George Clooney arrived in Venice by boat on Wednesday to accept a Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival, then sat down with journalists for a press conference that ranged from the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger to the state of American journalism to his two nine-year-old children.
On the merger, Clooney did not hold back. "I don't see how the merger financially ends up making sense for the people who are trying to do it," he said. "We'll see. I worry when a big company swallows up another company. I always worry whenever big companies are consolidating because it means a lot of people are going to lose their jobs."
Clooney also addressed the controversy surrounding actor Mark Ruffalo, who has faced accusations of antisemitism after criticizing the merger and the Ellison family behind it. Clooney declined to echo Ruffalo's specific arguments but was direct in his support. "I support Mark Ruffalo's ability to speak freely," he said. "It's ridiculous. We're not going to ban speech. I believe in free speech even when I completely disagree with it. That's important. In fact, it's part of how democracy works." According to The Wrap, Clooney joins Joel Coen, Joaquin Phoenix, Hannah Einbinder, Sarah Sherman, and Todd Haynes, among others, who signed an open letter supporting Ruffalo in the past 24 hours.
On the subject of studios largely skipping this year's major European film festivals, including Cannes, Berlin, and Venice, Clooney said he had not noticed the trend but offered an explanation rooted in decades of industry change. "In fairness, you could make the argument — and this has been going on for 25 or 30 years, this is some of the work that [Steven] Soderbergh and I were doing when we started doing [the 1998 film] Out of Sight and films like that — that studios are doing films that need a launchpad of a film festival less and less," he said, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. "The studios used to make Bonnie and Clyde and All the President's Men," he continued. "They don't really make many films like that [anymore], and so they don't really need this launchpad as much."
Clooney is also a director, having brought Good Night, and Good Luck to Venice in 2005. When asked whether he plans to return to directing, he was candid about the reason he has stepped back. "The only reason he is not directing," he explained, was "because I have two nine-year-old kids. In order for me to spend time with them, I can't [direct]. If I act in a movie, it's three months, and I can go and come and go and come back. When [you] direct a movie, it's a year, wherever you are, and there's no traveling back and forth."
He was also outspoken about American politics, singling out the Trump administration for what he called its cruelty, and raised concerns about the media landscape. "The state of journalism is in question," he said. "The richest people in the world are owning the Washington Post and Twitter, and that is a concern."
