The first full-length feature from 50-year-old US director Alexander Payne since he won an Oscar for Sideways seven years ago, The Descendants is highly anticipated, even by Hollywood’s standards. The heartwarming/heartbreaking tale of Matt King, a lawyer whose unfaithful wife is in a coma from which she will never wake, has been tipped as an Oscar-winning role for its star, 50-year-old George Clooney. The movie has already picked up a 2012 Golden Globe for best drama, with Clooney nabbing the best actor award.

With the recent news that the seven most successful movies in the US last year were sequels (yawn), we think a film as insightfully humane as The Descendants deserves extra-special attention. We caught up with Clooney and Payne to delve inside the movie.

When did the two of you first meet?
Alexander Payne: It was in 2003.

George Clooney: For Sideways.

AP: You arrived on your motorcycle…

GC: We had a long, long, long lunch and talked. Then we left and you said, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’ Then I left and said, ‘I have no idea what he’s doing.’ And then he gracefully passed. And I built a doll and stuck a few pins in it. That worked for six or seven years. Then I got a call from Bryan Lourd saying that Alexander wanted to talk, almost two years ago. I was in Toronto doing two films there and we met at a nice Italian restaurant, had a great night, and he said ‘I’m gonna send over a script, let me know what you think’. I kind of said I’d do it before I even read it, because I wanted to work with Alexander so much.

The author of The Descendants novel, Kaui Hart Hemmings, said she always imagined George as Matt King. Alexander, was that in your mind as you were writing?
AP: Yes, it was. Right when I decided to adapt the book, I called Kaui to ask a bunch of questions, including, ‘Is there any actor you’ve seen in your mind’s eye that could play Matt?’ She said ‘George Clooney’ right off the bat. I said, ‘Great, let’s get him.’

George, what attracted you to the role? Did shooting in the tropical Island paradise of Hawaii have anything to do with it?
GC: Tough job! ‘Work with Alexander. The bad news is you have to shoot in Hawaii!’ The funniest thing was that Alexander said he was going to send me a script, and there was always this fear that I was going to be in the first really bad Alexander Payne film, because I hadn’t read the script! Instead it was the opposite. I thought it was…

AP: The only good one!

GC: [Laughs] I thought it was the best screenplay I’d read in a long, long time. There’s not much that happens in the film, in a weird way. When you look for trailers for this film, it’s very hard to explain it, because it unfolds so slowly, so beautifully. It takes its time. It’s hard to describe the screenplay. You start reading it and you’re involved from the minute you start.
By the end, you’re really taken by it.