There Will Be Oscars

Daniel Day-Lewis arrived a little late, but he did it in style. He was wearing a jaunty porkpie hat and a black-and-white Western shirt that looked like something swiped from Bob Dylan's closet. The result was so un-Hollywood that George Clooney, this roundtable's class clown, couldn't stop ribbing his fellow best-actor hopeful. Question: "Daniel, do you remember your first professional job?" Clooney: "It was a Western, wasn't it?" One of the delights of these annual gatherings is watching beautiful, talented, rich celebrities become just folks. James McAvoy, who stars in "Atonement," spent the time waiting to go onstage at L.A.'s Hammer Museum talking about trying to steal some wineglasses from a recent Oscar event, only to be caught by the waiter. Just before they were announced onstage, Clooney turned to Angelina Jolie and said, "Let's not go out!" She then pointed to two nonactors nearby and said, "Let's send them instead." Before long, everyone—newbies and ­supercelebs—bonded. Jolie and Marion Cotillard, the French star of "La Vie en Rose," chatted about Provence. "Juno" star Ellen Page confessed that she just got her first apartment. It's a converted brothel, and it's haunted. "My stuff keeps vanishing," she said. "Weird things, like makeup." Advice to Ellen: if you do win an Oscar, hide it. An edited transcript:

NEWSWEEK: Was there a movie you saw when you were young that made you say, "This is what I've got to do with my life"? Daniel, I read that you mentioned seeing the movie "If… ," about a rebellion at a British boarding school, with Malcolm McDowell.
Daniel Day-Lewis: Certainly that was a very important moment, but not just because of Malcolm in that film. It was partly because I was at a boarding school at the time, and if I could have got away with setting fire to the place, I would have done it. And he created a banner around which all the outcasts rallied, and so that film was a big influence.
Marion Cotillard: I love Greta Garbo, and I was fascinated by her as a child. One of the most incredible feelings I had was watching "Camille."
James McAvoy: It sounds weird, but there's a film called "The Goonies." [Laughter] And I mean it with all my heart. As a young boy that film made me cry because it's about how you still have your problems at 10 years old or 12 years old. When I was little, you didn't get chased by pirates and you didn't get chased by gangsters and nobody was trying to kill you with guns, but your adventures were no less exciting. It helped inspire my imagination.
Ellen Page: It wasn't until I was about 15, when I shot a film with this Canadian actress named Molly Parker, who I just absolutely adored and looked up to, and became inspired by. For the first time, I felt something different. I felt myself being overcome by something I can't necessarily explain. But I wanted to keep feeling that and finding out what that was and learning more about it.

You worked with Molly Parker, didn't you, in "Marion Bridge"? [Pause] You look startled.
Page: Oh, you know, it's a Canadian independent film. They don't always get seen.

Angelina?
Angelina Jolie: Because I had acting in my family, I didn't like the movies very much, and I didn't watch them that much. I remember "Streetcar" and I remember Brando, but I don't know if that was as a woman or as somebody who liked acting.
Do you remember the first time you were paid to act? Daniel, you're nodding.
George Clooney: It was a Western, wasn't it?
Day-Lewis: George, I think you should answer this question.
Clooney: The first job I was paid for was "Batman & Robin."

That's the first job you were paid a lot for.
Clooney: You couldn't get a job without getting into the Screen Actors Guild, so everybody I knew, including myself, would make up these credits just to get in. They didn't have the Internet at the time, so you could get away with anything. I remember lying to a casting director, Barbara Claman, about this movie called "Cat People." She was, like, "You were in that, were you?" I was, like, yep. And she goes, "Because I cast that." I finally just said, "I can't get in SAG. Help me out." She helped me get a job on a film then called "The Predator." We shot it in Hungary. It was Charlie Sheen and Laura Dern and I, all three of our first jobs. As big as they became later, the movie never came out, that's how bad a film it was. But I got my SAG card.
Page: I would like to see that.
Clooney: I would, too. The guy—and I'm not kidding—the guy who financed it went to jail.
McAvoy: Because he made the film.
Clooney: Yes, as a matter of fact. If you'd seen me in it, you would understand why.

Daniel, were you paid for that little thing that you did in "Sunday Bloody Sunday"?
Day-Lewis: Yeah. I was 12 at the time, and there was a local grocer in southeast London who was, like, the unofficial mayor of that parish, and so the casting agent wisely asked her to round up all the local hooligans, of which I was one. She asked us initially to play soccer in the park as a background shot, and we were going to get £2 a day for that. I thought they must be insane. Because that's what we were doing all the time anyhow. It was my first professional soccer match, in fact. Then the next day [director] John Schlesinger asked to see the nastier types amongst us, and he chose three of us to walk out of the local church and scratch a row of fancy cars with a broken milk bottle. I got £3 for doing that.