George Clooney, Julia Roberts + More Attend The Press Conference For TICKET TO PARADISE
George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Kaitlyn Dever, Maxime Bouttier, Billie Lourd, Lucas Bravo and Writer/ Director Ol Parker Attend The Worldwide Press Conference For TICKET TO PARADISE, the brand new Romantic Comedy from Ol Parker, set for release in Cinemas on September 20!
Academy Award® winners George Clooney and Julia Roberts reunite on the big screen as exes who find themselves on a shared mission to stop their lovestruck daughter from making the same mistake they once made. From Working Title, Smokehouse Pictures and Red Om Films, Ticket to Paradise is a romantic comedy about the sweet surprise of second chances.
Hosted by Edith Bowman, the Worldwide Press Conference, that took place Virtually, saw George Clooney and Julia Roberts together since they starred together in 2016’s Money Monster. Here they talk with the rest of the cast about their chemistry, working with their young cast and working with Ol Parker who reveals why it was them he had to have in the film…
Edith Bowman – Am I right in thinking that you wrote this, with Julia and George, in mind?
Ol Parker – You’re entirely right, and it was only them. We wouldn’t be sitting here, we wouldn’t have made a film. If it wasn’t, then we’d still be writing letters going, You don’t understand. This needs to be you. So yeah, and it was conceived for them and written for them. And I begged them to do it and they took mercy on me.
George Clooney – In fairness, he had some, some compromising photographs. (laughs)
Edith Bowman – Thankfully, you said yes, it is wonderful to see you guys on screen together. Julia, what was it you connected to the script? What kind of jumped out at you both for this part in this film?
Julia Roberts – Just the chance to be snarky with George, really jumped out at me.Really jumped out at me just to see him just so pathetically in love with me. And I’m clearly moved on.
George Clooney – It’s obviously about being about a man in love, had to deal with a horrible woman.
Edith Bowman – David. I mean, what was it about the character you were looking forward to playing?
George Clooney – What was so important to me was to be able to work with the the queen of sitcoms, the queen of romantic comedies. But she couldn’t take the job, so I worked with Julia. Oh, that’s right. That’s where I went. I went there.
Julia Roberts – And you gave just enough time that I thought I was free and clear. It’s been two days of this.
Edith Bowman – And we get to watch you on screen and it’s glorious.
George Clooney – He was three inches taller when we started the film… (laughs)
Ol Parker – Any time you guys want to work over here waiting.
Edith Bowman – Well, is this chemistry? It’s chemistry with all these different characters throughout the film. And that chemistry has got to start with your daughter, with Lily, with you, Kaitlyn, and it’s beautiful because you have scenes, you know, with mom and dad. You also have seen with scene as well. Talk a little bit about Lilly in that character and working with these guys.
Kaitlyn Dever – I mean, it was just the best. It was immediately. So, you know, it’s kind of interesting as an actor when you’re thrown into, you know, having a relationship with someone on screen or meeting your best friend for the first time. And it’s really special when it’s so easy and immediate and knowing you guys and getting to know you is just so special.
Edith Bowman – Then you got a mate with you as well. You know, we’ve got to have that kind of nice friendship already that’s going to help and be lovely to get the chance to work together again.
Billie Lourd – Oh is the best. Just the best is the best. I loved it.
Kaitlyn Dever – All the time.
Billie Lourd – Adventures all the time. Great Barrier Reef, Stinger suits, I’ve never looked better in my life than anything I see with just this little sideshow in my face showing. And I only do that. I don’t know. Actually, I would. I should have worn that today, too. But I mean, I know I’ve been good. We all should have done a big stinger suit day.
Edith Bowman – Yeah, I think everybody needs a Wren in their life, to be honest, because she’s a great character.
Billie Lourd – She’s a good person. No, she’s not.
Kaitlyn Dever – She is!
Billie Lourd – I don’t know. She is underneath it all, underneath all the bracelets and sanity. But I would love to have a Wren in my life. I would love to have a Lily in my life. Yeah, everyone needs everyone needs a Wren, she’s the ultimate third wheel queen.
Edith Bowman – Talk about Paul, because you get the chance to kind of I don’t think there’s real comedy, physical comedy in this in this role as well. Was that a lot of fun to play with you, given much kind of freedom to to kind of improvise with that as well?
Lucas Bravo – I think the beauty of this character, first of all, it seems like this Paul went through his entire life without any trauma. And, you know, he has the innocence and is so naive, you can go full on. It’s like a 14 year old trapped in a 30 something body. So I could really go full on and and then Ol allowed me to improvise and give me so much room to try things. And then George and Julia were just, you know, following and helping me navigate the instinct and we just created, like crazy scene. You know, the character wasn’t really like this to begin with. And like, the kissing scene in the plane, I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe how we kissed with Julia. And we’re just laughing like, normal, and Ol was like, do it again. That was. That was good.
George Clooney – Julia wanted to do it again.
Julia Roberts – It was in my contract.
Edith Bowman – I’m not sure I trust you fly a plane, though. That might be my only concern. But on the flip side of that, Gede is kind of this almost worldly wise character really. He’s an old soul in a way. He sees things in a really kind of beautiful, honest way. Would you agree?
Maxime Bouttier – Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he’s a he comes from Bali. He’s a seaweed farmer, you know. And I think that in itself, like he’s very connected to the nature around him. And yeah, I mean, he’s a Prince Charming as Ol put it.
Ol Parker – A very organic one.
Edith Bowman – George and Julia, one of the funniest moments of the film. And there’s a lot of them are the outtakes at the end where you can see the camaraderie between you both. You’ve been friends for many years. Can you tell us some anecdotes about how the friendship came about, how your relationship has evolved over the years?
Julia Roberts – We met for Ocean’s Eleven.
George Clooney – We met, sat down with Steven Soderbergh. When we started working, we sat on the floor of a hotel and made jokes for about 5 hours. We did said, okay, let’s start. Yeah, it was I mean, for us it’s always been fairly easy, you know. And so when you get sent a script and you just go, I mean, I remember after you said it to both Julia and I at the same time and I called Julia. Of those. Have you read this yet? Because I’m reading right now and I said it only works if you do it. And she said, save that year. And then, you know, luckily it worked out. So it was, I think we were very lucky in that sense. But, you know, it’s fun to work with friends… And Julia.
Julia Roberts – You know, this is separation anxiety. That’s what you’re doing and you know that I’m about to get on an airplane and so you’re pushing me away
George Clooney – Yeah, yes I am.
Edith Bowman – I was about to say, you always leave us wanting more. Because it’s that thing where you leave, you don’t work together constantly.
Julia Roberts – He’s trying to leave me, not wanting anything ever again from him.
George Clooney – That’s my plan.
Julia Roberts – Yep.
Edith Bowman – Comedy is very much a genre that you seem so comfortable performing in. Do you find it comes naturally to, you know.
Billie Lourd – Yeah. I grew up with the funniest woman of all time, my mom. And so not being funny would just mean that I was not accepted in my family. So I kind of needed to be funny to survive.
Edith Bowman – Yeah, adapt or be an outcast.
Billie Lourd – Yeah, or get thrown out of the house. (laugh)
Edith Bowman – Films such as Exotic Marigold Hotel. Mamma Mia and now Ticket to Paradise have such a nice balance of humour, drama, memorable characters and a bit of silliness. What inspires you to make movies like this, and what is the hardest part of making these films?
Ol Parker – I think that’s very nice. Thank you. I don’t know. It’s it is just like going to lovely places and working with friends and the hard it there isn’t really hard. It’s fun. It’s an incredible privilege. I love what I do and I get to hang with these guys and just sit there at the monitor and eat biscuits and watch them be amazing. And in a lovely place, there’s just nothing better in the world.
Edith Bowman – But it’s important for those the films you make that do have that kind of, you know, the light and shade.
Ol Parker – And I think you don’t get light if you don’t have shade. There’s no weariness. Does that showing with those open with it without darkness. And so you got to you know, I killed Meryl in Mamma Mia, you know what I mean? That you’ve got to kind of find ways to show that sadness in order to be optimistic at the end is not just glib and don’t worry, be happy. So yeah, I think you have to kind of go there a little bit and then hopefully make people smile at the end.
Edith Bowman – How did it feel to become George Clooney’s son in law and Julia Roberts lover, respectively?
Maxime Bouttier – When I got the call, I got the part. I was just over the moon, to be honest, to be working with George and have like big chunks of dialog with him. And yeah, just, just really thankful and it was just a crazy experience.
Ol Parker – There was a point after I’d cast Max where I called him and he just sounded a bit nervous for the first time because he’s not as confident as he should be. And I was like are you alright?. And he said, I’ve been watching George’s films. He’s incredible. I was like, stop watching them.
Lucas Bravo – It’s a weird feeling as I just sort of movie. So I’m starting to realize what happened when I, when I got the call, it just went in through, you know, this, this with all the dimensions and and everything. I didn’t call my parents. I didn’t tell anyone. I just went straight to work for a while and everything happened like a blink of an eye. And yesterday I just started realizing what this was. So I guess if you ask me again in a couple of months, I’d be able to answer.
Edith Bowman – Kaitlyn, what attracted you to the film. What was the attraction of play Lily?
Julia Roberts – Go on you can say it, being George Clooney’s daughter.
Kaitlyn Dever – I mean yes that was not an added element for sure, George and Julia I guess. But I guess I’d never done a rom com before. And I think I’m always looking to do something different and work a different part of my brain. And I think this script was immediately such a good time. And I knew that that would mean a really good time on set and making the movie. And it’s, it’s a really special, special read and you know, Ol is just so talented and yeah, it was just really great.
Edith Bowman – One of the things I love about the fact that she’s kind of gives that strength to the girls watching it, to kind of make decisions for themselves.
Kaitlyn Dever – You do what you want, do what you feel, follow, follow your heart. And you know, she’s someone that I really admire because she had so much expectation and pressure that she put on herself and then really has, you know, finds perspective throughout the film and allows herself to do that, which I think is really special.
Edith Bowman – George and Julia, this is your fifth on screen collaboration. Is it a shorthand at this point? Do you work together off camera too or do you not need to? Is it just a case of working up? And you’ve got this you know each other so well.
George Clooney – We know each other pretty well.
Julia Roberts – We know each other pretty well.
Ol Parker – The only issue they had was this one scene where they have an argument, and George was going for it, and Julia was just not, and it’s like the only note I gave her in the whole three months, I was like, Julia, what’s happening here? And I just want to be mean to George. You’ve got to let him have it.
Julia Roberts – And then you couldn’t hold me back.
George Clooney – When the dam broke, it was all over.
Edith Bowman – Unleash the beast.
George Clooney– Ticket to Paradise, was filmed in Australia. Were there any not so paradise moments in Australia, like possible problems with massive spiders or snakes?
George Clooney – Everything’s huge.
Julia Roberts – Everything’s trying to kill you. Yeah.
George Clooney – There’s a little frog like that [gestures with hand]. Don’t touch it. It will kill you.
Julia Roberts – Yeah, a seashell. no that’s actually something that will kill you.
George Clooney – There was that you had the world’s smallest Jellyfish, and they’re like, you know what? They’ll kill you. Yeah.
Edith Bowman – You all spent some time in the water?
George Clooney– Well yeah, Ticket to Paradise….
Julia Roberts – Yeah. Ticket to the hospital. (laugh)
Edith Bowman – Was it restricted, you know, with Covid stuff and all that. What was the kind of reality, I guess you bubble for filming?
Ol Parker – And then before Christmas it was two weeks quarantine and then there was no Covid, It was great. But then they opened the borders on the 24th of December I think, and then it got tricky after that. And then I think they weren’t necessarily ready for Omicron, that started just then. Yeah. So it all got very chaotic.
George Clooney – It’s important to also remember that, you know, what we got to do in this compared to what everyone else was going through is nothing, you know, I mean, the people of Australia, the citizens of Australia really put their head down and got through this. They really took a big sacrifice. And had we in the United States done that, we would have had 900,000 more people alive today. So what they did was incredibly brave and very hard on their economy. And so for us coming in, that’s nothing. You know, we just sort of got to step in and we had some inconveniences, but they went through a long, hard slog. So we were very honored to be around and be with people who are dealing with things very seriously.
Edith Bowman – So, yeah, there’s real pride, though, for people when you do come to where they live and where they, you know, they’re home to come and film. The people of Queensland are immensely grateful for you guys coming to filming because you are drawing attention to that area. And there’s someone who follows that question up with wanting to ask about your experience of filming in Queensland. You guys want to pick up on that. Billie, what was your experience of the shoot and filming?
Billie Lourd – Tim Tams Forever! (laughter) It was one of the most incredible places I’ve ever been able to spend time in and being there with my family. It was just, as the kids say, a core memory. I made my kid a little book of it because he won’t remember because he’s a year old. But I’d like to force him to remember because it was incredible. And I slapped him on a plane there and jet lag with teething and breastfeeding and quarantining. But it was one of the most incredible few months of my life. It was awesome.
Edith Bowman – And that’s got to do with the crew, with the cast…
Billie Lourd – The cast, with the Tim Tams, the location.
Edith Bowman – What was it like to work with Ol Parker?
Julia Roberts – Was so great. He’s so gentle and funny and confident and brave. And I think that.
Lucas Bravo – Moment for the emotion, it’s a confronting moment for him.
Julia Roberts – I know, I know. But it’s something that they are probably that this was actually something being about this is. It’s true and I mean, you see, we’re an unruly bunch and.
George Clooney – Herding cats.
Julia Roberts – He just, he understood us as individuals and really knew how to shepherd us in this really beautiful way. And I think it shows.
George Clooney – You know, you want me to say something. Say something more nice about him. Now, listen, the truth is this. We were very lucky. He wrote a beautiful script, and he showed up and he literally got this group. And he’s going to have to figure out a way to make us all, you know, pay attention. And. And it was nothing but fun and gentle. And everyone really. There’s not a bad day on the set. So that’s now that’s a very rare thing. So it’s a great compliment.
Edith Bowman – I want to ask specifically about the club pub scene with the dancing? Was there music playing whilst you were doing that? Because a lot of the time when those types of scenes there isn’t, you know, the music hasn’t being cleared in advance and things like that, but that was all done in advance.
Ol Parker – Jump Around is George’s go to.
Edith Bowman – Is it!?
George Clooney – Yeah. I requested House of Pain.
Ol Parker – Although it’s so expensive, I did promise them that it would be under a minute long and it comes in at one minute before seconds. Oh, which is another million dollars. But it is so good that they they wouldn’t they didn’t make me cut the 4 seconds.
Edith Bowman – Wow.
Ol Parker – I guaranteed it would be 59 seconds or less.
Julia Roberts – They were just 5 seconds of George doing the Running Man. They could not be parted with.
Edith Bowman – You guys do drunk so well too, it’s brilliant and hungover as well…
George Clooney – I’ve been studying for years.
Edith Bowman – How did that scene in particular take to shoot like that?
Ol Parker – Couple of hours. You’ve got to commit, you know. I mean, so you get those cameras, you’ve vaguely and then you go for it. Yes. And it was fun to see.
George Clooney – These three young ins sitting there and that we were literally Julia. I just went, okay. Light it up. here we go. They were like this. On the first take their mouths were on the floor.
Ol Parker – We had a camera on them and they were just watching.
George Clooney – It was just horror. And we were very proud.
Edith Bowman – That’s good not to have something like that would you’d miss out. See, you react in realtime is great.
Kaitlyn Dever – Yeah.
George Clooney – Oh, there’s a reaction. I didn’t see. She literally went home and said, I never having children.
Edith Bowman – Was there much room in the film when you go in for being spontaneous and having kind of freedom to play.
Lucas Bravo – The movie is mostly spontaneous. You know, we had such beautiful base to work with and then we just danced in through it in each other’s nuances and, and prepositions. There was just pure freedom.
Edith Bowman – Is that a nightmare. Or is that fun?
George Clooney – Let me let me give a little defence on this, because writers really hate hearing that. We really stuck to the dialog and then inside the dialog we got the play around and you left us a room as a director, but there was a really well-written, you know, dialog all the way through. And that was part of the blessing.
Ol Parker – Last night, I kept nudging you is I think the five biggest lessons from all the lines that she wrote.
Julia Roberts – I mean, for George.
Ol Parker – You know, listen, if you’re working with brilliant, funny, talented, smart people, they do what they do. So well, then you’re just a fool if you don’t take that. And then the brilliant thing is that it says at the end of the movie that it’s written by me, my friend Dan. And so I just get the credit for that brilliance.
George Clooney – That’s not true, you wrote a really great script.
Edith Bowman – George and Julia, you both act and Executive Producers in the film. What makes tackling that side of the industry appealing for you both?
Julia Roberts – What makes it appealing?
George Clooney – I think as you as you last a little longer in the business, you’re trying to find other ways to participate. So you don’t want to really worry about what some casting director thinks, how you’re ageing as an actor. That’s why I write and direct and produce and stuff. This is executive producing. There’s a big difference between that and producing their actual producers who, you know, find the money, do all the hard work and stuff. So this one is just us helping with distribution and things like that. So I feel like I think Julia and I both because she’s producing a lot of projects as well. I think as you get older and as these guys get older, they’ll understand this is you need to have other irons in the fire or you’re reliant on other people’s opinions of you. And that’s dangerous.
Edith Bowman – It’s good advice.
Ol Parker – It’s brilliant support. There’s always that can always make a call and help. And they don’t just have the status as an actor, you know, as what they do, but also as so if I ever need something and there’s a problem, if I did need the extra 5 seconds of around and a problem and I’d call these guys.
Edith Bowman – Get me a million! (laughter)
Ol Parker – A call would be placed, So for me it was nothing, but it just made me more secure and more protected.
Edith Bowman – It must be lovely for you guys as well. You don’t. Constantly learning on set with every job you work on and stuff. And is it like that? Was it like that on this in terms of learning a lot from Julia and George taking something from that experience away?
Kaitlyn Dever – Honestly, it was just really a masterclass and I felt like I was a total sponge on this movie, just getting to watch you guys work and do your thing. But yeah, for sure.
Lucas Bravo – I think for the first time I discovered what it means to, you know, be at someone’s service. I always, always felt like in every scene with George or Julia that they were trying to put me in the spotlight and that would, through that medium, be as well in the light. And I’ve never tackled that. That perception of the of the of the acting process. And that was so interesting. And then be able to say on the set that is made so set for us, so safe for us to try things with, with so much love and, and to see them connected to their inner child with this magic, after providing so many great performances, was so inspiring. Give us all fuel to just, you know, jump into the next phase and just keep that spirit.
George Clooney – The polite French way of saying that we’re childish. (laughter)
Edith Bowman – Julia, you said in an interview that you wanted to do this movie to give people the holiday from life. The world has gone through a really hard time. Did shooting this serve the same purpose for you as well?
Julia Roberts – It did. I mean, it’s always to make people laugh. I mean, I think George and I are both really motivated by making people laugh. And it was our great joy whenever we would do something where we could hear all laughing across the set at the monitor and we thought, Okay, yeah, that’s great. We’re going to move on now. And so you had to work in an environment like this was really joyful. And to be on an island with no place to run, we got to spend really sweet time all together getting to know one another and just sharing that space in a really unique way, which was, you know, something that isn’t always afforded when you’re kind of going home to your regular life every day after work.
TICKET TO PARADISE IS IN CINEMAS NOW
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