Fresh on the heels of his most recent Best Actor Oscar nomination for his lead role in Michael Clayton, George Clooney is back in the spotlight both as an actor and behind the camera in the director's chair with Leatherheads, a romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s football. After proving himself to be a capable director with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney is fast becoming known for making high quality films with substance. In Leatherheads, which hits theaters on April 4, Clooney takes on the role of football team head Jimmy "Dodge" Connelly who finds himself at odds with a good-looking war hero (John Krasinski) and a lovely news reporter (Renee Zellweger).

Leading up to the film's release at the Leatherheads press conference in Los Angeles, The Deadbolt was on-hand to hear Clooney talk 1920s football, whether he played the game in high school, the responsibility of being the star in a film, his thoughts on the political situation with China and Tibet, what it's like to be compared to Cary Grant, and what project he'll be directing next.

George Clooney on the challenge of playing a different type of football from an older era:

"The only thing they had to be - John [Krasinski] had to be athletic. You certainly don't have to be a football player, but you have to be athletic because there is a lot of"you". It's more like a pick-up game in your backyard - when we started looking at these - the footage of these guys in 1925. They just grab 'em and six guys pull him down. Then, if he got back up and started running, they would just let him get back up and keep running. So you just had to hold him down for a long period of time. So it was a much different kind of game, you know? You played all different parts; sometimes you're the quarterback and sometimes you're the defensive back. Our big problem was that there were a lot of actors there and I got to use them for four months, so you can really get them hurt along the way. That was the trick, is trying to keep from anybody getting their ears boxed too bad."

Clooney on the specific challenges he faced with the game:

"This is a screenplay that, in a very different incarnation, Steven Soderbergh was going to direct and I was going to act in 1998. I always liked the world and I thought if we could ever figure out how to make the story work, it would be a really fun movie. Once we got it, I spent a summer kind of stealing from His Girl Friday and from Philadelphia Story - we could go down the list. But once we figured it out and [we] go, 'Oh, well, let's make this film!' then I called up Universal who had the script and I said, 'I think I've figured it out.' And they said, 'Let's do it. Great.' And everything got going, and then I realized when I got on the football field I would have to actually play football and I was like, 'Oh, Jesus!' And the first, literally like the first play, I hired all these [guys]. I'm 5'11 so I hired all the football players to be 5'11, which, believe it or not, is not so easy to do anymore because they're giants. But the first kid that hit me, this kid from Clemson, he's 21 years old, and I went running with the football down the middle and he just thumped me. Knocked me backwards, and I couldn't catch my breath and I stood up and was like, 'Uh-oh, now I'm trouble. I forgot about this part of it.' And then it was four months of that. So I made rules like don't hit the director, you know - those kinds of rules."

On whether he sees himself improving as a director:

"Well, you hope you improve. I mean, the funny thing is, this is a light comedy, but it's infinitely more complicated than making Good Night, Good Luck or Confessions [of a Dangerous Mind]. This is a BIG movie, there is a lot of work to it, and a lot of movable, moving parts. You hope you're getting better, you never know. My feeling is [that] I think of myself much more as a director in terms of film and filmmaking. I like acting a lot and it's an exciting thing to do, but directing is a lot more creative and I like it a lot more in general."

Clooney on whether he played football in high school:

"I didn't have a football team. I grew up in a tiny town in Kentucky; fifteen hundred people in it. The public school - I think I had twenty three, twenty four, twenty five people in my high school class. So we didn't have enough guys for a football team. We had a basketball team, which was the worst team in the state. We were 1 in 25 my senior year, that was exciting. And we had a baseball team that we only had for a couple of years and then it was gone. So, in general, in a tiny school like a football team is just impossible."

On what attracted him to the story of Leatherheads and what appealed to him most:

"Well, what attracted me to it is: over the years I've avoided doing romantic comedies in general because I think that they don't necessarily work anymore. We know how they are going to end; the guy’s going to get the girl in general. And if it doesn't end that way, people aren't satisfied with it. So the only way they work is if you put them in a really interesting venue, if you put them in a place where that is as much the star of it as the romantic comedy is. I loved this world because I hadn't seen it. You've seen Jim Thorpe: All American but other than that - and I mean how many people have seen that movie? It's a world you haven't seen. So, immediately it was unique. It also forced you into a type of dialogue and a pattern of dialogue that I find funny, that you can't do if you're doing a contemporary film. You can't do it that quick. So if you're going to do it, it's rapid fire if you're going to be true to the period and to me that's funnier. You can't do it exactly like they did because if you do it like Rosalind Russell, who's a genius, but if you took her performance and stuck it into a contemporary movie, even in that context, it's, 'Sure. Whatever. What do you want?' You couldn't get away with it. So you have to find that balance, which Rene [Zellweger] does so beautifully, of being quick. 'Yeah. Whatever. I Don't Care,' but not to the point that it feels like an imitation of the '30s and '40s."

Clooney on the relationships and the lack of a sexual nature:

"No, there's nothing sexual about it. We sort of realized very early on - you know how you'll see films - and you have to re-create the rules of the time. You have to say, 'Okay now, kissing a girl in public is risqué.' So you have to reset people into that period of time. We had that problem with Good Night, and Good Luck for instance. We had to remind people of how scary it was to have someone call you a traitor to your country and that you could lose your job. When you do pieces that go back, you have to re-create what that world was like and so the first few bits are trying to set everyone into the different, 'What's okay and what isn't?’ which, nowadays of course, everything's okay. In many ways that's why I like doing pieces that are older - it's easier to be outrageous. Once you've made something like it - kissing a girl with lipstick all over your face, outrageous again, you know?"

Playing Football with Leatherhead George Clooney - Page 2