George Clooney is talking straight about why film work has drifted from Los Angeles and what might pull it back. He is not buying the tariff idea, and he is not pretending the problem does not exist. He says President Trump is “not wrong” that productions are exiting Hollywood, but he argues the answer sits with a federal tax rebate rather than a blanket penalty on foreign made films.
“Look, he’s not wrong about the idea that businesses have left Los Angeles. They have, and in droves,” Clooney said in an interview with The Associated Press at the New York Film Festival premiere of “Jay Kelly” on Monday. That line set the tone. Acknowledgement first, then a practical fix.
He pointed to the places where filming is booming and made the math simple. “What we need is the… tax incentives that you get here in New York,” the 64 year old actor said. “They’re building studios here because there’s so much work. We need those,” the Academy Award winner said. In other words, productions chase value. If New York or Louisiana puts better numbers on the table, the crews follow.
His comments landed only hours after the president renewed a call to slap a 100 percent tariff on films made outside the United States. “Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing ‘candy from a baby,’” Trump wrote in a social media post. Clooney did not debate the frustration. He redirected it.
Clooney said rather than a tariff on foreign made movies, a tax rebate would help the effort to encourage projects produced in the Golden State. “If he really wants to fix it, then we should talk about a federal incentive passed to keep people working in Los Angeles,” Clooney said of Trump. That is aimed at the people who feel the shift most.
“Because there are tons of below the line people — grips and cinematographers — who are losing their jobs because work is going away, leaving to… New York, and Louisiana and places like that, but also to London and other places,” he said. “So it’d be nice if we had a federal sort of rebate,” he said.