The Descendants (2011 Alexander Payne)

The other great Hawaii film.

Ten years... Clooney (I think it's his best performance) lost the Oscar to Jean Dujardin, Payne to Hazanavicius, Kevin Tent to Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The screenplay won. It's very nicely shaded - you can't help thinking that part of the reason he's not selling the land is simply to deprive his wife's lover of commissions from sales of property that would be built there.

Amara Miller: "George is amazing. He’s a really, really fun guy. I mean he’s hilarious, of course! He’s really energetic and super playful. He definitely made me feel really welcome and I learned a lot from him. It was fantastic working with him on my first movie."

Shailene Woodley: "I’m not an actor who approaches films doing a lot of research. I do zero research... On this film, I thought a little about her back history, but I maybe spent an hour thinking about it, and that’s it. I think you get the most honest performances when an actor shows up to set with their lines memorized. That’s a very important thing that a lot of people seem to forget. You have a pre-conceived notion of what you want the scene to be, but once you get there, that goes out the window and it turns out to be a way that you never imagined. When you’re on set and you professionally listen to what the other actors have to say, then the emotion is naturally evoked, especially with this screenplay. So many times, you get a script and it says, “And then, the character cries,” and you read the lines and think, “That would never make me cry. Those lines are so untruthful.” But, with this script, if our characters were supposed to be emotional, we would be overly emotional because the words were so thought-provoking and emotion-provoking. My approach is just to be honest to the situation.... Someone asked me about George Clooney’s image, but he has no image. He has the image of what materialism has given him, but as a human being, he has no image because he is just so normal and so human. Talk about a professional. He’s a great actor because he’s a great actor, not because an editor makes him look good. I think a lot of people don’t realize that about him. I literally could talk about him for hours. It’s a dangerous subject."

'It's a dangerous subject.' I like that.

Shailene had been in lots and lots of TV, things like The O.C. and Without a Trace but this was her film breakthrough, which led to The Spectacular Now, Divergent, The Fault In Our Stars, Big Little Lies and The Mauritanian.