George Clooney remembered mortgaging his home to pay for his 2005 movie ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ during a conversation he held at the Venice Film Festival
Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.
NEED TO KNOW
- George Clooney remembered mortgaging his home to pay for his 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck during a moderated conversation he held at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, Sept. 3
- Clooney co-wrote, directed and starred in the movie before adapting it as a stage play that served as his Broadway debut in 2025
- The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from Sept. 2 to Sept. 12.
George Clooney certainly bet a lot on himself when he made his 2005 movie Good Night, and Good Luck.
Clooney, 65, looked back at the impetus for his decision to make the black-and-white drama over 20 years ago — his second movie as a director — during a moderated conversation at the Venice Film Festival on Thursday, Sept. 3, one day after he received the Italian festival’s Golden Lion award for lifetime achievement during its opening night ceremony.
During the conversation, the actor and filmmaker remembered that he mortgaged his own home in order to pay for the movie’s budget.
“We shot it all in 22 days, which meant you had to move quick. All the actors were really on board. I’ll tell you, it was a moment that we all felt very proud to make a film. I had to mortgage my house to make it, and the first place we screened it was in Venice,” Clooney said. “We came here, and I had never seen it with an audience before, so who the hell knows if anybody would get it.”
Credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros.
Clooney co-wrote, directed and starred in Good Night, and Good Luck as 20th century CBS News president Fred W. Friendly. The movie, which takes place in the 1950s, follows then-Senator Joseph McCarthy and a conflict he had with CBS News anchor Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) regarding McCarthy’s political activities and anti-communist sentiment during the height of the Cold War.
“I wrote Good Night, and Good Luck because I was being called a traitor to my country because I was against the war in Iraq, and I wanted to talk about the importance of journalism and the importance of free speech,” Clooney said in Venice. “Looking around, I couldn’t talk about Iraq at that point, so I looked backwards and I found McCarthy and those moments where people were scared to speak up, and I used that as a way of discussing it.”
Clooney previously shared at 2005’s New York Film Festival that he mortgaged his home in Los Angeles to pay for Good Night, and Good Luck‘s budget, per Fox News.
When Clooney brought the project to Broadway for live performances onstage — which also marked his Broadway debut, this time portraying Murrow— in 2025, the Associated Press noted that the actor only paid himself $1 for making the 2005 movie version in addition to mortgaging his home.
Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney now also own property in England, Italy, France and Kentucky.
Credit: Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty
In Venice on Sept. 3, Clooney described Good Night, and Good Luck’s world premiere at the festival in 2005 as “one of the greatest nights of my life” due to the reception it received after something of a false start during its premiere screening.
“They start the screening, the film starts to go, and all of a sudden everybody in the theater starts screaming, like ‘Ahhh!’ They’re like really screaming. I was like ‘What the f— is going on? What is everyone screaming about?’ And they just keep screaming, and the film is running, and they were yelling because they hadn’t all sat down yet and the movie had started,” he said.
“So I’m standing up on the chair and yelling at the projectionist to turn it off and start it over, and they finally did, and this is the days when the projection was all on film, they had to respool it,” he added. “It took like 20 minutes and everybody is sitting in the audience. But it was extraordinary because it made everyone focus on the film, and so by the time the movie started again, it made it an incredibly special night. One of the greatest nights of my life. It was really amazing.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs from Sept. 2 to Sept. 12.
Read the full article here