Clooney, Damon lead the cast of ‘The Monuments Men’

“The story of the Monuments Men is one that really very few people know,” says George Clooney, who returns to the director’s chair for the story of a small group of artists, art historians, architects, and museum curators who would lead the rescue of 1000 years of civilization during World War II in his new film, The Monuments Men.  “Artists, art dealers, architects – these were men that were far beyond the age that they were going to be drafted into a war or volunteer.  But they took on this adventure, because they had this belief that culture can be destroyed.  If they’d failed, it could have meant the loss of six million pieces of art. They weren’t going to let that happen – and the truth of the matter is, they pulled it off.”
 
Part of the drama of the film is that all of the Monuments Men are so unsuited to serving as soldiers in wartime.  “Wars are fought by 18-year-olds,” says Clooney.  “Once you get to the John Goodmans and the Bob Balabans and the George Clooneys, you know – these guys are not getting drafted.” Producing and writing partner Grant Heslov adds: “They did it because it was clear that they were the only people who could do it.”
 
The answer was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives group, which would go to the front lines and, for the first time, try to save the treasures that could be saved. “Culture was at risk,” says Clooney.  “You see it time and time again.  You saw it in Iraq – the museums weren’t protected, and you saw how much of their culture was lost because of that.”
 
“Even today, people are still trying to get back the art that was looted from their families by the Nazis,”Heslov says, noting that just recently, a treasure trove of looted art was discovered in a Munich apartment – 1,500 works worth $1.5 billion, paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Dix, and other artists that had been thought to be lost.
 
Clooney and Heslov note that while the film is based on the true story of the Monuments Men, they did take some liberties with the characters for dramatic purposes.  Though many of the characters are inspired by real Monuments Men, Clooney and Heslov have invented characters for the film.           More importantly, even if the characters are invented, their story is real.  “We invented a few mundane scenes, just to help the story along, but the things in the movie that you’d think are so ridiculous and strange, ‘well, there’s no way that those actually happened’ – those are the things that actually happened,” says Clooney.
 
Meet “The Monuments Men,” for the film, Clooney and Heslov were able to attract a top tier of actors, including Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett.  
 
George Clooney heads the cast in the role of Frank Stokes, a leading art historian. The inspiration for Clooney’s character was art historian George Stout.“In real life, he was a very scrappy guy.  He could do anything – like fix cars and radios.”  The head of the conservation department at the Fogg, and later the director of the Worcester Art Museum and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Stout was on the front lines during the war, helping to rescue cultural treasures in Caen, Maastricht, and Aachen, as well as Nazi art repositories in Siegen, Heilbronn, Cologne, Merkers, and Altaussee.
 
Matt Damon takes on the role of James Granger and marks his sixth collaboration with George Clooney.   The James Granger character is inspired by James Rorimer, who later became director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Granger’s relationship with Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett) was inspired by Rorimer’s interaction with Rose Valland, an employee of the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris.
 
Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Cate Blanchett also join the cast.

“The Monuments Men” opens February 12 in cinemas from 20th Century Fox to be distributed by Warner Bros.

Watch the trailer of "The Monuments Men":