The star of ‘Suburbicon’ also called for a new president: “Anybody to be the next president of the United States, right away! ”
George Clooney’s new film Suburbicon has its world premiere in Venice on Saturday night. The script, which Clooney and writing partner Grant Heslov started working on during Donald Trump’s campaign, combines an old Coen Brothers script about murderous knuckleheads with the real-life story of the Myers, an African American family that faced constant race riots after moving into an all-white neighborhood in the 1950s.
In Suburbicon, Matt Damon plays a workingman whose life drastically changes after a home invasion goes terribly wrong. The once-quiet neighborhood is never the same, and everyone blames the African American family who just moved in, for the wave of violence. A fence is built around their home, and white neighbors begin to riot daily outside their property. Julianne Moore plays Damon’s wife, as well as her twin sister, and Noah Jupe plays his son. Oscar Isaac plays a curious insurance claims inspector, a role that Clooney was slated to play in the original Coen Brothers script.
“The genesis of the screenplay started when I was watching a lot of speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities,” said Clooney in Venice. “I started looking around at other times in our history when we’ve unfortunately fallen back to these things.
And I found this story that happened in Levittown, Pennslyvania.”“The idea of juxtaposing these two was to say, you’re looking in the wrong direction if you’re blaming this African American family for all your woes,” he said. “Some of us are able to speak to the idea of white men feeling that they’re losing their privilege and blaming it all on minorities. And of course, it has nothing to do with that. We’ve seen it growing up.”
The filmmakers acknowledged the film, unfortunately, is as timely as ever. “It’s kind of the definition of white privilege when you’re riding around your neighborhood on a bicycle covered in blood murdering people and the African American family is getting blamed for it,” said Damon. “We couldn’t have predicted obviously when we were filming these race riots, that we would have something like Charlottesville. It does speak to the fact that these issues have not and are not going away until there’s an honest reckoning in our country.”
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