Mixing business and pleasure

Clooney stars with Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air. Photo / Getty Images

In the movie business, film-makers and actors are always on the lookout for their next project. So as Jason Reitman and George Clooney met on several occasions while promoting their respective hit films, Juno and Michael Clayton, around the globe, Reitman decided that Clooney, whom he says "looks so good in a suit", should play another corporate type in his next movie.

Up in the Air is about a man who travels around America firing people. It was nothing for Reitman, an avid frequent flyer with invite-only Global Services status on United Airlines, to hop on a plane and go see the actor face to face.

"Jason came to Italy and handed the screenplay to me in my house," Clooney recalls. "I said, "You can stay here a couple of days and I'll read it after you're gone. First we can have dinner'. Then I actually ran upstairs and read it, and I came back down, threw it on table and said, 'I'll do it. Let's go eat pizza!' If I hated it, we were stuck with each other [for] a couple of days, so it was just as well."

Reitman laughs at the memory. "I like how a casual moment for George was one of the great moments of my life. When George read the screenplay, he connected with it.

You can see that in the film. When you stare straight into his eyes you can see this is one of the more vulnerable, emotional performances he's given."

Up in the Air marks a rare romantic role for Clooney, whose character, Ryan Bingham, meets and falls in love with a fellow frequent flying businessperson, Alex (Vera Farmiga) and looks set to change his ways. Well, maybe a little.

"Romantic comedies are hard to find," Clooney admits. "They were done so well in the 40s, 50s and 60s, but the few times I've done them, audiences have known how they're going to end. From the beginning I didn't think of this just being romantic, there are romantic underpinnings but there are also sad moments. When Jason Bateman, my boss in the film, starts talking about how many people Chrysler is laying off and saying, 'This is our time', there's something incredibly sad about that.

" I read the screenplay just before the big crash, so the film became less and less a comedy and more about real people. It was so timely we felt like we were at exactly the right moment to be making the film."

Initially the story, which is loosely based on Walter Kirn's novel, was a satirical take on modern society. "We're more disconnected than we've ever been," Reitman says. "We communicate on the phone, we have webchats, but we don't look into each other's eyes any more. We feel at home in airports and there's no sense of community."

He was going to have actors in the scenes of people being fired, but given the financial meltdown he decided to reach out to actual people who'd lost their jobs. He placed an ad saying he was making a documentary about job loss and was inundated with responses.

"We interviewed 100 people, we put 60 on film and 25 are in the finished movie. They were nervous at first, but the second we read the legal statement that they hear when they lose their jobs, they began to shudder, they began to cry and one girl broke into a rash across her neck. It was so real that it made for some very heartbreaking days. "It was the hardest directing I've ever done in my life."