NY Comic Con: Birdman panel with Michael Keaton and Edward Norton!

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Two superhero legends hit New York ComicCon Friday night to promote what is decidedly NOT a superhero movie, but rather a meta exploration of a former superhero actor mentally unraveling. Alejandro González Iñárritu's BIRDMAN, or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" proved to be a full-on actor's workshop for stars Michael Keaton and Edward Norton, and while the two actors took a more subdued approach to discussing their past nerd-friendly oeuvre, they could not hide their excitement for the new film they made.

Always genial host Chris Hardwick of "@Midnight" and Nerdist fame kept the unusually deep discussion of the serious themes in "Birdman" in check as Keaton and Norton waxed philosophical about the film and how it connects with their own careers as onscreen do-gooders.

They kicked things off by generously sharing the first ten-minutes of the film, featuring Keaton's washed-up thespian Riggan Thomson going through a harried rehearsal process on a new stage adaptation of a Raymond Carver story he's performing in and directing. The scene played out as one long, seamless shot, and the cinematography on display by Emmanuel Lubezki ("Children of Men," "Gravity," "Tree of Life") is as bravura as we've come to expect. Along the way through the scene we're introduced to Riggan's lawyer (Zach Galifianakis), his daughter/assistant (Emma Stone) and some of the actors who are having a rough go of working with him (Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts). The footage played fast, funny and so absorbing that after a few minutes you forget that Iñárritu isn't cutting.

Then they brought Keaton and Norton to the Empire stage. Here's a rundown of the best quotes:

KEATON: They couldn't tell me what it was about, and now that I've done the movie I understand why they couldn't explain it, 'cause I'm not sure what happened. [Alejandro] is just a really interesting, extremely passionate guy, which is contagious. It took me about 27-seonds to decide I wanted to do this.

NORTON: I read the script at 3-in-the-morning and I laughed so hard I woke people up. I had coffee with Alejandro and I said, 'You're not leaving this breakfast alive until you agree I'm doing this with you.' It was just an extraordinary script, and he's a director that I put in the category of I'd do something with him sight-unseen.

KEATON: I've been giving lectures on all the ways the movie was shot. It's not like anything you've ever seen before. Literally. It's not just a glib expression. I don't know if I've seen any of my movies outside of looping in ten years, but I've seen this movie two-and-a-half times. I'm gonna watch it all the way through tomorrow, and I'll watch it many many times after.

NORTON: I'm sure film schools will be deconstructing how a lot of it was done for a long time to come, because it is really remarkable. It was a level of planning you rarely see on a film. I thought it was wonderful because you rarely get that kind of rehearsal period on a film or get to work that intimately with the entire camera crew. It was all great.

– The two actors spoke of how the film touches upon actors who have played superheroes, as Keaton did in Tim Burton's "Batman" movies and Norton did in "The Incredible Hulk."

KEATON: Because I don't really think about it anyway, in terms of having played Batman… and by the way, being really proud of having played Batman (applause). I never really back off that. It was really bold and interesting when Tim made it, and after that… I didn't even put that together until well into shooting the movie, "Oh yeah, Edward did that too." It's arguably way more about Alejandro than it is about us.

NORTON: I think Freud says, "If you have a dream then anyone who shows up in the dream is really you." I think everyone in this film is Alejandro. I think my character is Alejandro, I think Michael's is Alejandro, the two girls making out in the mirror is Alejandro. – Finally, they hinted that they would not be adverse to doing another big superhero movie in the future, despite the bleak picture "Birdman" paints of such an enterprise.

NORTON: I grew up on all those graphic novels, Frank Miller, I was obsessed with that stuff. I think that it's this rich pool of stuff that's become almost a modern-day canon of mythic stories for all of us. We all sit around hoping that people will make films out of that material that captures how serious it felt at that time in our life. No one reads comic books because they're cartoonish, they read them because they're dark and serious and long. That's what was great about the best ones. Some are a swing and a miss, some really connect, and some weren't actually novels. Movies like "The Matrix" completely capture the sensation I used to get reading those. When things like that come along I don't ever discount the idea of doing it. It always depends on with who or what the vision is.

KEATON: Exactly. Who's directing? What's the cast? Is the script good? What's it about? When Tim called and I took the original "Batman" script home I was mostly unfamiliar with the superhero books and wasn't that big of a comic book reader. I thought, "I can’t imagine anyone making this movie the way I see the character, but I'm sure glad to read it." I told Tim what I thought, and Tim was just nodding, his long hair going up and down. He was smiling and looking excited. I said, "Okay, they're not gonna make that are they?" He said, "I dunno, let's find out!" (laughs)

BIRDMAN hits limited theaters on October 17, 2014.