Interview: David Strathairn of Good Night, and Good Luck

For years, David Strathairn’s held a curiously split place in American film. For devoted indie-film fans, he’s a must-see actor whose name in the credits alone is enough reason to seek out a movie, with great performances like Blue Car, 8 Men Out and Limbo on his resume; to more mainstream audiences, he’s been a subtle, tricky scene-stealer in Hollywood films like L.A. Confidential, Sneakers and  A League of Their Own. With the release of George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, starring Strathairn as ‘50s newsman Edward R. Murrow and earning him his first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama), there’s the question of if Strathairn’s attained a whole new level of mainstream fame … or if the mainstream’s finally caught up with him.  Relaxed and affable, Strathairn was able to join us in his native San Francisco to talk about moviemaking, working with director George Clooney and how the experience of making Good Night, and Good Luck served as a crash course in the history of ‘50s America … and the realities of the here-and-now.

When you realized you’d be playing Edward R. Murrow -- a newsman who left behind so much recorded material and archived broadcasts – did you simply dive into the material, or did you approach it more tentatively?

I dove in … but then I was very tentative in my reading through it, because I wasn't sure how much would be apropos to the script – or, to put it another way, George (Clooney, director and co-writer) said it's not a biopic. So that helped with my tentativeness, because we weren't concerned with him as a young man, or what he thought about when he was at home, or what he liked to eat or his relationship with his son and his wife.  So then I could sort of funnel my focus into a particular moment; I went directly to the kinescopes and the archival footage of the broadcasts, the “See It Now” broadcasts and the “Person to Person” broadcasts and … his 1958 speech to the Radio and Television News Directors of America, so I could concentrate on that.  Once I realized where I was headed, I started paddling like crazy.

A lot of Good Night, and Good Luck shows the sheer work of making TV, the grind of it, and the nuts-and-bolts of journalism; a lot of the finished film really has the crackling energy of a procedural. Could you feel that while you were shooting it?

Well, George (Clooney) knew that world; he grew up in that world. His father, Nick Clooney, was a broadcast journalist and an anchorman and George was working with the teleprompter when he was nine or 10, so he knew that energy.  …. (and) I had never been in a newsroom, before this one. You look at the microphones that are the size of softballs, the console, the knobs look like they're from Star Trek and the huge lumbering cameras that they had to move around; those round erasers with the little brushes on them, those beautiful old typewriters. All these things, which took time to use and didn’t have the alacrity of the technology we have today -- and yet the energy of the people (in Good Night’s fake newsroom) was exciting. It felt like we were making news.  We were making a movie, but we were also making news.
 
We had copies of the New York Times that corresponded to the very day (of events seen in the film), March 9, 1953 -- the headlines were there.  George would say, 'All right, Matt, you're going to cover local news. Robert, you do obits today. You do the sports page. You find anything about Eisenhower or McCarthy …” so the headlines were there, (and the actors) could pitch their stories directly from the newspaper, so that improvisation was happening a lot during the scenes. They were making the scenes about making the news as we were making the film. …

The decision to not cast an actor as Joseph R. McCarthy but instead use real footage of McCarthy – it certainly helps the realism of the film, but at the same time it sets the movie up as a struggle between two people who are never in the same room; was it hard to work opposite 50-year-old news footage instead of a flesh-and-blood actor?

Well, they never really met; as far as I know, they were only together in a room once. A year or so after (the events of Good Night, and Good Luck), some time after this had all come to pass.  McCarthy had been moved to the back of the Senate and Murrow was marginalized at CBS. (At a public event,) McCarthy came up to Murrow and banged him on the back and said, 'No hard feelings!' And Joe Wershba (a reporting peer of Murrow’s played by Robert Downey Jr. in Good Night, and Good Luck), who related this to me, was standing right next to Murrow and Murrow turned to McCarthy and said, 'Yeah, all right.' McCarthy walked away and then Murrow asked Joe, 'Who the hell was that?'  And Wershba said, 'That was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.' And Murrow, uncharacteristically, in public, said, 'That son-of-a-bitch!'
 
So it was true  … they didn't confront each other, except through letters –  there was an incredible amount of negotiation going on about how they were going to do these broadcasts and who was going to pay for them. McCarthy wanted CBS to pay for them, and Murrow said, 'No way, we're not going to pay for it'. It was a very terse and respectful exchange of letters, but that's the way it was done.  They met each other through the camera.  That's the way it was done, just the way we saw it.

And being able to watch that footage of the real McCarthy while filming?

It had to be there.  It helped to put me there as much as it could, that when I would turn to the monitor and say, 'Now the junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy …'  and boom! There he is.  So, it was kind of haunting, but what a great thing to – Not only was that a piece of the world we were in, but the set, the costumes, the whole thing was so – the cigarettes!

There’s a lot of that in the film; were you ‘Method Smoking?’

Well, I had to smoke.  There was a bit of madness in that.  You sort of had to do that.  They did – Joe Wershba was there.  He said they smoked like that; everybody smoked like that. And Murrow died (of lung cancer) in 1964 when he was 57 years old.

At the same time, the movie’s not a period piece; it feels relevant to today.

Absolutely.  (Good Night, and Good Luck) could have been made in 1941.  It could have been in the 1800’s, or 1941 with the Japanese-American internment camps … the fear of Indians, so we'd better take away their civil liberties and put them on a reservation.  It could be Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, any place that is where fear has been used … and confusion and the oppression of news has been used. The light has shined on it by this film.  I don't think it's any coincidence that it's coming out now.  I think that it's just a wonderful confluence of timing, that George (Clooney) got it together to make this film. I imagine if (George W.) Bush hadn't gotten a second term, it wouldn't be quite as potent an illumination, but there's always going to be something going on apropos of this, on this issue. Especially today, where we are fearful, but I think we are more confused;  we're more paralyzed by our confusion as to who's telling us what, and what do we believe, and where's the truth?
 
I mean, it's sort of relative now.  One news network is really only speaking to those people who need to be re-affirmed of their particular ideology and another one is (supporting another) – so these tribal factions in our society are feeding off these wildly opposing founts of information.  Murrow was not about that.  Murrow was about information for all, for the good of all. It's not a film to polarize or proselytize or indict, it's just to examine and to maybe build a platform for debate about these issues, and the responsibility of the journalist to find what's most important. Sure, we need to find out what's going on as a result of (recent hurricanes), but to what extent? To the extent that it puts a smokescreen over the (Alito) confirmation hearing or Gonzalez vs. Oregon, a physicians right’s (case)? There are so many issues out there that Murrow would have targeted, because they were so important to our daily lives.

Watching the film, I was thinking that George Clooney might be following in the steps of John Frankenheimer – someone who came up from TV and learned a lot of hard-and-fast things that he’s been able to bring to making films.

He knows this; he knows what he's doing; he knows how to do it. (He’s) very, very savvy and very certain and skilled, in addition to being who everybody thinks he is -- this charming star. It was great working with him, for all those reasons, because he brought a great energy, a playfulness, an excitement (and) very incisive intentions to this film. (Clooney has) not only a technical understanding, but a feel for the time -- and then as an actor, a generosity of spirit, knowing what actors need to do their best work, what kind of direction, or how much or how little, and also how to provide a safety net for them out there.  He was on top of it, really. He absolutely knows what he's doing.
 
People on the Left think the media are corporate tools; people on the Right think that Liberals control the media. I think that may just be because news has gotten so much shorter, that it’s easy to feel like the complexities of your thoughts about an issue weren’t covered. Did Murrow’s kind of journalism reach a higher level than what we have today?

I'm not sure  – there are journalism schools, which I hope and I think are teaching those ideals, those standards. But … what actually is journalism – is journalism saying 'Well, there were three reporters one had a spiral notebook and a pen, one was doing it just off the top of his head, and one was typing on a computer?' What does that mean? What's that? No, it should be something more inside the (news), (whereas now) journalism seems to be just, 'Let's get something out there that catches some kind of synapse, but ultimately dissolves.’ 
 
But I think it's happening.  I think that there's been a sea change. Blogging -- that's a frontier unto its own. The coverage of Katrina: CNN started to do something there, they started to call people on the carpet and look for (answers)– But that's only because they were there and they actually saw something. They actually saw something and said what they saw. They presented what they saw.  They didn't do any spin or anything like that. And that's what Murrow was great at.  He was just  … telling the story as he saw it, not as it should be told or (asking) ‘What's the agenda?’ Just … tell the story to the people.

When you signed up to play Murrow, did you have any idea you’d be getting grilled about your take on media ethics and broadcast journalism?

(Laughs) No. I think the movie speaks for itself and I'm really glad to talk about it, but I had no idea it was going to be just little old me in odd rooms like this.