‘ER’ Director Reflects on ‘Hell and High Water’: George Clooney ‘Was George Clooney After That Episode’

There are some episodes of television that all you have to say is the title, and people immediately know it. ER‘s memorable, outstanding “Hell and High Water,” which aired 30 years ago (November 9, 1995), is one of them.

Doug Ross (George Clooney), just as he’s about to leave the hospital for a job in a private practice, ends up in the middle of a high-stakes rescue during a storm: saving a boy (Erik von Detten) who’s trapped in a storm drain. You know the iconic image of Doug rising up from the water, holding the boy. He makes the call to take a news helicopter to County, and everyone, including those waiting in the ER, watch the live broadcast, including when the feed cuts. Of course, the boy lives and Doug stays where he belongs (for the time being, at least).

The show was already a hit at the time, but this episode helped elevate it. The hour hinges entirely on George Clooney’s performance, and he more than rose to the occasion. This was before he was George Clooney. This was what made him George Clooney.

This episode, “Hell and High Water,” earned Christopher Chulack the win for Outstanding Directing a Drama Series for the Directors Guild of America Awards. It received six Emmy nominations, including for Clooney, Chulack, and Neal Baer for writing.

“I learned a lot about a lot of things, and the people were great,” Chulack, who was also an executive producer on the show, remembers of his time on ER. “The cast as a whole was fantastic because the show became such a hit immediately. It could have turned into kind of a s**t show in terms of the politics and the cast and whatever, but they just took care of each other, and like John Wells said, they were kind of a self-cleaning oven, the original six, and it was pretty great.”

In honor of the 30th anniversary, TV Insider invited director Christopher Chulack to take a look back at the episode.

What was your first impression of the script for this episode? What stood out to you about it?

Christopher Chulack: I was producing the show as well, I was line producer. “Hell and High Water” was Season 2, Episode 7, and it was the first time out of the first year and six episodes into our second season that we attempted anything like this. The show took place in the ER, and that’s where, mostly, we did our exterior shots in Chicago, four trips a year. But what stood out was, it was huge. I mean, water and kids and helicopters, and it just was kind of intimidating that way, but we were going to give it a shot. So as a producer, that struck me, and then as a director, that was like, “Wow.” And I was not a really experienced director by my standards of, I did 100 hours, I started directing on a show called Homefront for ABC, and that’s where I started, and then ER happened, and I started directing there. And so it was a little intimidating, I gotta say.

© NBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection

What stood out about George Clooney’s performance in it? This was early in his career, early in the show, early in getting to know Doug Ross as a character.

Correct. Well, it was physical, what he had to do. So he was comfortable with that, and although it was really hard for him crawling into that pipe and running around and being in a helicopter, I don’t recall having to really work with him on his performance. He was pretty much there. And I think he liked being around kids, and he’s a great guy with kids, and we would have Make-A-Wish children come to the set, and he would hang with them. And so that’s just his basic personality.

What do you remember about directing the storm drain, rescue, and news helicopter scenes, and your approach to those? Because it was something different than being in the hospital.

It was confining. We shot it, a lot of that stuff — I don’t recall if the interior of the helicopter, I’m pretty sure it was shot in Chicago because the landing of the helicopter, the taking off of the helicopter, that was in Chicago right off Grant Park. And so what I’m saying is it was shot with a more limited crew because we didn’t take our whole crew. We used the local crews there, and so it was a little different. My approach is always just to get the best performance and picture and shot. So that’s just what I do. So I didn’t have to compromise it, is what I’m trying to say.

This episode features that iconic image of Doug emerging from the water with the kid, the light from the helicopter on them. Had you had any idea how well-known that image would become when you were filming?

No, but I knew from the very beginning how I was going to shoot that sequence, that lake, that reservoir, and the pipe. We built the pipe. That was all on the back lot of Warner Bros., and we shot it in this pond, it’s called Walton’s Pond because the exterior of Walton’s house was on the back lot, as was that pond that they used in the show. So I was able to really kind of scout it and figured it out, but it just came to me right from the start that he would come out, he would be underwater, disappear, then he’d come up, be closer, then he’d come up and boom. I just knew it.

There’s chaos throughout the episode, whether you’re in the emergency room, in the trauma rooms, or with the rescue. Parallel to that was the story you had with Benton (Eriq La Salle), Carter (Noah Wyle), and Harper (Christina Elise) dealing with the other patient, the kid who ends up dying. Doug’s storyline is splashier, but the other one is just as important, the typical everyday stuff we saw on ER.  What was your approach to that storyline to make sure that it didn’t kind of get lost?

To do just that. I mean, it’s what we did regularly. I mean, we had been doing it for season plus seven, and again, that wasn’t hard. Eriq is great. There was no different approach. I mean, when you’re in the ER and the little boy is brought in and he’s in Trauma 1 and the girl’s in Trauma 2, that was quite a deal to set up, and thank God we had Guy Beem, who was our steadicam operator. So once the doctors, the technical advisors said, “Well, this should be here and this doctor’s going to be here,” they just make it technically correct, my approach to those trauma scenes was you just shoot ’em like a documentary in a way. And Guy Bee’s a great steadicam operator, so he can get in there. He is a good storyteller. He dances with the actors. And if I do say so myself, I’m very proud of the sequences in that episode.

© NBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection

That’s something that ER did very well, going between the trauma rooms.

Right. And you as an actor better know your lines because when you’re spinning around and you are in the middle of a take and you blub it, we got to cut because if you look, sometimes there’s not a lot of edits. The editing is in the handheld or steadicam shot, so it’s complicated.

What changed, if anything, during the course of filming this episode?

I don’t recall. I mean, Neal Baer wrote the script. We got the script and we prepped it. Nothing really changed. We had a big meeting. We knew we had a kid in the water as well as number two on the call sheet, George Clooney, and although he wasn’t George Clooney, yet — he was George Clooney after that episode. We had to heat the water, and that was thousands of gallons of water that had to be heated because they were in it for such a long time. That was a big deal, and I think we made some changes in terms of technical changes, special effects had to do some extra, extra work on it as the nights went on. It was pretty standard that way. We were a well-oiled machine as a production company.

Every episode was just another event. You had to tune in live, and if you didn’t, then you were missing out on something big.

Yeah. Everybody that has been affiliated with ER, ER changed their life.

I think ER changed the medical drama genre as a whole.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we got word that specialty medicine in universities went over to — everybody wanted to be an ER doc. Everybody was affected by it. When you have collectively every Thursday night at 10 o’clock, 35 to 40 million people having a common experience, I mean, that doesn’t happen.

No. It was compelling medical cases, great characters, great relationships, and you combine all of that into 40 minutes, and there was no streaming back then, there was no social media, so people were just watching.

Right, exactly right.

Something else that stood out to me about “Hell and High Water” is the character and relationship moments. We get Carol (Juliana Margulies) checking in on Doug in the locker room about if he really wants to leave — that’s back when they were broken up, before they got back together, but you can still feel that history between them.

Always looking for that. And Juliana was great at giving those looks, and if you notice that, there’s a couple of cuts, I believe, in the trauma room where George is very intense, trying to save the boy. She’s in there, and we cut to her closeup, and it’s about him, and it just subtle things like that. She was really good, and we were able to capture that.

And also, you really capture the Mark (Anthony Edwards) and Doug relationship, one of the best on this show. He’s stitching him up, and you have the moment between them, and then when they’re leaving the hospital at the end, it’s Mark at its side.

Yeah, he’s stitching his arm, and George says, “It’s crooked.” He says, “You’ll get better. Don’t worry about it.” Or whatever the line was. And yeah, I remember that.

And having Mark by him as he leaves, because they had tension, there was always conflict between those two, but at the same time, they had each other’s backs.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Did you have a sense of the lasting impact this episode would have? Not only on ER, but dramas going forward when it comes to bringing doctors out of the hospital for incidents like this? That this episode would become almost the blueprint for doing so?

No, I wish I could say I did. What the heck did I know? It’s a television show, 46 minutes. So no, I didn’t. But I would imagine people, after they saw it, they were like, “OK, stuff like this was going to happen,” and maybe it does happen, you just don’t hear about it much other than television shows. And I am sure a lot of shows that followed similar — a lot of these stories are from real doctors who are in the writers’ room and advise the writers or our writers themselves. We had three, four doctors in the writing staff eventually.

You said you already knew the show was a hit, but did you know what a big hit it would become after this episode? Because I feel like it elevated it to another level when you had episodes like this.

I knew it was already a hit because when I was prepping “Hell and High Water,” the Today Show was following us. We were such a big hit. So they had cameras and they watched the prep, and they filmed a little office scene that I walked into John Wells’s office and the door was open. We were talking about the show, and then I turned around, and the camera is filming me and John. I’m like, “What the hell? This is a private meeting.” So I knew that the show was already a hit. That episode got 45 million viewers. The next day, this is a true story — the next day, Bob Daley and Terry Semel, who were the presidents of Warner Bros. Television, came down and knocked on George’s dressing room door and told him, “You’re going to be the next Batman because of the heroism of that episode.” So I figured it’s just going to go up from here, and it did.

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