When asked about Barris's claim of being a CIA assassin, Clooney commented, "I don't know how much I believed it. I didn't want to officially ask him, because I didn't want him to say, 'I made it up.' I wanted to tell the story and I thought how interesting, if it was all made up, why someone as wealthy and as successful as Chuck Barris would have to do that. I thought that was an interesting person to explore, and that's what we wanted to do with the film." (Barris had already admitted he had made the story up in a 1984 interview promoting the book; he wrote the story in large part because he had been exiled from television over the controversy surrounding one of his shows, 3's a Crowd. In the same interview, Barris noted that he had applied for work with the CIA in the early 1960s but never actually entered the agency; Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was the product of Barris imagining how he could have done both at the same time.RIP Chuck Barris. " in a 1984 interview on NBC's Today show, he once put the rumors to rest: "No, I was never a CIA hit man. I never did those things. I once applied for the CIA, and while I was going through the process I got a job and went on television. But I had always wondered what would have happened if I had done both." ") Clooney acknowledged that his upbringing with father Nick Clooney had a great bearing on his choice of depicting the 1960/70s game shows. "My father had a game show when I was growing up called The Money Maze. I know what those sets look like. I showed the guy how to do cue cards. I grew up on them," the director reflected, "and knew what it looked like and smelled like. And I know something about some of the trappings of fame, so I thought I had a unique take on it."
