There Will Be Oscars

This is obviously a big year in America for politics. George, in 2004, Kerry asked you to help him and you said, "I'm not going to help you. I can only hurt you." Why do you think that?
Clooney: You know, Michael Moore—and I like Michael a lot—but that speech he gave at the Oscars was polarizing. It became Hollywood versus the heartland, and I always find that it's best not to raise the rhetoric at that point. I've been a big supporter of Barack Obama since his Senate run and I'm a friend of his, but I said to him, "I stay completely out of it." I don't show up at those things. And believe me, it's not because his group doesn't say, "Come on, help us out." It's just not the attention you want. I worry about that a lot, because you don't want to do harm.

Can you guys talk a little bit about the trust required of the director in order to get you to do a movie and why that's so critical? Daniel, how did you know you could trust Paul Thomas Anderson? You had never worked with him.
Day-Lewis: Well, I suppose because I have had this very strange sense that, even though we came from very different cultures and were separated by a vast ocean and a continent and quite a number of years in age, we have been separated at birth. So I suppose I trusted him in the way you might trust a brother. You might kill each other, but you'd fight to the death for everything else.

Where did that sense come from?
Day-Lewis: I have no idea. I felt I knew something of him from his work. That's a rash thing to think, perhaps, but I was certainly intrigued by him. When I met him, it was love at first sight.

Angelina, how did you get comfortable with Michael Winterbottom? I mean, the level of trust you must have had in your director to do a movie like "A Mighty Heart," with so much emotion in it, must've been very high.
Jolie: I was comfortable when Mariane [Pearl] was comfortable. But I wasn't so comfortable the first day of shooting, when I realized his style was so unbelievably raw. There is often no rehearsal, no one saying "cut." For example, you have three different rooms, and we would go into one room and we'd be talking, say our five lines, and he'd film us. Then I'd go pee, and I'd come out, and the camera was still on. So I'd think, "OK …" Then I'd say my five lines again, and that would turn into 10 more minutes of talking, and then someone would go get something from the kitchen and I'd go to my bedroom, and he'd follow me and he just wouldn't leave. It was really odd. But it became just the most perfect way to shoot that film. It was chaos in that moment. It was very intimate, and my big fear was that something horrible might happen and the camera would be like this. [She gestures as though there's a camera right in her face] But everybody was absolutely connected in every single moment. Even when we'd have lunch, we'd have it together at the table, or we'd all go for a walk together. We were just always present in the film. And so as an actor it brought me back to loving acting, and that was just great. But he does cross a line. One day one of the girls got sick and threw up, and he said, "Next time, tell us." So he can be a little crazy. But I absolutely adore him.

Ellen, what was the atmosphere like working on "Juno"? It's a very stylized piece, so I suspect there wasn't a lot of improvisation.
Page: No, there wasn't. I mean, Diablo Cody wrote one of the best screenplays I've ever read. It just didn't need it. There was a lot of freedom in the sense that it was one of the most wonderful, open, collaborative atmospheres I ever have been involved with, which was just such a joy. Especially because I did trust everyone.
Day-Lewis: There's one thing I wanted to ask you, Ellen. The wit, the very particular wit of "Juno"—it's hard to imagine that that isn't close to your own wit. But maybe that's just part of the wonder of the work that you did in it. Did you feel when you were reading it and when you were doing it that there was a real kinship between your own sense of humor and the sense of humor of that character?
Page: I think it was even more than that—it reminded me of an aspect of what a lot of young women are like that absolutely never gets reflected in popular media. And so when I first read the screenplay I was just so in love that this was going to go out into the world. It really felt like a teenage female lead that had never existed before.

Marion, the amazing thing about your ­getting cast to play Edith Piaf was that the director didn't even audition you.
Cotillard: I heard about the project before it was written. And I didn't know Olivier Dahan, the director. But he said he thought about me, and I don't know exactly why. Talking about trust, when I met him, we never talked about the script, we never talked about the character. We just talked about Piaf.