David Strathairn on His Opinion of Journalists After Playing Edward R Murrow in "Good Night, and Good Luck:" “Maybe I should ask, has your opinions of yourselves changed after knowing Edward R. Murrow? It’s one of the world’s greatest professions, one of the world’s oldest professions I would think, from the drumbeat giving information to the tribe around the mountainside to what’s coming, to today. It’s so vital to any culture. I think there are thousands of you guys out there trying to do the same thing he [did], but the times are so different now. There just seems to be so many more opportunities for the dissemination of information.
I don’t think differently about journalists [now]. It makes me more aware of the rocky, rocky road that is out there, and the bravery of many and the timidity of many. It’s a great perspective to go from that place, whatever you call it, this thing, this phenomenon of journalism, at least in broadcast journalism, when it was in its infancy to today. It’s a great thing that this movie can give a perspective on that.”
David Strathairn Takes an Educated Guess at What Murrow’s Opinion Would Be of the State of Journalism Today: “He might say, ‘I told you so.’ When he said, ‘It’ll be a dangerous day in American broadcasting when those who have the most money dictate the discussion in the marketplace of ideas,’ well, I told you so. They say he’s turning over in his grave, and the fact that they refer to this one man is turning over in his grave because of what we all do in terms of our gathering and sharing of news is a testament to how amazing his legacy is, or his memory is.
Today he might go, ‘Yeah, go, Anderson Cooper,‘ to get in somebody’s face and call them on the carpet on national news. Or he may also say, ‘What are you doing standing where you could be killed by a hurricane? What is that all about? Oh well, I did that in London when I was on top of the da-da-da-da, and the bombs were coming. I understand that lust for the hard news.’
I think he would probably just go out and have a very long scotch and a pack of cigarettes when he sees some of these talk radio shows. The divisiveness, I think, would make him feel dark inside; the fact that it’s so fractured.
Every year at Christmas he would bring all the foreign correspondents to New York. They would sit around this huge table under the map of the world and they would talk about issues that had happened that year. They could bring up whatever was important to them. And these were like Howard K. Smith and…Hugh Downs and many, many more foreign journalists, not just Americans. You can’t even get Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric in the same room together. What’s that all about? I think that would make him break out in hives.”
David Strathairn on the Look of “Good Night, and Good Luck:” “I love the black and white. I think one of the great things about this film is how beautiful it is. Black and white, the gradations of gray become really luscious, I think. It helps to frame poetically the black and white issue that the film is about. It had to be in black and white because they’re using stock footage of McCarthy and the sub-committee hearings. All television was black and white, so the integrity of the film design required that.”
David Strathairn on Smoking in "Good Night, and Good Luck:" "The smoking is part of the history that this picture tells. We all started smoking; none of us were smokers – Robert Downey Jr had been but had quit before the picture. George [Clooney] was not a smoker. So we all had to figure out what we’re going to do because we had to smoke cigarettes all day long.
I experimented with all kinds of alternatives – straight regular cigarettes to the mildest possible to herbal cigarettes. I came up with pipe tobacco, which was the most crew-friendly as far as the aroma. It didn’t get in your clothes like regular cigarettes do and it wasn’t as harsh and didn’t burn your throat out. When I put out that last cigarette, which was the last day of shooting was the last scene in the film when he says the box of lights and wires speech…I put out that cigarette. I had to have one since just to see what that was like. I put it right out."
David Strathairn Addresses Negative Remarks About the Film: “While we were shooting it, the New York Post came out with a couple of hits saying it’s a revisionist history piece. Which is ridiculous because everything was documented and corroborated by not only biographies, but it had to be at least mentioned twice. Everything that happens in the film, happened, so there’s that. The revisionist thing is balderdash. And they were saying that this is defamation of a great American, Joseph R. McCarthy, and that Murrow was a traitor.”
