Why Press Conferences Suck: The George Clooney Example

You get someone like George Clooney sitting in front of journalists and despite the integrity of the film and media outlets, certain journalists will use all their skills to try and pull pointless personal BS from the talent. At the London Film Festival‘s press conference for Wes Anderson‘s new animation The Fantastic Mr. Fox certain “journalists” just couldn’t stop asking Clooney about was his personal life. The problem with these “journalists” is that they are like fleas, once they start biting they just won’t stop until they get something they can manipulate into a cheesy headline.

Check out when a good interviews goes bad below…

To set the stage, it’s never just one question that is asked, it’s multiple. Maybe one they could get away with, but no, these blood-suckers are incessant. They start up with….

Q: Clooney, there’s some lovely onscreen moments between yourself and your son. Something about broody.

Clooney: That’s a word that Americans don’t understand. Broody means when you have kids?

He obviously doesn’t want to answer the question so the flea goes in from another angle…

Q: Did it make you want to start a family?

Clooney: Just having Jason (Schwartzman) here next to me, I feel like a father. And he just got married, so I feel like almost a grandfather. Yes, I’m jumping right into it. I’ll bring lots of kids on the red carpet.

At this point, Clooney was still stepping politely step around the issue. If you’re another journalist in the audience, or I imagine if you’re Clooney, you’re now thinking “I hope that person shuts up and everyone else gets the idea that these types of questions are pointless.” But they don’t. They try other things like…

Q: Clooney, I guess now you can officially be described as foxy. What other attributes you think you share with Mr. Fox, other than foxiness?

Clooney: Well I tried a daily wax. Let’s see, I seem to be considerably taller than this character.

…which isn’t too bad, but then as the end of the 30 minutes approachs you finally get some idiot stepping over the edge….

Q: Clooney, in the first production by Smokehouse you played a character that needed to grow up and get responsibility, in this film as Bill [Murray] says your character needs to find responsibility, do you think that’s why everyone keeps asking you if you are going to have kids or are you going to get married?

Well at least he was creative. At this point Clooney has basically called him an asshole to his face, so what does he add?

Clooney: Wow. That was — you went from there — that was good, man. I actually have to applaud you on that. That’s a hard swing.

But that wasn’t enough, he then added?

Q: Do you intend to adopt?

Clooney: I am. I am going to adopt some of Brad Pitt’s kids. [Laughs] I owe him a few. Thank you for that question. I will now have to consider the other jobs I was going to play — Peter Pan, I’ll have to rethink those along the way. That was a good question though, I got to say. Good swing. I don’t have an answer obviously.

As you can see, it seems as if Mr. Clooney is rather skilled at dodging bullets while even creating a few witty comebacks, but for the life of me I can’t understand why these vermin ask him four times if he wants to have kids. The answer, as always is, “it’s none of you’re goddamn business.”

Makes you wonder why he’s even a good enough sport to show up to these things at all. He’s a great actor who was just in a great film, come up with some decent questions or keep your mouth shut!

What do you think about their questions?