By Jenny Halper in New York City

You might mistake George Clooney for just another journalist striding through the Rihga Royal hotel. He doesn’t have an entourage, his head is down, and his black t-shirt and simple khakis seem implicitly chosen to detract attention.

As the son of a well-known journalist (Cincinnati personality Nick Clooney), the TV star-turned-movie star-turned surprisingly inventive director grew up in the world of broadcast, one he captured with sordid imagination in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” and with searing intellect in “Good Night and Good Luck,” which opened in limited release on Friday.

Shot in black and white and chronicling Edward R. Murrow’s famously bold stance against McCarthy’s blacklist, “Good Night” is both a plea for honest, gutsy reportage (the tagline is ‘we will not walk in fear of one another’), and a perfectly plotted, superbly acted depiction of a turning point in American news.

Clooney, who wrote the script with Grant Heslov, co-stars as Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, a role he wisely underplays (having cast the excellent David Strathairn as Murrow). It’s one of many prudent choices made by a man knows he’s a huge star, but likes to pretend otherwise.

“Hi, I’m George,” he says (as if I don’t know?) when he sits down to talk to press. “I’m a tourist, I hate long lines, and I love to laugh.”

Here’s what else Clooney had to say.

Q: Could there be another Murrow?

GEORGE: Could be. There's still great reporting going on by a bunch of people. The problem is that I don't think there’s anybody who's going to have forty million people watching them again- that's the difference. It may be good that there won't ever be the most trusted man in America again, depending on who that man is, but I just don't think you could have that kind of access. I don't think they'd get that many people to watch it, to change policy. The two great moments (in journalism) are Murrow taking out McCarthy and Walter Cronkite coming back from Vietnam and saying it's a stalemate.

Q: That we can’t win the war?

GEORGE: We can't win the war and ultimately Johnson not running again because he said "Hey, you know, I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country." We had a great night last night, I don't know if you guys heard about that. It was really something. Walter got up and gave a great speech. It was fun to be around a lot of old news men. There was electricity in the room, people looking around for who to talk to and what to talk about. It was a really interesting night all the way around.

Q: Broadly- how did this project start?

GEORGE: It started because I grew up on the newsroom floor watching my dad work with these really wonderful reporters. And Murrow was always the high water mark that everyone aims for. So it was my love of that, it was certainly a tip of my hat to my dad and the sacrifices he's made over the years.

Q: What journalists do you hold in high regard now?

GEORGE: I think there are a lot of great journalists out there. The problem is the same problem Murrow fought in 1954 and that my father fought in 1974- a continuous diligent fight which is the idea, and it's not a simple answer. Lester, this is a buddy of mine, I understand his problems of saying "listen, I got to back to shareholders and I got to deliver and the market is getting smaller, money is getting less.” I understand all those problems but it has always been and it will always be the battle between corporate and information. It's a tricky one and it's complicated and I don't know if there are great answers to it.

Q: Did you ask your father for advice?

GEORGE: He just said the one thing to me constantly that was important, which we talked about a lot, Grant and I. He just said double check, double source every scene so that when the people that want to marginalize it- and they are out there- cannot marginalize the film. It's important to say that because there's sort of a revisionist history going on that McCarthy was right and Murrow was a traitor. Ann Coulter has a lovely book about Murrow getting the story wrong, and it was important to recalibrate fact, purely fact, and that's all. So my dad said "get the facts right" and that was what was most important to us.

Q: One of the great things about the film is that it doesn't really end on a rousing note. Did you ever think you needed to have a major climax?

GEORGE: We made a montage of some of the greatest hits of television moments, and then they rapidly decline to the OJ chase. It ended with that famous piece of a car chase, they follow the guy and he sets his truck on fire and takes off all his clothes and blows his head off on live television. You hear the people in the background laughing in the newsroom and the guys says "there's your lead news story." It was really a compelling ending but it was editorializing on my part. In order to get your facts straight, we decided we had to keep it in historical context and not do that. It's very tempting to do it because it's pretty explosive stuff to watch, and we did it, we edited it, we looked at it a bunch and we really liked it and then ultimately Grant and I sat in a room for a day and said we were going to cut our favorite scene.

Q: Is it logical to think George Clooney will one day be running for office?

GEORGE: That's a ridiculous idea. I think I should run on the "Yes, I did it" ticket.

Q: Do you feel it’s your responsibility to question power?

GEORGE: It is certainly the responsibility to constantly question power, no matter who's in power. My father went after Carter, and he went after Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon. It was his job. He believed that authority or government unchallenged or unquestioned (could be) corrupt. It's not unpatriotic to ask these questions. The other thing we thought was important to talk about the dangers of allowing fear to erode away civil liberties because that's always a dangerous step. We do it once every thirty years, we panic. We get blown up, Pearl Harbor, they bomb us and we grab up all the Japanese-Americans and throw them in detention camps. The good news about it and why it's an optimistic film is we fix it, we're good at that. We lose our minds, we get a little scared, usually someone capitalizes on that for their own gain and then we fix it- because of news men. Without them we don't have a civil rights movement, we don't have a women's movement, we don't have a Vietnam movement. It’s newsmen, so that's why we give them the support they talk about.

Q: It’s been three years since your last film. How careful are you about what you decide to direct?

GEORGE: I made so much money on that last one. (Laughs). Actually, I direct one when I can. We did this T.V. show “Unscripted” and I directed five of those. They're really fun to do, and we couldn't have done this film had we not done that show. I learned a lot about overlapping dialogue and some of the tricks we were going to use later, and improvisation, where we wanted to put the camera. Realistically it's about finding the script I had some interest in, or writing the script I had some interest in. But this is a subject matter I know pretty well, I mean it's a big part of my life, Grant and I researched the hell out of it too. So far I've done two films that have basically been about television because I know that world. Working backwards- I started with the low point in television and now I've done the high point. So I think radio next.

Q: Did you ever have an interest in going into journalism?

GEORGE: No, I don't have the talent for it. I tried it when I was young. My dad's one of the best I've ever seen. There are people who ask the right questions and are fearless.

Q: While doing your research, did you come across anything enlightening or new?

GEORGE: In doing the research you learn it is important for us to go back to the original material. For instance, “Point of Order,” which some of you may know, which is the documentary that was made about the army-McCarthy hearings, if we just used that as our source of the army-McCarthy hearings, the problem is, and I'm an old liberal, it's really unbelievably manipulatively bad, BAD, I mean, they have that scene where McCarthy is screaming, and they cut to this wide shot of him, and it looks like Frederick March at the end of “Inherit the Wind.” And when we got to the archival footage and watched all the archival footage, Grant called me up and said you're not going to believe this, and it was two different days. So the problem is, our job was, is to make sure that we went back to all of the source materials from the very beginning so that we weren't going to compound any sort of myth that had been made in an editing room.

Q: Can you talk about the parallel in the end where McCarthy is censured in the Senate and Murrow is censured in television…?

GEORGE: I think there is very little doubt of the idea that it was the clash of those two at the pinnacle of their career, the both of them, and it basically ended their career in many ways. Murrow was the tenuous position with Paley that got worse and certainly got bad after that '58 speech where they didn't speak again, and it opened McCarthy up for a real shot at the McCarthy hearings. It was the first television news room, newspapers had written about it but television hadn't, they'd been very timid. So it's exactly what you say. It was one of those moments where you look around and you go, they did it the same way, they didn't fire either of them. They just sort of let them whither on the vine until they left.

Q: It was a sad ending for them.

GEORGE: I think so. It's usually sad at the end.

Q: Why did you decide to play Fred Friendly?

GEORGE: I didn't really want to act in the film. It isn't fun directing yourself, you know. “How was I?” “Fantastic!” It's not fun but it was a black and white movie starring David Strathairn for seven and a half million dollars so they were going to make sure I was in it in one way or another. Fred, for those of you who knew him or know of him, he really took over a room. He was gallant, he was bombastic, and I decided early on that that can't be the nature of this character- this was about the story and about his words. So I took it just because I thought it's a big enough part that I can help get the money and I have a sense as the director of how little of Fred I wanted it to be. I want there to be a relationship between the guys, I wanted there to be the camaraderie, I want there to be some of the fun, I want there to be the drive, but I don't want him to take over a room. As an actor I'm most proud of the fact that I'm in those scenes and you never look at me.

Q: Do you prefer this to frothy films like “Ocean’s Eleven”?

GEORGE: I like frothy things. Those are the things that bought me a nice house in Italy. And by the way, I like those frothy things. I think if my sell-out is “Ocean's Eleven” then I'm doing okay. If it's “Batman and Robin” I'm in a little trouble.

Q: What made you settle on David Strathairn as Murrow?

GEORGE: He's the only guy we ever talked about.

Q: And the rest of the cast?

GEORGE: I knew that David was going to hold his own and he was going to have the screen for so long that you needed someone that can walk into a scene and do three scenes and hold his own with someone who's going to be as powerful as David. Frank (Langella) can do that. Frank's good. Frank he's the real deal so that when he sits there and looks at him, it's real clash of titans and I think that that worked well. Patty (Clarkson), Robert (Downey Jr.), I thought Ray Wise just did a wonderful job. Jeff Daniels is fantastic. So basically we got everybody we asked for, you know.

Q: Who was cast first?

GEORGE: I called David first. Grant and I were in Italy, we called him up, he said "Yeah, I'm in.” The second person we called was Patty. And then it was just sort of one after the other just called up and said they're in. We were really lucky that way. The guys we know a little bit, a lot of them were in “Memphis Belle,” together, there's a great familiarity between them and that helps. And in the mornings, they would come in, we had a real news room set up with their own typewriters and their own desks, and I’d say "Today is October 4th, 1954.” They had a New York Times and a New York Post and Washington Post of that day with all the ads and everything. And they would sit their with their little manual typewriters and they would go through the papers and they would pick their stories and then we would go in the room after a couple hours when we were ready to start with the cameras set, and we'd have two cameras going, and they'd start rolling and I'd go "okay, what's your lead?" and they would pitch their stories. We did it the way I watched my dad put together a news program every night. And that had an entity to it that I really loved and it reminded me of the things I grew up watching in news. It's a funny how these guys will take on these characters. You know, Matt's trying to pitch sort of, with my dad you'd be pitching metro stories which just never are going to make it to the front.

Q: Would you call this a political film?

GEORGE: It isn't overtly political. It is a film by someone who happens to political, but it's a historical piece. We were very careful with our facts to make sure of that. If that opens up a debate of any sort of political or journalistic questions then good, and if it doesn't, then that's okay, we did our job. If some kid in Cincinnati sees it in a journalism class and decides he wants to be a writer because of it, and he wants to hold certain standards, then we win.

Q: Do movies have the same obligation as documentaries?

GEORGE: Yeah, of course they do. They tend to reflect the times. It's like protest songs of the sixties. It takes a while for everybody to catch up and then it sort of catches up. I think that films in general go through periods of time where we don't really care much about political or social issues. I think when political or social issues become the forefront it takes a couple years to write the script and get the film out so it's usually a little later. There are plenty of films over a history of time that have raised some questions. I've got one coming out, “Syriana,” that's going to get me plenty of trouble.

Q: “Good Night and Good Luck” is also a buddy movie…

GEORGE: I like ensembles, not just buddy movies, I really like ensembles. ER was an ensemble. I've had all my successes out of ensembles. And quite honestly I like working with people that are friends. It's fun. Fun sets are fun places to be I think it's healthy and good work comes out of it. And so you get a list of the group of people you like to work with and try to work with them as often as possible. It seems like it's a good thing to do. Steven and I have the same policy.

Q: Journalism today is so routed in celebrity culture. Is this a real problem?

GEORGE: But don't you think that that's not new? I saw some real teeth in journalism in Katrina; again, I think we go up and down with that. You know there was a tremendous amount of celebrity journalism before 9/11, and then it seemed to stop and suddenly there were some real conversations going on. I think it's cyclical again, I'm not one to attack it since my father’s been one for a long time and I find that if I'm going to do movies that are fluff at times to help get real news out. If sending Brad Pitt to Africa gets 18 million people to understand more about the plight of how dangerous Mugabe is, well then that's part of the tradeoff and I think that's okay.

Q: But it gets frustrating when you have to read that you're living with some girl or you're hosting a wedding.

GEORGE: But that would be my own sort of personal issues. In a way, you have to think on a much grander scale. It's a real pain in the ass to have a bunch of photographers hanging outside your house. I'm not complaining. I'm just saying it's a rotten thing. If you did it for a day you'd go "this isn't very fun". They're sneaky, the pop out of places to take pictures. They don't necessarily try to catch you doing something stupid, they create you doing something stupid by picking fights. But I must forever defend their right to be there because the idea of stopping them is so much more dangerous in that first step towards censorship. It's like burning the first book even if it's “Mein Kampf.” Those are the things we have to eat up if we're public figures. As a part of the thing you go "it's a drag" but to try to take steps to stop them, now that doesn't mean, if they're committing a crime that's another thing, but in general, celebrity journalism and all those things, those are things you sort of have to take at the risk of any way of trying to stop it. Because stopping it to me is censorship.

Q: How did growing up in conservative Cincinnati affect you?

GEORGE: It wasn't so conservative then. I mean there was Simon Leis and he was conservative and yeah, he made “Hustler” famous. But it was a different time. When I was growing up, it was early 70's and it was the sexual revolution and the drug counterculture and the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. Even in Cincinnati they had giant lapels and big thick ties and wild hair. It's much more conservative now. We had a mayor; you know Jerry Springer was the Mayor for a while. I got to tell you something about that idiot is he was a friend of ours. He was sort of this Kennedy-democrat. He was really sharp, he was really articulate. I really liked him, you know? My dad gave him his first broadcasting job on the news. And then he wrote a check to a hooker. and that's dumb. And he came out in sort of a Kennedy way and said "what I just did, that was dumb and I quit". And he quit and he ran again and he won by a landslide. I was like "this guy's fantastic". And then he got into that show and slowly that show changed and he changed it. I saw him not too long ago, and he's like "George come on, say hi" and I said "I'm ashamed of you, my father's ashamed of you, we're ashamed of what you've done and ashamed of what you do. You, more than anyone, know what you're doing". There are people, there are the Jenny Joneses of the world who think they're actually performing some sort of public service. He knows better and that to me is shameful.

Q: How was your movie received in Venice?

GEORGE: One of the best nights of our lives. I couldn't have written better reviews.

Q: Did you hear anything from the audience?

GEORGE: There was a five minute standing ovation and it would have lasted longer had we not have left. I kept saying they were just getting up to leave but no, it was just one of those great nights in your life where you look around and there was all your friends, Grant and I go back twenty-something years. He loaned me a hundred bucks to get headshots for a Joanie Loves Chachi episode, which I did not get but he did, and I'm still paying him back.

Q: Who would you interview?

GEORGE: Ever? Dead or Alive?

Q: Dead or alive.

GEORGE: That's a good one. You know, just because he was funny too, Jack Kennedy would have been fun. That would have been a fun one because he was so, if you would have watched his press conference right after the Bay of Pigs, amazing. He comes out and he comes out like this "What happened yesterday was my fault and I take full Responsibility," and the whole press corps is sitting there. And the first question is "Isn't it your fault?" And he says "I just said that". And then they all just kind of sat there for a minute and then you hear "What's Jackie going to wear tomorrow?" He was funny, that would have been a fun one.

“Good Night and Good Luck” opened on October 7th.