George Clooney on making 'Leatherheads'

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GREENVILLE, S.C. -- After talking about "Leatherheads" and tweaking the script for several years, George Clooney finally had to get a move on."I couldn't do it another year later," says Clooney, 46. "I was getting too old; I had to do it quick."In the comedy "Leatherheads," Clooney plays Dodge Connolly, a pro football player desperate to win some respect -- and income -- for his ragtag sport in 1925. He recruits Princeton gridiron standout Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to play for his team, a move that attracts crowds but also draws a reporter, Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger), eager to expose Rutherford's supposed heroism in the Great War as a sham.Clooney, who also directed the film, says he and Zellweger had been looking for an opportunity to work together for a long time. Although Lexie seems to favor Carter, she and Dodge are soon shooting off sparks."They were the kinds of parts where we felt like we were at the right time in our careers and the right place," Clooney says during a press conference at a hotel in Greenville. "We really felt like we wanted to do a film together, and you only get one shot at it, so we thought this was the right one.""We talked about doing this a long, long time ago -- five years ago," says Zellweger, 38. "It wasn't ready. And then he went off and got busy with other things."Clooney says he looked forward to the film's screwball-romantic-comedy scenes with Zellweger."We thought we would do that -- we knew how to do it -- and I forgot that I was also gonna have to play football," he says. "That was a surprise. I was changing the rules: Don't hit the director.""Leatherheads" was shot last year in South Carolina and North Carolina."I don't think we really understood how pretty it would be and welcoming and how easy it was gonna be to work here," says Clooney."I grew up in the South, sort of. We call Kentucky the South. ... There is a difference in the way people are accepted here. It's very open and fun."And so you felt very much ... like you were at a backyard party a lot of the time. You didn't feel as if you were strangers intruding at all."Clooney wasn't bothered by having star-struck locals hanging around."I was in a little town in Kentucky, and they shot a miniseries called 'Centennial' there when I was 12, 13 years old," he says. "I remember following Raymond Burr around everywhere."Clooney, whose fondness for basketball has been widely reported, says he didn't get the chance to play organized football as a youth."As you can tell by my physique, I was the greatest football player ever," he jokes. "We didn't have a football team in Augusta High School. We were a tiny little school. We had 23 people in my high-school class."I was, honest to God, the center on my basketball team at 5-11. We were 1 and 25 my senior year. We played everybody's homecoming because everybody wants to win their homecoming. Every time we'd go to an away game there was a banner, 'Homecoming!'"We had a band. The only thing they knew how to play was the theme song from 'The Pink Panther.' When we'd go to an away game, we had to bring the band. It was humiliating enough because we were going to lose by 60 or 70 points. But we had our band that can't play anything."Despite his lack of pigskin experience, Clooney was intrigued by the backdrop of the early days of pro football."The reason I was interested was because you're always looking for a different venue," he says. "Not just for comedy, but almost any film it's hard to find anything original. And really, you hadn't seen this since 'Jim Thorpe: All American.' "(Contact Knoxville News Sentinel film critic Betsy Pickle at pickle(at)knews.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)