VENICE: For George Clooney, it felt like second nature making wisecracks and sparring with Brad Pitt in their new action comedy “Wolfs” about two professional fixers begrudgingly forced to work together.

The high-profile production starring Hollywood’s two top leading men is one of the highlights of the 10-day Venice Film Festival, where it has its out-of-competition premiere on the glamorous Lido on Sunday night.

“It just felt from the minute I read the script, from the minute we got on the set, that sort of banter, the way we blast over each other every time, it just felt easy,” Clooney told a press conference ahead of the premiere.

The 63-year-star kept the wisecracks coming, telling reporters of his sidekick: “I’m much younger. I know I don’t look it but I’m much younger.” “He’s 74 and he’s lucky at this age to be still working,” Clooney joked of 60-year-old Pitt, grinning at his side.

The 81st edition of the world’s oldest film festival has been awash with stars this year, with the highly anticipated appearance of Clooney and Pitt preceded by the likes of Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett to Angelina Jolie — Pitt’s ex-wife.

In the Apple Studios production from US director Jon Watts — director of the “Spider-Man: Homecoming” trilogy — Clooney and Pitt are both called in to clean up after a crime, but soon find themselves over their heads as the situation spirals out of control.

Together, Clooney and Pitt have a palpable on-screen energy and easy rapport that the Coen brothers tapped in 2008’s “Burn After Reading”, and that was evident in the trilogy of heist films “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001-2007).

“In ‘Burn after Reading’ I had the supreme pleasure of shooting him (Pitt) in the face and so I thought we’d try again,” joked Clooney.

Pitt was more diplomatic: “I’ve got to say as I get older, just working with the people that I really enjoy spending time with has really become important to me.” The film — whose title references the fixer played by Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction” — gets only a limited theatrical release before going to streaming around the world on Apple TV+ September 27.

Clooney on Biden

Clooney, one of the Democratic Party’s leading fundraisers, was asked about his July New York Times opinion piece in which he urged President Joe Biden not to seek a reelection bid to make room for a younger candidate — which he did two weeks later.

“The person who should be applauded is the president who did the most selfless thing that anyone has done since George Washington,” said Clooney.

“All the machinations that got us there, none of that is going to be remembered. And it shouldn’t be,” he added. “For someone to say, ‘I think there’s a better way forward,’ all the credit goes to him.” Also premiering Sunday is Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” starring Adrien Brody, winner of the 2003 Academy Award for Roman Polanski’s war drama “The Pianist”.

In the ambitious, three-and-a-half-hour film, Brody — in a gut-wrenching performance that could bring him a Best Actor award at Venice — plays a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor, Lazlo Toth.

After emigrating to the United States, he meets a wealthy benefactor (Guy Pearce) who commissions him to build a huge religious and community centre, an imposing work of Brutalism, in a new test of psychological resistance that threatens to ruin Toth’s life.

“There were so many architects out of the Bauhaus that had so much talent and we didn’t ever get to see what they were planning to build, the futures they planned for and expected,” because of the war, Corbet said.

“This film, it’s dedicated to them, the artists who didn’t get to realise their visions,” he said. Brody spoke of his mother, New York photographer Sylvia Plachy who herself fled Hungary in 1956 after the revolution and whose subsequent work reflected her experiences.

“Much like Lazlo, she started again. She lost her home and pursued a dream of being an artist,” Brody said. “I understand a great deal about the repercussions of that on her life and her work as an artist,” he said. “Even though it’s fictional, it feels very real, very real to me.”

Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2024