In a wide-ranging Venice Film Festival masterclass George Clooney revealed the rule he tries to live by, his thoughts on how to achieve acting success and what he’ll be filming next.

Clooney was asked about his way into the business and his early career. The star described to an adoring Lido audience how he initially worked on a tobacco farm and sold insurance before getting into acting — encouraged by his cousin Miguel Ferrer — and how he found success relatively late, something he said he thought ultimately benefitted his career.

“I got successful at 33, not at 23. I don’t think it’s very helpful to be very young and very successful; I don’t think you get a chance to make mistakes. And when you make mistakes, I don’t think you get an opportunity to make mistakes in private. And those mistakes you learn from. So I was very lucky that I got much more successful much later in life.”

Clooney said that not having a huge movie hit in his early career allowed him to work in different genres so that he wasn’t pigeon-holed into one type of movie.

The Oceans 11 and Gravity star was asked multiple questions by aspiring actors about how to make it. He called on the audience to chase their dreams.

“If you’re chasing your dreams, chase them,” he said. “You don’t want to wake up at my age, at 65 years old, and say you never tried. That’s it. You got to try. Now, it may not work out. You know, it takes a lot of luck, a lot of things that have nothing to do with your talent or your skill. Having said that, you’ll be really angry with yourself late in life if you don’t try. Now, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll find something else to do. But if you’re chasing your dreams, chase your dreams, man.”

He added that luck and perseverance can play key roles in finding success, noting that E.R. was one of two TV projects he was sent at the time and he happened to make the right choice in choosing NBC’s mega-hit.

“Luck plays a gigantic part. It really does. The best actors from my early acting classes are not big stars. They’re not the big stars. They were good looking. They were talented. You have to end up being the right person, the right place, the right time. That’s how it works. Having said that, you can create a lot of that luck, making yourself available, chasing things, pursuing things. You know, Jack Nicklaus, the famous golfer made a 60-foot putt, and someone said to him ‘Lucky putt’, and he goes, ‘It’s funny. The more I practice, the luckier I get.’ You can create some luck.”

The actor, producer and director talked about key projects in his career such as Goodnight, and Good Luck, which he has successfully transposed to theater with his producing partner Grant Heslov, and key collaborations such as his partnerships with Steven Soderbergh and the Coen Brothers. He also talked about the influence on him of friendships with actors he called “real movie stars” such as Gregory Peck and Paul Newman.

He also talked about the humanitarian work he and his wife, humanitarian lawyer Amal (who Clooney described as a “badass”), undertake via their foundation, including helping get dozens of detained journalists out of prison in authoritarian countries, and a rule imparted by his father that he tries to live by: “My dad used to say to me, ‘I don’t give a shit what you do in life. I don’t care. You have one responsibility, and that is to challenge people with more power than you, and to defend people with less power than you. That’s it. If you do nothing else, you’re successful. It’s true. Now I try to do that. I fail often, but I try to do that. I’ve made it part of my life, and so Amal, my wife, and I spend a good portion of our lives trying to follow those same rules, which is, you know, by birth, by luck, by all the things that got us here in this room, got us all in the positions we’re all in. There’s an awful lot of people who didn’t get those same kinds of moments of luck, whether you’re born in a war zone, you’re born in a place of hunger, you’re born in a place where women are treated terribly, or journalists are imprisoned… those people need some luck. And so our job is to be part of that solution, and we do the best we can, and we fail as as everyone does often.”

The Hollywood icon confirmed to the audience that he would begin filming his next movie in a matter of weeks, the Amy Bloom memoir adaptation In Love from director Paul Weitz. You can read more about the project in our break from last year.

In a moving coda, speaking with visible emotion, the actor finally recalled the death of his sister from cancer last year and being with her in her final moments: “She died very quickly, and I was with her when she died. And there was this feeling, being with her, holding her hand when she died, understanding how brief all of this is. It was minutes ago that she and I were little kids together; minutes ago we were holding hands as little kids,” he said.

“Time goes fast. All of this. And so we have to find nothing but joy,” he told the rapt crowd.

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