Original title: Telluride: ‘Jay Kelly’ Team on Clooney and Stardom, Sandler’s Soulful Turn and Crudup’s Crazy Scene
Due to illness, George Clooney couldn’t make it to this year’s Telluride Film Festival for the North American premiere of Jay Kelly, a film that centers on a movie star (Clooney) who experiences an existential crisis that prompts him to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to Europe to see his daughter and accept a career tribute from a film festival, and his “team,” who are expected to drop everything to support him. But a large coterie of Clooney’s collaborators on the film were in town — among them co-writer/director Noah Baumbach, actors Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup and Patrick Wilson, and composer Nicholas Britell — and basked in the warm reception and awards chatter that greeted the Netflix title at its four festival screenings, two of which followed career tributes to Baumbach. On Sunday, following one of those screenings, I sat down with the aforementioned group for a wide-ranging Q&A. We discussed why Baumbach and Emily Mortimer wrote the part of Kelly with Clooney in mind