TONY GILROY

Michael Clayton director finds the devil inside

By ROB TURBOVSKY

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In Michael Clayton, writer/director Tony Gilroy shows a remarkable gift for understatement that doesn't at all betray the fact that he spent the last five years scripting that supremely seizure-inducing series of Bourne films. After 15 years of writing movies for everyone from Taylor Hackford to Michael Bay and Paul Greengrass, Gilroy steps into the director's chair for the first time with a surprising amount of assuredness. Directing a movie is hard enough, but doing it when your cast includes one of the most acclaimed directors of the last 40 years (Sydney Pollack) and a major star who's also a pretty good filmmaker in his own right (George Clooney), well, that has to be fairly nerve-wracking. Amazingly, Gilroy pulls it off. His story of a law firm "fixer" with a newly troubled conscience is an absorbing film with layers of moral complexity and (rare in the movies) a profound humanity.

You're one of six credited writers on Armageddon. Is there anything in that movie you want to say is firmly yours? The explosions in space?

No, I don't want to take any credit for the last 60 pages of that film. My involvement was very early on; I really did a lot of housekeeping. There was a really messy script and all of a sudden, there was a start date.

What did I do on Armageddon? I did all the oil rig. I did all the characters. I set up Steve Buscemi. I did all the housekeeping at the beginning to get everything in good shape. What happened once they got to the asteroid, I couldn't tell you.

On to better movies, then.

Please.

There are no real villains and no real heroes in this movie. What do you think about that? Like the character of Karen, for example. It would've been easy to make this a typical, faceless corporate villain. We're not quite rooting for her, but we definitely understand.

I have a great deal of empathy for that character. She's what passes for a villain, in a way, in this sort of a thriller film, but I have great affection for her problem.

I think, in a way, in talking about the film over the last couple weeks, I've come to realize that I wrote a lot of movies like this -- even uncredited movies. I've worked on a lot of films in this genre. I think this was a place for me to put in a lot of the moments and a lot of the scenes that you never get to put in all those other films, where the villain arrives and they're the villain and their motivation is presented to you whole.

There's no mystery about who's doing anything in this film. It's really about how they do it and why they do it. And as a dramatist, the most interesting thing for me is the moment that usually gets passed by, which is the moment of decision. You're actually watching people make those decisions in front of you.

You don't really have a chance a lot of times. You're so urged and so trained and so expected to be urgent all the time and propulsive all the time, you pass by a lot of those moments.

This was a chance to really watch people bent to the wheel and make the mistake and go too far.

Is there a common thread throughout your work, from Devil's Advocate through the Bourne movies and to this, about people who lose their moral compass -- or turn it off -- and their quest to get it back?

Yeah. I'm much more aware of that. I hadn't really ever had to go out and talk about my work, the library of it, until coming out to sell this film. There is a common question that seems to rise up in all these films. People keep saying, "The Bourne films have all this external paranoia, Michael Clayton has all this external paranoia and Devil's Advocate is paranoid. What's the attraction in that?" I don't see it that way. The problem is the villain that's inside all of those people.

Devil's Advocate -- my major contribution to that was making it his father, putting it inside him, making it a biological problem. It's internal. Bourne is completely internal. Bourne has much more to fear of himself than he does of what's outside him. Michael Clayton is very much the same way, so there is a thread that runs through these films.

Do you think that moral ambiguity has been absent from [recent] movies?

Totally, yeah. It gets beaten out of you, anyway. Movies are supposed to round-out, and the more things cost, the more the people that are paying for the film want the film to appeal to everyone. Well, if you're going to appeal to everyone, then everyone has to understand it, everyone has to get the jokes, everyone has to feel there's closure. Those things are the enemies of complex material.