In the grand tradition of Hollywood types taking mild swipes at each other in the press, George Clooney lightly roasted Quentin Tarantino for a perceived slight the director made about the actor’s movie star bona fides.
In a new interview with GQ alongside friend/co-star Brad Pitt, Clooney and Pitt were asked about the directors they’ve worked with most over the years and whether they were ever jealous of the other’s work with certain filmmakers. Pitt, of course, has worked with Tarantino on numerous occasions — and won his Oscar for Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood— and Clooney noted he, too, worked with Tarantino on From Dusk Till Dawn before explaining why he was “a little irritated” with the director.
“Quentin said some shit about me recently,” Clooney said. “He did some interview where he was naming movie stars, and he was talking about you [Pitt] and somebody else, and this guy goes, ‘Well, what about George?’”
Clooney claimed that Tarantino replied that he was not a movie star, adding: “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.” (This apparently elicited a hearty chuckle from Pitt.)
While the remark may have lightly bruised Clooney’s ego, the actor seemed to take it with his usual good-natured charm: “So now I’m like, all right, dude, fuck off. I don’t mind giving him shit. He gave me shit.”
(It’s unclear where exactly Tarantino’s original comments came from. Tarantino both directed and co-starred with Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn, casting himself as the brother of Clooney’s character — a little fact Clooney has ribbed Tarantino about in the past.)
That said, Clooney appeared to have some genuinely harsher words for a different filmmaker he worked with in the Nineties — David O. Russel, with whom Clooney reportedly had a very contentious relationship with on the set of 1999’s Three Kings.
“The older you get, time allotment is very different,” Clooney said. “Five months out of your life is a lot. And so it’s not just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go do a really good film, like Three Kings, and I’m going to have a miserable fuck like David O. Russell making my life hell. Making every person on the crew’s life hell.’ It’s not worth it. Not at this point in my life. Just to have a good product.”
