I’ve been interviewing people for a long time, but as a child of the 80s, one of my bucket list interviews has always been Michael Keaton. Not only was he Batman and Beetlejuice, but he also starred in a whole bunch of childhood favourites of mine, including Johnny Dangerously (coming soon to The Best Movie You Never Saw), The Dream Team, Gung-Ho, and even a drama he did called Clean & Sober, which for some reason I enjoyed as a child.
Keaton’s in the middle of a great career resurgence that began with Birdman. Fresh off his Batman stare-down at the Oscars, Keaton is in theaters this week with his film noir throwback Knox Goes Away. In it, he plays a hitman stricken with early-onset dementia. The fast-moving illness is set to destroy his memory (hence the title) completely, and as if that weren’t bad enough, his estranged son just killed someone and needs his father’s help to cover up the crime.
I actually caught Knox Goes Away at TIFF (read my review) and admired how Keaton, who also directed the film, shoots it in a way that makes Knox an unreliable narrator. He’s confused, and the film is shot in a way that we never really know what’s real and what’s not. It’s really well done and features a standout role from James Marsden, who gets to be highly dramatic here. I was lucky enough to sit down with both Keaton and Marsden to discuss the film. Keaton, in particular, seemed very excited to have audiences discover a film that means a lot to him and told me all about how he got Al Pacino to costar in the film and how blown away he was by all the performances, even if the film, as he admits, was shot very quickly due to the limited budget.
Knox Goes Away comes out on Friday!