style of football was part location, but also part filmmaking magic. Or, lack of magic as Clooney put it. "There was a trick to this. When you are doing a period film, in particular a football film, an action film, we're used to it now with hand held cameras and steady cams. You can really increase the excitement level of football. If you were to do that in a period piece, in 1925 in particular, you would immediately sell out the period. Immediately you would feel that it was contemporary. ‘Oh, why is this hand held with the camera?’ You have to shoot it in a way we are sort of used to seeing that world which is straighter. So we realized that everything is going to be on a crane arm. Or everything was going to be on a dolly track and it’s going to be slower, so you had to find ways to move the camera toward the action always. It was a really tricky balance. And the actors had to find a way to perform like that too, because if you are going to keep things in a two-shot, you’ve go to keep it moving and you’ve got to keep the dynamic."
Clooney also made all his costars roll around in the mud. "I guess ultimately, nature provided the mud, but we shipped it all into that football field. That is the same field where we do the opening sequence where John runs a touchdown. We came back a month later and shipped in tons and tons of mud. We had to do mud testing to find the right mud that would stick to you. And it was all sort of funny the first day, because it was 70 degrees, and we all just jumped in the mud and you have to wallow around and you get up and you start shooting. But, first of all, that stuff adds another 20-30 pounds and if you're running, all of a sudden you’re running in mud. But, the next day, it was 20 degrees and we were covered in mud. Then it was just mudsicles. We were like fudgicles out there and then it was just miserable. It was about two to four days of truly miserable shooting. It took us a week to do that whole sequence. It was really complicated because a lot of that is CGI around it. We couldn’t have 50,000 people there. So, it was always about being able to shoot it and the pieces you could use in this sort of a section. So, it was trickier than anything I have done before. But, the mud was terrible as you can imagine."
Leatherheads opens to theaters April 4th.
For the trailer, stills and more movie info, go to the Leatherheads Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Images property of Universal Pictures
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