I didn’t exactly take part in this morning’s round-table interviews at the Waldorf Astoria this morning for The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15); “sat in on” is more like it. I wasn’t feeling the moxie for some reason. But at least I recorded a couple of lively, light-hearted interviews with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. Amusing machine-gun stuff, some of it informative and even thoughtful.
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After the sessions ended, in an 18th floor suite of the Waldorf Astoria — Saturday, 12.2.06, 1:15 pm
You need to be on-your-toes to get a question in edgewise at a typical session, which usually happens around a table-clothed round table that seats maybe 9 or 10 journalists. It’s always about nail-gunning your question at just the right instant (i.e., just as the celebrity is saying the last couple of words of the final sentence of his/her reply). This time,however, the interview tables were at least 30 feet long — Henry the VIII banquet tables — with maybe 20 or 25 journalists firing questions at the “talent” — Clooney, Blanchett, director Steven Soderbergh, screenwriter Paul Attanasio. And the competition was extra-fierce.
Clooney always delivers at these things. He’s going to be the same glib and grin- ning smoothie for the next 20 or 30 years — always between-the-lines thoughtful, never giving you a tape-recorded answer, never inconsiderate…the self-effacing hyphenate. Soderbergh and Attanasio were fine (and I don’t mean that to sound dismissive). But Blanchett was extraordinary. Honestly? I stared at her more than I listened.
It’s obvious within a minute or two that she’s living deep in her own realm. One with little electric cracks of lightning. She looks down and does little fidgety things — pulling her weddng ring on and off, drawing a doodle on a note pad — when she’s listening to a question. It’s not that she’s shy or avoids eye contact, but a lot of the time she talks to the tabletop or her eyes dart around as she’s answering. (Always a mark of a fine creative mind.) Plus it’s been a while since I’ve heard her native Australian accent. She’s done so many different accents recently she could be channelling the Meryl Streep of the ’80s.
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The longest table I’ve ever sat at for a group interview in my life — I was rescued from the far end by a kindly Warner Bros. publicist and put into another room.
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