Clooney's Naked Truth About 'Solaris'

By Todd Peterson

11/25/2002 at 12:00 PM EST

George Clooney doesn't want the moon in his new sci-fi film "Solaris" to get all the attention.

The movie, which opens this week, drew considerable attention when its R rating was challenged by the film's director, Steven Soderbergh, and studio 20th Century Fox.

The rating was based on a couple scenes in which the 41-year-old Clooney's backside is bare -- which Soderbergh and the studio claimed wasn't enough to merit the more-mature designation. The Motion Picture Association of America, which determines film ratings, eventually relented and agreed to release "Solaris" with a PG-13 rating. Makers of the film hope the lower rating will draw larger audiences, but now Clooney is concerned the attention will be focused primarily on his posterior.

"Fox leaked the story about the MPAA rating on 'Solaris,' how we got an R because I showed my (behind), but I think they're having trouble selling this film. They don't know what to do with it," Clooney tells Newsday.

According to an Associated Press report, Clooney speculated that the question he would most likely be asked during interviews for the film would be, "So you're naked. Did you work out?"

"I find it funny because we're trying to talk about things on a much grander scale, with a story that contains questions about the cosmos, and it'll come down to a 30-second sound bite where I say, 'Yeah, I worked out,'" Clooney said.

"Solaris," a remake of the 1972 science-fiction thriller by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, stars Clooney as a psychologist sent to a space station to investigate the crew's mental fitness, and ends up seeing images of his wife who committed suicide.