When Paramount invited us down to Playa Del Rey
to check out the set of IRON MAN there was great deal of speculation surrounding
the film, with most of it centering on its brilliant yet mercurial star, Robert
Downey Jr. Downey certainly had an impressive pedigree, but would he be
convincing as a mainstream comic book hero? More importantly, would he make it
through the entire shoot without melting down, hitting the pipe and crashing in
some random person’s bed? (Let’s just say I lost more than a few bets on that
last one. Double or nothing for the sequel!)
10 months and several badass trailers later,
those concerns seem almost laughable. Downey looks so perfect for the role that
it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing it. But it wasn’t that way when he sat
down with a group of internet journalists for one of his first IRON MAN
interviews ever (perhaps THE first, but I’m too damn lazy to confirm that) after
just getting off the set. He was classic Downey: candid, self-effacing and a
little bit nuts. Check it out.
Terrence Howard Interview / Jon Favreau Interview
Robert Downey, Jr.
What attracted you to the role? It seems like
an unusual choice for you.
Well, I mean, all my friends are doing it. I
remember the original Superman – Brando was in it. I thought, wow, these things
must be getting legit. I was already I guess fairly opinionated when I was
seven. So I don’t know; I’m kind of like a nerd about this stuff. I think
there’s been an onslaught, obviously, of this genre of film and I thought this
one was different enough to accommodate whatever snobbery that might be
unleashed on me by my peers or friends. It’s like my buddies, man…you want to
do stuff and they say, “You’re doing what, man? Shaggy Dog? Are you on
drugs again?”
Have people been giving you sh*t about this?
No, no one’s given me any guff about IRON MAN and
it’s funny, too. It’s like it’s a particular kind of fan likes it or…these
smart, highly-educated entertainment lawyers like pulling me aside at a party
and are like, “Dude, Tony Stark, man!” And then they tie gets loose
and they start geeking out and it’s great.
Can you talk about all the bruises and cuts
you’ve go? (He’d just finished shooting his scene and was still in make-up.)
I can. He goes through a lot. I don’t know what I
can really talk about or not. Well, I guess it’s safe to say that he is in
captivity for some time and the fact that you’ve just seen a sequence where he’s
returning home and a lot has occurred means that obviously he has figured out a
way to escape. And I don’t know much about these sorts of things, but I know you
can get pretty bruised up escaping.
He’s been back home, he’s had a press conference
and he’s talked to his partner in front of this kind of legacy energy device
that he’s in essence miniaturized, which is keeping him alive. But he’s back
home…I mean “back home,” there’s nothing that’s normal in this film.
Have you seen that pad? He’s not just back home but he’s home and there isn’t a
big wait staff and he doesn’t have a gal on his arm and his assistant’s not
around, so it’s just kind of like this isolated opulence, which again I think
like…there was this last round of Iron Man comics, the Extremis and those very
kind of graphic-y looking ones. And I remember in pre-production and stuff,
without wanting to be derivative, there was this very kind of specific design.
And that’s what I like about anything. That’s why I’m a fan of like Matrix and
stuff and they’re like, “Not 2 or 3.” And I’m like, “Yeah. If I
love it, I like all of them.” I’m like the boyfriend that needs to grow up.
Because if I love something and it impacts me, then I am till the wheels fall
off, you know?
If you met Tony Stark on a street corner, what
would you talk about?
First of all, he’d be an imposter. So we’d
probably throw down right there. It’s so funny, because I think I’m like old
enough to have a pretty strong aesthetic distance. And I remember the days,
whether it was LESS THAN ZERO or CHAPLIN, where I would just throw myself into
this tizzy of prep where the “dance of the role is 16 hours” or
whatever. For LESS THAN ZERO the makeup girl what blowing menthol into my eyes
and putting latex on my lips and I was doing pushups before the scenes and my
heart was racing forever. And I feel like, as much as anything nowadays, it’s
not that we’re phoning it in – we really care and we really prepped it into
practical oblivion. But I still try to have some distance. But it’s really
almost even more narcissistic to be talking to some department head going,
“You know, I don’t think Tony would…” — essentially saying what
want to do in the scene. But if there’s ever been a character in the history of
my career that I would be happy to kind of meld with and associate myself with,
it’s Tony Stark, because it’s the coolest job I’ve ever had. The history of
it…I got to meet Stan Lee. I took him to the grill in Beverly Hills. And I
said to him, “What were the real origins of this?” And he said,
“Well, we kind of did it on a dare: Could you make a billionaire
industrialist, womanizing heathen somehow through this vulnerability of his
own…” I’m sorry, this might be more fun.
(At this point he’s handed the chest device
that we wears in the film).
He said he did it on a dare to see…and also you
think about it. It’s interesting – roughly 30 years ago, it was a time of this
very strong anti-establishment, anti-military-industrial complex, anti-rich,
over thirty energy. And so for him it was just a huge challenge. And he said
they got more female fanmail for him than all their other characters combined
because there was this sense of him being very vulnerable and not knowing from
day-to-day whether this very precarious device that keeps him alive and drives
him but is clearly a metaphor for something else. But sometimes it’s not a
metaphor. If you’ve got a small reactor in your chest, it’s the reason you’re
not dead. In the movie, how can that be a metaphor? It’s like saying, “This
aqualung underwater…this reed I’m breathing through…” You know?
You’re known for ad-libbing. Were there times
when you caused big re-sets because of your improv ideas?
As a martial artist, you want to be as efficient
and effective and use as much linear striking as possible. Don’t fight force
with force. There’s a lot of these concepts that everything is like everything
else for the film. So I’m not coming in and going, “Hey, this is all wrong.
Re-light.” But I’ll come in and I’ll say, “Given the time we have, we
can probably get this many shots,” and Jon has been very flexible and very
fun because we’re very similar. I mean Tony Stark is really…I don’t know how
this could come across, but it’s really Jon and I who are creating Tony. And
through it half the lines are his and half the ideas are mine and you’ve got all
these really great people on top of their field who are either simultaneously
exasperated with the fact that we’re like vetting an idea. I come in everyday
and I say, “I’ve seen this in a movie before. No offense. But if we do
this, I haven’t seen that.” And some of them are just so far out they go,
“Will you just go put on your chest piece and earn a living like everyone
else?” But more often than not…If anything I feel the honus and the
responsibility to not venture into this genre without an understanding that it’s
actually inhabited and enjoyed — and me being amongst these people — by very
apt, bright, perceptive and often times educated in the arts people. So just
because it happens to have this two-dimensional aspect to it in its origins
doesn’t mean that it doesn’t go deep and that it shouldn’t be an art form and it
shouldn’t…I don’t know. I just think audiences are continually underestimated.
At the same time I loved CHUD. I could go see a pretty crappy movie and love it.
If it’s got a few things that work…I don’t know; I’m like a soccer coach with
kids who probably shouldn’t be playing soccer.
In the scene you shot, what’s going through
your mind when you enter the press conference?
What was going through my mind was I walked into
the press conference and everyone’s standing up and I go, “Here we are.
Now…bwaaahhh!” And all that thing. I was like, “Can he come in
and…he’s also supposedly gone through this massive transformation. He’s been
humbled. He’s seen things through new eyes. And I think even the people he’s
interacting with, whoever it’s for it’s like, “That’s the press and we do
our soundbytes and we do our damage control and we do our propaganda and that’s
it.” And I think he’s starting to relate to these people as not an idealist
— because I think he’s too educated in the dark arts of weapons manufacturing
and also his family and their legacy to be a moron or waving flowers and wanting
to join hands and sing kumbayah — but I think there’s an equalization that
occurs. But still that is a little bit strange in a way. It’s not like he raises
his finger and he’s Caesar, he wears the purple and everyone sit down. I think
it was just kind of making him nervous. And it was a strange thing to do and
also later on it was like Tony’s maybe gone a little cuckoo. And I thought it
would demonstrate…it’s that thing of miscommunication of intentions and ideas.
Can you talk about the wardrobe and getting
into the costume?
Yes. I love Stan Winston and Shane and all the
guys on his team. There are several stuntmen. Oakley, we call one of them. And
Mike Justice and these guys. And they’re kind of like…again, if Jon and I are
Tony Stark, then it’s me and those fellas and my stuntmen and my stand-in who
end up really being Iron Man. Because it’s just such a massive undertaking. I
mean, we said at first that we wanted to do it as practically as possible. I was
coming into this like, “Oh yes, practical. Practical.” I was like,
cool. But it’s really, really tough. And really great. The first time you try on
that suit…I swear to god, you could put the least macho superhero-looking man
or woman in this suit and I swear to god for 15 seconds you’d believe any of
them could destroy the nemesis and all this. So it really is the long game. It’s
about, how do you not have a personality meltdown in like hour seven when you
kind of fell like you’ve been tarred and feathered and covered in machine parts?
It’s like, “Here’s the moment when you…” and you’re like,
“Uh-huh.” And you’re calling up every therapeutic moment you’ve had
with friends, family and strangers and every book you’ve ever read. They’re
like, “Hey, have you read The Secret?” and it’s like, “I am
living The Secret right now.” I have the entire Bodhi tree between my ears.
I’d come off doing ZODIAC before this and KISS KISS BANG BANG — which is a
movie I really loved — a couple years before that. And SCANNER DARKLY. And all
these films were really kind of about character and once in a while you got your
finger cut off or you had a bad day or you’re wearing an ascot or something like
that. I’d really gotten used to these non-technically-driven movies, and as much
as we’ve been able to in this, we’ve tried to have it feel like if Bob Altman
had directed SUPERMAN or something like that, you know?
How long does it take to get into it?
Well, I like to say that I’m the first person
who’ve been able to relieve themselves while wearing this suit. It was
precipitous. Wouldn’t it be great if that was the rest of the interview?
How’d you do it?
It was a zipper, but the zipper was still covered
by a hip piece that actually had a groin attached…anyway, suffice it to
say…it was like that thing where it’s like, How did that guy escape from jail?
Well, he was thin. But there’s a lot of thin guys in jail. Well, his head was
just the right size and he got out between the bars and…you know.
Does it get frustrating wearing the chest
piece all the time?
Look, wearing a watch can be frustrating if
you’re not in the right headspace, you know? There was this time a couple days
ago where they said, “You’ve been through a lot.” This has been a
really grueling shoot, but it’s also been a really magical shoot, because I shit
you not: We come in every day — it reminds me of reading about Chaplin in the
early days when he’d go in without an idea in his head. It’s not like we don’t
have a script and one that we approve of and this and that, but we go in and we
say, “How do we raise this to a level of something we want to see or
something that addresses all the different elements of these kind of films? I’m
actually starting to think that they’re a really, really high order of art.
Because there are so many that you have to professionally have gone through and
understood and experienced to be able to not be overwhelmed by the fact
that…”Now in this scene you’re going through something, but actually the
boot is out and you’re welding and the phone rings and all this other stuff and
you have a relationship with your shop…” This is kind of why I’m so glad
— I’m actually comforted being here right now — is, you ever feel like that
summer in that place or in that apartment, creatively we did every single thing
we could? You know, I wrote my best stuff, I was the most honest, I was the most
disciplined, you know what I mean? Back when you used to say, “I’m not just
gonna go out and eat again, I’m gonna look at the menu and this cookbook I’ve
had for five years and actually try to make a pasta that doesn’t suck.” And
we really came in on this set in particular, because this is where so much of
his work happens and the creation of the Mark 2 suit and beyond. What was the
question?
About the chest plate.
Oh, yeah yeah yeah…no, it’s fine.
What has your training process been like?
Well you know, the funny thing is I was at this
museum. What was it? It’s gonna come to me. It’s not the Mutter Museum where all
the babies are in formaldehyde. It’s called…ok, forget what I said,
because if I can’t represent it properly than it’s not responsible. There’s some
museum in Miami and I’d gotten this little keychain and it looked like Iron Man.
This was like six months before I even knew about this thing. And for the last
five years or so I’ve been doing martial arts and then when I got the part they
said, “So, do you want to put on some…” And I’m not like 28, or like
Daniel Craig, who already had like a meat pack on his shoulders and then just
swolled ’em up for that. You’ve seen me in all the movies. I’m not like Mr. Buff
Guy, and now I’m over 43. So it has literally been like this excruciating
process of working out so hard and so often, just to not look like a little
pot-bellied pig. And then there’s a couple scene where we finally got it
together and I’m like banging on that thing and I go, “Mattie, you gotta,”
and he’s like, “I know what to do man; I’ve done this before,” and
they light it right and I’m like, “Ugh,” and I’m like rubber band Sam
and we do all this stuff and I’m like, “Waaah,” and it’s like,
“Wow man, that was great! You’re really in shape.” And then 20 minutes
later, it’s like, “Urrrr.”
And Yoga. And eating right. And all the
supplement. And sleeping right. And all the other obvious stuff that’s probably
more important than working out. You gotta keep your head right. It’s so easy to
get spun out. You see people who have no challenges outside of their Hollywood
problems and they come in and they regularly have meltdowns on sets. And they
turn into a bitch. Or they say and do thing because they’re under pressure. Or
because they think that they’re something they’re not. I mean, it’s really a
trip to be number one on the call sheet and doing a movie like this. It’s always
kind of an inside game — and I forget that occasionally, but I keep righting
the ship and the toggle switch. It’s that thing, you know? Like life is 85%
maintenance and you realize at the end of a good day that you spent most of the
day just making sure other peoples’ energy and all that all your own mind talk
wasn’t ruining what had started off…like, the day plans to be good. And then
they’re like, “(Makes a bunch of noises)?” And they’re like, “Can
we just blow some sand in your eye right before the take?” Why? “I
don’t know. I’m from the blow-sand-in-your-eye department.” Jon? And then
there’s the whole thing, I mean I look at the comic books and the guy’s
like…we did a photo shoot the other day and it wound up going great, but like
you see this picture of Tony Stark, who kind of looks like Tom Cruise except
more handsome and more buff, and he’s in this suit and his hair’s blowing in the
wind and it’s curly and they go, “Can we do a shot like that?” And the
hair lady’s like, “We can try that,” and I was like, “Let’s not
go Something About Mary here.” And so it’s been a lot of that, just like,
outside issues. I’m not particularly tall and I was like surrounded by giants
and I was like, “This is kinda weird…” I’m not walking around like
Don Adams on boards or anything, but there are all these elements of…when I
see this movie, it’s like I want to believe like this guy is the guy.
Did you draw on any real-life playboys for
inspiration for Tony?
This might sound a little weird, but I’m not
drawing on other things for him. It’s like I consider him to be a real entity,
for the most part. That works for me. You know, if you had the stimuli that I
do, day by day — I say that with whatever I learned in theater arts 101 of
again having that aesthetic distance so you actually know what you’re doing. I
mean, there’s no sense in getting too caught up in something, but I come into
work and there’s like hundreds of people around and — without abusing the
influence I have — it’s like things are made easy and available to me. And I
see $100,000 cars and things and all this stuff that, regardless of how much
dough I’ve made over the years, I’ve never lived a day — I’ve never lived a
four seconds — like this guy’s lived every day. So it’s been really this kind
of like amazing experience to see what it would be like if you had unimaginable
resources and you have this change of heart and you decide to pool these
resources into something that became kind of fetishistic and obsessive, but
obsessive in a way that you kind of have to figure out as you go along what the
moral psychology is of that. So I think it’s a very human journey. But
continuing not answering your question, I tended to actually go more to
mythology and the real basis of mythology and how men and women are capable, at
a certain subtle level, of god-making, of making themselves god-like, of
clearing themselves of these earthly things and locking into a purpose or some
sort of divine idea. Whether it seems dark at the time or not, it’s like you can
see perception and you have this heroic experience. And I could say that about
single mothers, I could say that about a variety of different folks that I’ve
known growing up or whatever.
I’m sorry to have to ask you this, but…
Yeah, yeah. Don’t give me all the f*ckin’
preambles. Just bring it, dude.
How much of what’s happened in your personal
life have anything to do with what you’re bringing to this role, or is it
irrelevant?
Well, I think when someone’s had a fundamental
change and they’re not just trying to backpedal and make it seem like, “I’m
going to rehab again, and it’s fine, but I’m still clubbing tonight and it
doesn’t matter,” or whatever, it’s like friends of mine are just in a
different place in their own evolution. By the time you get out of Dodge and
start doing the right thing, you really don’t relate to the person that
historically people still say. But it’s like that thing, the guy that says,
“You know if you Google me, all you’re gonna see is that I was accused of
raping those two kids on the boat,” or whatever. It’s like, I don’t
even…why am I Googling you anyway? “My life has been ruined.” That’s
a really nice headspace. So my thing is like, what else is like yeah, Tony Stark
has been known to go bonkers and be so irresponsible that he’s like too hammered
to put on the suit. And I was like, “Really?” And they’re like,
“Yeah, yeah.” And I thought, all these times when it seemed like in
the atmosphere that maybe there was another one of these, because you know, it’s
like your superhero of the week thing. And I was like, “Green Hornet? Naah.
Green Hornet! No.” Or other different ones or some of the others that have
happened where it’s like, “We’d like you to play the bad guy in our
movie,” and I’m like, “Yeah, the bad guy, yeah.” But the fact
that Tony is so conflicted and at certain points in the…I guess it was like
the later years, with Demon in a Bottle and all that stuff…there’s so much in
this movie as it is that we decided not to do like the Pirandello thing too, you
know? But I get it. In a way it’s ideally suited for me, and I’m ideally suited
for it.
Whew! Questions? Comments? Manifestos? Send
them to me at thomasleupp@joblo.com.