MCN Interview: David Strathairn

David Strathairn
Good Night, And Good Luck.

Good Night, and Good Luck. is a quiet, concentrated effort, adroitly capturing a flickering moment of courage by a clutch of broadcast journalists against the backdrop of fearsome abuses of governmental power in the 1950s, notably incorporating extensive archival footage of Wisconsin Senator Joseph "I have here in my hand a list of 205 people" McCarthy.

Director, co-writer, co-star and co-producer George Clooney grew up the son of a television broadcaster whose hero was Edward R. Murrow, the CBS broadcaster who opposed the junior Senator in his series, "See It Now," and earlier, gathered gravitas with his 1940s radio broadcasts from the London Blitz. Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov worked as much as possible from the historical record, multiply sourcing content so that their black-and-white venture could not easily be called "revisionist." Bleating bullies who work from contempt, lies and heedless fabrication 50 years on, remain with us, such as the bullying entertainer Anne Coulter, a stalwart defender of McCarthy, his tactics and many other things authoritarian (along with laughing at the idea of the murder of journalists). Clooney's sleek, accomplished slice of reconstructed history, focusing on the preparation for a handful of television shows, is canny about co-workers' facades in the office, but also about what journalists and artists ought to do.

David Strathairn is a marvelous actor, as his many roles with John Sayles, Curtis Hanson and other directors amply demonstrate, and his rich habitation of Murrow through professional behavior alone-almost none of the film's figures have even a flicker of a personal life indicated-is one of the year's most richly imagined. (One of the others is Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote, another journalism-oriented tragedy.) The 56-year-old actor and I spoke at Chicago's Peninsula Hotel just before its premiere at the New York Film Festival, just as a grinning reporter and a cameraman were packing up their gear.

RAY PRIDE: What do television reporters want to hear from you?

DAVID STRATHAIRN: They don't have that much time. Most of them have to go scattershot. The junket stuff? There's a reason they call it a junket! People want to talk about what the film is talking about. It's great. The international press, at Venice, it was amazing: 'So! What does it have to say about America?" They're really looking for some kind of handle. But [they're] respectful of the film in many ways, artistically, engaging it that way. They like the performances, the esthetic. They love the black-and-white. And then they all ask about, 'Is this a political statement, why did you do this film?' They're asking it of George and Grant especially.

RP: Too many writers seem to be looking for a walnut-sized statement instead of taking in an entire movie. Why does something that's true have to be considered politically tinged?

DS: [He smiles, considers another artist being asked to explain their work.] "I just painted a painting about 'Guernica.' Those giants, as they say, Goya's paintings… I think that's what George intends to [do], to honor a truthful moment, or to honor a moment, truthfully, in American history. Or to honor it an industry his father had worked in, and Murrow was [George's] dad's hero. He most certainly doesn't want to polarize the people out there who will see this movie… before seeing it, by saying, okay, there's something that's coming down the pike.

RP: The trailer's stirring. It does leave you with the thought that there is unavoidable contemporary resonance.

DS: Somebody's already said it's "a liberal feel-good movie." But what's amazing is that Edward R. Murrow wrote two-fifths of this film!

RP: Its simple black-and-white style, kept to interiors, makes it seem like a "See It Now" episode in its own way.

DS: Good point.

RP: How could anyone have ever "acted" McCarthy?

DS: I know. That's what Grant and George said, nobody would believe it, to have an actor doing McCarthy, somebody doing Eisenhower.

RP: Eisenhower gets an important scene at the end, and he comes across a charming guy.

DS: That's an amazing speech altogether. You forget that he caved a little bit, but the use of all that stock footage, I find, is surprisingly emotional. When you apply Murrow's prescience in that speech in 1958 to the Radio and Television Director's Association, what he was saying, it's uncanny. "We cannot defend freedom abroad by denying it at home"; "We will not walk in fear of one another"; "It will be a dark day in American broadcasting when those who have the most money dictate the discussion in the marketplace of ideas." All of these things he was saying have come to pass.

RP: Reality television has done a great service for documentaries and even for hybrid work like this. The attention of an audience today doesn't shut down because of the hybrid style, the way it might have in the past. The footage of Annie Lee Moss, the older black woman who's interrogated by McCarthy. Obviously, there's been some kind of restoration, but it's still a little ragged, it's still time capsule stuff, yet it breaks your heart. Five years ago, it might have been criticized as being some kind of stunt, a successor of Oliver Stone's JFK or cynically dismissed as being a crafty way to work around a miniscule budget.

DS: That's a great observation. I think we are somewhat primed to dismiss something like that, but then we're also primed to investigate, to have some investigative feeling in us to go, wow, that was a time only 50 years ago in our history? If it rings that bell, on its own, without being directly related to what's happening today, that's great. Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books. The beautiful thing about this film is that it's not, as it has been accused of, revisionist history. It's the very thing. That's what that stock footage proves, especially when you pan down and you see Symington and Robert Kennedy and Roy Cohn. All these people who are definitely in the public mind.

RP: There's one close-up of Cohn scowling that freezes the blood. And any of the shots of McCarthy, wheezing, wheedling. He has rancorous defenders even today.

DS: Yeah. "He was a great American and Edward R. Murrow was a traitor."

PRIDE. Murrow's why I wanted to become a journalist. One summer, CBS was recycling their old library, I think. They showed Murrow every week. That voice, that gaze, is the most ingrained image for me of a journalist. (And I discovered Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" from Murrow's recitation of the "fault lies not in our stars" passage.) This was the journalistic guy, this was the voice. What you do with Murrow doesn't seem at all an impersonation, but you've captured the cadences, the righteousness without being theatrical or stentorian. It wasn't bullying, but it was, "I've seen something, but within boundaries, sir, I am offended."

DS: It's right for you to bring that up, because that was the most important thing to effect, that underneath this very professional objective and clear, corroborated presentation of what was happening was what, I think and this is just musings-started in London and after he went to Birkenau. When he came back to the States after the war, there was a sea change in his soul, I think. That drove him through the fifties and into the McCarthy [conflict]. You see all these pictures of him before, beautifully styled and dressed, out there smiling in society. And then the pictures of him when he came back… He was often called "The Prince of Doom" around CBS studios, or "The Man Who Wears the Crown of Thorns." I don't think it was a Christ reference, but it was just that this guy was… angsted-out! And that's the tone that is in his things from good night, and good luck.: it wasn't presented to the camera. He'd say "Good night, and good luck," sometimes not even looking at the camera. He learned that on the streets of London during the Blitz, people would say that to each other when he was out sneaking around, being the first Anderson Cooper, y'know, on the scene, [in the] standing-in-the-hurricane style we know today. It was on the streets, going into the bomb shelters, they'd say that. There's a tone in there which is, "I know from whereof and what I speak…" The sense that he would not transgress into any kind of soapboxing. It was difficult to effect that.

RP: My familiarity with the material makes this short, sharp movie almost primal, making me remember why I wanted to be a journalist. To hear the name [of the accused airman], "Milo Radulovich" again, after all these years, I still get a chill. And then I thought, what kind of name sounds like that today, that's been involved in any issue today. And I realized, if you pronounce the second name correctly, "Milo Radulovich"; "Jose Padilla." Foreign-sounding name, American born, that's a reference George and Grant may be aware of, but that's just history dovetailing.

DS: That's great.

RP: The reported $8 million budget is insane. The choices that are pragmatic seem cheaper-using stock footage instead of coaching and coaxing-

DS: Almost!

RP: But there's a discipline. There's the newspaper romance of the early edition, when you see the bale of papers drop in Times Square at the start of The Sweet Smell of Success, but in this film, an important scene where they're all waiting for the Bulldog, it's waiting, waiting, waiting, in the old-style Manhattan bar where the owner wants to close at 4am. George doesn't waste any shoe leather on "exterior, night" establishing shots.

DS: I think that's pretty brilliant [about the movie], and it's part of this certain musicality to the film, which is very subterranean in the way it works on an audience. It's not just the presentation, there's rhythms and the use of silences…

RP: Plus the lack of score…

DS: Yeah. It's just so savvy. This accumulation of moments and energies that all of a sudden catch… and then just when you need it, there's a song. You can sit, a Greek chorus-

RP: With a barb in the lyrics.

DS: "I've got my eyes on you."

RP: Clooney tried on a lot of outrageous visual devices and styles in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but there's a sweet, subtle one here, where you can figure out that an elevator scene in which the doors open a few times, the elevator's sitting there and the background sets are being flown in and out, being swapped out. That was worth a smile.

DS: Yes. Yeah. "How did they do that?" It was such a no-brainer when George said, this is how we're going to do it.

RP: It's self-effacing. The other movie sprawls. You might be able to decipher that bit, but for most of the audience, it's a nice card trick, just elemental sleight-of-hand.

DS: I think it's a marriage of some nostalgic black-and-white palette and that kind of technique, and use of camera movement of today, where we expect our minds to be multitasking in the frame at any given moment. Here, you catch information off-kilter and that gives it a pace and energy. It's historical, it documents a period of history, there's two-shot, three-shot, coverage, coverage. But [the camera is] moving, moving and being in the moment, that can also amplify the energy but also how we look at movies nowadays.

RP: There are a number of shots, at the end of scenes, where the camera is low on your Murrow, which is a traditional "hero" perspective, we are small and look up at the gods, but once the camera is off, there's a beat that's held consistently. And I wonder how two actors, a director who's an actor directing an actor, talks about what goes on in that silent moment, that instant after the CBS news cameras are shut off. There's a humorless New York reviewer who called your Murrow "humorless," but that seems shallow. There's a quality when Murrow is left alone, the lights are off, he doesn't seem fearful but he doesn't seem stoic. It's not a woe-is-me, "Oh I fucked this up," there's something in between. A slightly pained expression. Since it recurs, how specifically do you talk about that? Do you come at it sideways in some way?

DS: That's funny. I think of the moments, I know what you mean. There was one moment that I didn't think was going to get that kind of laughter or take the edge off the moment, but it's after the Liberace "Person-to-Person" program when the camera is left on Murrow there. I was aware that he did not like doing this things, he was robbing Peter to pay Paul. So that was sort of a conscious choice to try to get that little bit of psychology, that little bit of information in there because it ultimately pays off in office with [Frank Langella's CBS owner, William] Paley. George would leave the camera going. A lot. At the end of a lot of the scenes knowing that he could find something. He probably learned that not only from watching his own stuff over the years and other directors who he's respected and admired. But I think he knows that actors don't stop if allowed. Cut is "cut" sometimes but the scene is never over in this film. That's what's cool. It bolts right into the next one and the next one. In the editing, he allowed himself to do that be letting the camera keep rolling, 'A' camera and 'B' camera. I also felt that, after every take, I was thinking, "Ahhhh. Okay…" Actually, in the moment, I'm thinking, "Jesus, I didn't nail that one. Is he going to give me another one? Probably not!"

October 28, 2005