It strikes me that both of you have managed to keep a certain level of mystery about yourselves despite all the scrutiny. I mean, Brad, you were just down there smoking a cigarette hunched behind a barrier.
PITT: [Picks up tape recorder and speaks directly into it] No, he wasn't! He wasn't smoking! Um... Honey! Honey, that was George! [Laughs]
But how do you manage that? How does it not ruin your day-to-day lives?
CLOONEY: You adjust your life, certainly. There are certain things you don't do, there are certain places you don't go, but then at some point you have to go out. You have to live, you know?
PITT: So you will see George laid out on the rocks in a Speedo later.
CLOONEY: I don't want to see anyone in a Speedo. Especially 70-year-old men. [Gestures to the beach, which is full of 70-year-old men in Speedos] You learn a lot about the aging process watching that. [Laughs]
Clearly the obsession with celebrity is a little out of control. From where I sit, it looks like you're the meat being thrown to the lions.
CLOONEY: Right. Well, we are always going to be that society that slows down to look at the car wreck on the side of the road. I think we're just in one of those places right now, and it seems to be focused on younger kids. Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and people like that. They'll get through it, but I wouldn't want to be growing up around that. If I were as famous as some of those kids who are on the magazines right now at 21 years old, I'd be shooting crack under my eyeball.
PITT: But being that it is our nature, you have to focus on other, more important issues too, because those [car wreck] tendencies can be very disruptive and aren't a good guide on how to live your life.
CLOONEY: No, it's a terrible guide.
So how do you get people to focus on the issues that matter to you — and manage to make a difference —without just distracting from the cause?
CLOONEY: It's interesting. Brad did it first and best — he went to Africa. Was it the Diane Sawyer show?
PITT: It was.
CLOONEY: You made this really interesting decision where you said, ''The cameras are going to follow me, so I'm going to go here. And wherever the cameras follow me they're going to see this.'' It was really smart. And I thought, Wow, here's a way to take this insatiable appetite and say, ''If you're going to take these photographs and follow us around, fair enough. But you're also going to have to go where it will provoke some thought about what else is going on in the world.'' It was a really smart play. And all of us have been taking a cue from that.
PITT: The idea was: We can't get out of the spotlight and they can't get in the spotlight, so let's equal that out a little bit.
NEXT PAGE: ''So if you're going to go and talk about poverty or AIDS in Africa or Darfur, you better know your s---. And you better know it better than any of the jackasses that are going to try and somehow make what you're trying to do [look] bad.''
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