Why did you use actual archival footage of Senator Joe McCarthy? We wanted to let him use his own words. We thought that was the smartest thing to do because there's a group out there that are entertaining the thought that McCarthy was now right and Murrow was wrong. We thought it was important to be very careful with the facts. If you had an actor that played him perfectly everyone would say you're making him too much of a buffoon. You couldn't really actually believe someone could act like that.

How difficult was it to get the rights to the footage that you used?
CBS (US TV network) was very helpful. Most of the stuff comes from their archives. Grant Heslov [co-writer/producer] had to send researchers into the archives to find footage which was in a state of disarray so there was restoration that had to happen. It was tedious work. Grant was doing so much research I thought it was going to kill him. There was actually some footage with my Aunt Rosemary (Clooney), which we didn't use. There was also some stuff with Gina Lollabridgida, where she's talking about fashion with (President) Nixon.

How would you describe your style as a director?
I think silence is incredibly fascinating. If you watch the original film Fail Safe, where Henry Fonda is sitting in the room waiting for the phone to ring to find out whether or not Moscow is gone, there is nothing but silence and stillness. To me, that is deafening now in an MTV generation, where everyone is anxious to keep everyone's attention constantly. I find that tension can come out of quiet and still. I'm dubious, at best, at acting and directing, but I'm a good casting director. Sam [Rockwell] was the perfect guy to play Chuck Barris [in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind] because I needed a guy who was always likeable, and Sam, in everything he does, is likeable - even when he does some dastardly things. With this, I needed someone who felt like they had the weight of the world on their shoulders and David [Strathairn] is that actor. You felt as if he was carrying democracy up a hill. This movie can't be made without David Strathairn. Grant and I called him from Italy and had never met him before. We didn't know he could do it until three days before shooting when we did the camera test. That was the first time we saw him as Murrow and both Grant and I high-fived each other.

Do you think that Edward R Murrow's speech 'we cannot use fear as a weapon' is applicable to what's going on in the world today?
It's a constant vigil. We do this every 30 years. We panic! Something big happens and we panic. We got bombed at Pearl Harbor and we rounded up all the Japanese Americans and stuck 'em in a detention camp, which is not really very democratic of us. But we do come to our senses. It wouldn't have been fun to be a Muslim American in the United States weeks after 9/11. It's probably not great to have been one of the detainees for three and a half years and then set free because they had no evidence against you. The Patriot Act is certainly a concern; all of those things are dangerous. I think more important than me preaching is that we as a nation have to have the debate. I don't know what the answers are. I just know that if the idea is to say talking about it makes you unpatriotic, I've got to call your bluff on that.

You recently cancelled a planned appearance on the news show Dateline. Why?
I did it on purpose because someone cancelled at the last minute after pitching us a show. Their pitch was, they wanted an earnest discussion about the difficulties of entertainment pushing news off the air. Stone Phillips [Dateline anchor] was going to do it and I thought, 'That's an interesting thing,' and they tied it with other appearances on the Today Show. Then, with a couple of days left, we got a call and he [the producer] cancelled it for an Eva Longoria piece, which is fine. I wanted to point out that it seemed awfully interesting because we were doing a film about the dangers of entertainment constantly pushing off news and then we were pushed off for entertainment! I fired off a letter which said, 'Listen, if you told me you were pulling the plug on our show because we were an entertainment story and you had a news piece that you wanted I would applaud your stance, but you didn't. By the way I don't mind any of those things. I find that entertainment on those shows at night isn't such a bad thing because they're magazine shows; they're not fully news shows, but investigative shows. You can do a piece on an actor; I think that's fine.

Do you think the media has too much power?
When you have a man who has 40 million people watching him, like Murrow did; they had an awful lot of power. I don't think you'll ever that kind of power again with any one person, which may be good - if that one person is Bill O'Reilly, then maybe that's a bad thing! I saw some teeth in the handling of Hurricane Katrina, which I thought was nice to see. This administration is the first one in a long time that gets to take a pass on responsibility because you can hide behind patriotism. I grew up in a family where my father went after Jimmy Carter during the OPEC nations raising the price of gas; he went after Gerald Ford for pardoning Richard Nixon. He believes that your responsibility - not just your right, but your duty - is to question authority, period, and all government.

What are your feelings about the production studios like Warner Brothers having their own blacklists at one time, and is there a blacklist of actors and producers etc today?
The nice thing is that Hollywood's best apologies [for blacklisting] are to do films like this one, or The Crucible or Guess Who's Coming To Dinner during the civil rights movement, or the Young Lions after World War II. It seems that those might be better ways of apologising than just sending out an apology letter. As we were waltzing into war in Iraq very few people, especially the Democratic senators, were asking tough questions; they were all taking a pass. Some of us actors were getting hit pretty hard for being asked questions and answering them honestly and put on the front of magazines that called us traitors. The difference now is nobody is bringing us in front of the House of Representatives investigating us. It is nowhere near as powerful as it was during Murrow's time. There is no such thing as a blacklist anymore. For anybody who would blacklist you, there are 50 people that would hire you now.

Your next big venture is a Las Vegas casino. When is the projected opening?
Two years from this December. It's going to be fun. I'm really excited about it. The whole place is called Las Ramblas and it's based on the road in Barcelona. We have this romantic vision of putting on a suit, getting dressed up, going down to the casino and having a big band playing, having dinner and pushing the tables back and people dancing. It's the way I grew up watching Rosemary sing at those places. I've found some people who are crazy enough to let us get away with it. We're going to take 25 per cent (of my profits) and put it into the Make Poverty History campaign. It's a good thing to do.