Anyway, that was a big part of my growing up, first of all. Then I revisited some of those speeches that I was pretty familiar with. I knew the Box of Lights and Wires speech really well. Most people who studied any journalism at all always heard that. I had heard a lot of the shows. I hadn't heard all of the television shows. I hadn't heard the Annie Lee Moss show before and I hadn't heard his rebuttals to McCarthy. But I started watching those speeches again and I thought that they were incredibly inspiring, as I think they are, and I miss that kind of clarity at times.
It's sort of like when was the last time you were watching network and you heard Paddy Chayefsky's words? And you go, 'Wow.' So they sort of represented us at our best. I'm always the guy in the car going, 'You know what I should have said?' So I really enjoyed the idea of talking about Murrow again.”
George Clooney on Tackling This Particular Subject Matter: “…To me it was an interesting to talk about again. I worry about polarizing issues. I mean, we all know what the world is like out there right now and we also know that there are a couple of ways to do this. I had to be very careful about how I campaigned for my father, which I couldn't do because it was Hollywood versus the Heartland. Somehow we sort of lose the moral argument lately. Fair enough. We'll take those hits. It's all cyclical, but I didn't want this to be a polarizing piece. I wanted it to be a factual piece. I tried to treat this as my father did and he talked to me about it for a long time.
We double sourced every scene in the movie. Every scene in the film is double sourced. We literally, it was either Joe and Shirley [Wershba]…or it was Fred Friendly's book. It was infinite numbers of things. It might've been other documentaries that we used. Everything that we could to source each of the scenes and basically the content in each of the scenes because we wanted to be able to say… And that's why we used McCarthy playing himself, for the same reason. We wanted to say, 'Look, you tell us what we did wrong. I had Joe and Shirley on the set everyday. 'Tell me what we're getting wrong. Tell me where we're missing it.'
I know that there are people out there who are going to try and marginalize it because all you have to do is find one thing wrong and go, 'Well, it's all horses**t. It's all crap.' So then I thought that I had to be very careful with the facts. That's important, and so that was my job.
What I found to do was to go and look at all of the other arguments, the arguments against Murrow. George Seldes' wrote a book that talked about it. He's a really interesting, bright journalist, but he thought that Murrow taking sides was a mistake. So we went through the idea of taking sides and how dangerous that might have been and if it was a wrong step or a step in the wrong direction, and we brought that into the story. We read some of the journalism school's conversations about the Alger Hiss piece where he said they didn't correct that because he didn't want to be known for that. So we put that in. We just felt that it was important to constantly balance all the other arguments and say, 'Fair enough. Let’s have those discussions.' And not say that we're right or that we're wrong, but that we can have discussions.”
Page 2: George Clooney on the Use of Black and White, Archival Footage, and Contemporary Journalists
