George Clooney isn’t shying away from calling out auteur Quentin Tarantino, even if he’s not citing his sources.
Clooney told GQ UK during a joint interview with his “Wolfs” co-star Brad Pitt that he was “a little irritated” with Tarantino after the director supposedly commented about a lack of modern movie stars, and outright said Clooney was not one of them.
Pitt won an Academy Award for Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” while Clooney collaborated with Tarantino in “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
“Listen, I did a movie with Quentin. He played my brother [in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’]. He was OK in it,” Clooney said of Tarantino’s acting ability.
While Pitt protested, saying that Tarantino had a standout scene, Clooney explained why he wasn’t too keen on complimenting the “Pulp Fiction” writer/director.
“Quentin said some shit about me recently, so I’m a little irritated by him,” Clooney said. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about you, and somebody else, and then this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’ He goes, ‘He’s not a movie star.’ And then he literally said something like, ‘Name me a movie since the millennium.’ And I was like, ‘Since the millennium? That’s kind of my whole fucking career.’”
Clooney continued, “So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit. He gave me shit.”
The director of “The Boys in the Boat” did however admit that people like he and Pitt were “lucky” to work with great directors, something he came to appreciate after making enough stinkers.
“Director and screenplay is what keeps you alive,” he said. “And I learned that after doing some really bad films. You can’t make a good film out of a bad script. You can’t do it. You can make a bad film out of a good script. You can fuck it up.”
IndieWire after an extensive search digging back through Tarantino’s on-the-record comments was unable to identify the interview that Clooney is referencing. Seems like a case for the “Ocean’s” team to recover…
Meanwhile, Tarantino seems to have no problem publicly deeming Clooney’s “Wolfs” co-star and “Ocean’s” collaborator Pitt a bonafide movie star akin to Old Hollywood acting icons. We had no trouble finding those. Tarantino told GQ in 2023 he became starstruck by Pitt while on the set of “Inglourious Basterds.”
“He’s one of the last remaining big-screen movie stars,” Tarantino said while comparing Pitt to Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Steve McQueen. “He suggests an older-style movie star. It’s just a different breed of man. And frankly, I don’t think you can describe exactly what that is because it’s like describing starshine.”
Tarantino continued, “He’s really good-looking. He’s also really masculine and he’s also really hip; he gets the joke. But the thing that only the directors that work with Brad and the actors that act opposite him really know, what he’s so incredibly talented at, is his ability to really understand the scene. He might not be able to articulate it, but he has an instinctive understanding about it.”
Pitt was in talks to star in Tarantino’s now-shelved 10th and presumed final feature film, “The Movie Critic.”
Read the full interview with George Clooney and Brad Pitt via GQ UK.