THE MIDNIGHT SKY (2020): George Clooney Talks New Sci-Fi Drama

George Clooney Discusses His New Sci-Fi Drama

In a seminar at the EnergaCamerimage Film Festival, George Clooney spoke at length about The Midnight Sky, his seventh feature film as a director.

The Netflix Sci-Fi drama will be available to stream next month. Clooney plays Augustine, an isolated scientist in the Arctic trying to prevent the astronaut Sully (Felicity Jones) from returning home to a worldwide catastrophe.

“It’s two different worlds; we were basically saying we were going to shoot ‘The Revenant’ and stop, and then shoot ‘Gravity,’” said Clooney, joined by the project’s cinematographer Martin Ruhe. “Usually, when space movies are shot, up is up and down is down, and that’s not exactly how it works. In ‘Gravity,’ the camera was constantly rotating. We wanted to keep the idea of the horizon being different, without making everyone throw up along the way. But our first conversation was: ‘How do we shoot winter’?” he added, noting that a large portion of the Arctic shoots were done on the sound stage, “which was as cold as Iceland for some reason!”

“When you shoot with a 7-year-old, time is of the essence and Martin designed everything so that we could walk in and shoot most of the stuff in one or two takes. [In Iceland] it was 40 degrees below zero and we would tie strings to one another because you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. You would see this cloud of wind and snow coming, which is what you want because it gives it the right look, and then nothing. You set the focus and pray.”

Clooney said that he and Ruhe were inspired by classic science-fiction films.

“When you look at almost every space movie shot in the last 10 years or something, it’s so sharp and so clear. We started to look at old astronaut footage and films like ‘Capricorn One’ that were shot on film, and there was a tremendous amount of grain to it,” he said. “A big part of what we were doing was about reintroducing this grain and flare, the kind of things that gave it these imperfections.”

Ruhe praised Clooney as a “very visual director” through their collaborations.

“George knows by heart where he wants to be and where he doesn’t want to be. He takes risks and when he feels something is right, he just goes for it. That makes it easy for me,” Ruhe said. “You want the director to take a stand, and then you want the director to trust you. It’s always a journey and you have to trust each other, otherwise you are lost. And if you are lost, it gets really exhausting.”

“I worked with Martin on a bunch of things, starting with [Anton Corbijn’s] ‘The American,’ and his mind is constantly looking for and trying to figure out really beautiful and brilliant ways to shoot projects,” replied Clooney. “I can’t tell you what an honor it is to work with this guy.”

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