The Oscar Dance

EW: At the same time, I haven't seen one interview with you for this movie.
Clooney It's closing in on two years since I've really done any interviews. Leatherheads bombed. And what occurred to me is that I did everything. I did the whistle-stop tour. What you realize is, when you're at a certain place in your career where people know you, it's not like you have to get known. I don't want to be more famous. You realize that movies are going to be successful or not based on the trailer and how it's sold and what people's perception of the movie is. No amount of going out there and trying to be funny on a talk show or doing covers of magazines is going to make any difference. I don't believe that's true for actors who are making their name. But once you get to that place, I find it to be sort of soul stealing.

EW: But then you just end up getting stupid questions on red carpets and marriage proposals at press conferences. At some point, don't you want an avenue to discuss your work intelligently?
Clooney I'll do the red carpets, but I'm not going to do the press conferences anymore. You focus on a few smart interviews and try to do them every once in a while and make them hard to get.

EW: Let's wrap up with a frequent-flier question. Window or aisle?
Clooney Always window for me, so I'm at least one person away from being automatically grabbed and touched [by fans]. You need a little buffer.
Farmiga Window. Because it's a nice head prop.
Kendrick Window. Which gets tricky when the person next to you is trying to sleep and you don't know them. I have actually been in the middle of crawling over a man that I did not know, thinking that I was stealth enough to get over him without waking him — and he woke up. He was looking at me as I was hovering over him.
Clooney''Not now, baby, relax!''

EW: And finally, how does it feel to know that no matter how many Oscar nominations this movie gets, it still won't make nearly as much money as Anna's other movie, New Moon?
Kendrick Yeah, take that, bitches!
Clooney [To Kendrick, sarcastically] How did it do? Did it do okay?

EW: George, are you Team Edward or Team Jacob, by the way?
Clooney I've gone right over that. I'm Team Anna

Piloting an Adaptation

Walter Kirn's keen-eyed novel Up in the Air was altered on its way to the screen. The movie contains more hope — and two great new women.

Jason Reitman knew when he sat down to adapt Walter Kirn's 2001 novel Up in the Air that challenge No. 1 would be moving the protagonist, Ryan Bingham, out of his own head. Though sharp and funny on the page, Bingham's first-person, stream-of-consciousness narration about his frequent-flier exploits just wouldn't translate cinematically. ''I had a character who spent his entire life alone on the road. I needed to give him people to talk to,'' says Reitman, who shares a writing credit with Sheldon Turner. ''Otherwise, this was going to be a very quiet movie.'' So he transformed the pill-popping party planner of the book into a sexy, feisty love interest for Bingham, and invented another female character, a spitfire colleague. It's thanks to these women that the film's Bingham reassesses his bachelor-for-life philosophy — which, in turn, imbues the movie with a brighter outlook than the source material. ''The book is about a man having a mental breakdown,'' Reitman says. ''Someone told me, 'It's about a guy who's losing it, and the movie's about a guy who finds it.''' That's a major alteration. How did Kirn feel about it? ''To me, the heart of the book is the main character and the setting. So all the DNA is there,'' Kirn says. ''When I see that still from the movie of George Clooney looking up at the departures boards with that puzzled, melancholic expression on his face, I see the character that I imagined—in a way that's almost spooky.''