Robert Downey Jr. Breaks Down His Career, from 'Iron Man' to 'Oppenheimer' | Vanity Fair

I've been thinking about this recently if I could talk back to that uh 17 year old who was doing regional theater in Rochester I would say guess what it's going to go pretty well it's going to be a lot of ups and downs I'm not going to tell you the specifics because you get too scared but it turns out in a good place and it never will get better than it is right now so just appreciate where you are three two one laughs [Music] I'm Robert Downey Jr and this is the timeline of my career [Music] hair on your balls I'm afraid to look pound is a film that my dad got the financing for I think the investors thought he was making a documentary about pounds and animal shelters and then he said no no it's a it's a live-action thing and I'm casting people to play the dogs next thing you know we're shooting it and these character actors of all shapes and sizes are playing various uh dogs and then I played a puppy my earliest memories are of cameras being on sets being on stages being on location to the point where it almost seemed like life was kind of making a movie and kind of being a kid at the same time because my folks were mostly underground kind of counterculture it was never like I saw later on like my friends like a Jason Bateman who literally grew up in the high-end you know multi-camera TV show stuff our stuff was really weird so there was always something that felt a little bit outsider-ish about it remember the infamous coffee cup oh no don't please oh yes how to seduced Blair Without Really Trying there it is there's a smile it's nice to see it again I'm cast with Andrew McCarthy James Spader Jamie Gertz and there's a scene on a tennis court where I'm asking my dad if I can come home and it was a kind of an impactful bit of a challenging scene to do my first day shooting and the director Merrick knievska who I argue is one of the the greats I ever got to work with said everybody be absolutely quiet he's trying to concentrate and I felt like he told everybody hey this is important and then I was like oh my God I guess I guess I better concentrate and I just thought for a quarter second about what's it like for All Fathers and Sons mothers and daughters are they ever going to connect can they ever understand each other and just having that thought in my head gave me this springboard and it wound up being a kind of a pivotal day where if it was the first time I felt I was taken seriously in a dramatic way I just needed to be my father for one goddamn day just just help me I can't tell when I when I'm telling the truth no if anything less than zero showed me that there was a cultural relevance to filmmaking I'd seen it uh in The Breakfast Club and a bunch of other films and there was something about our generation had some sort of valid statement to make in the filmmakers and artists of that period and you felt like maybe I could be one of those folks very formal everybody [Music] chaplain was a absolute gift and a real bear of a challenge for someone who's 25 when I started prepping to do it but there were all these people that were still around just barely still around like Johnny Hutch who came from the Benny Hill show and he knew the guy who'd really done these choreographed things at the Carno theater with chaplain so he actually had access to some of the books of really what the choreography was or some of this stuff and he drilled me incessantly for months and months and months and then having Attenborough Dickie Attenborough directed he was like the Yoda of Cinema and just the fact that he cast me obviously was the endorsement and then it was just this year process of shooting it at a certain point I had a one-way mirror with a TV playing VHS tapes of his old uh films and I would try to match up where his face was in mine and literally just mimic him for hours and hours over a course of weeks and months I employed every single way I I could try to show up for that role hmm [Laughter] when you're 25 and you're given the keys to the kingdom you're going to probably come out of Center maybe out of fear maybe out of confidence and for me I at that point not to boast but I was as much of a chaplain expert as anyone involved in the project and I was making corrections to the things that were factually and historically inaccurate to which atmoset but puppet we're making a film it's not a documentary I did learn at that point though that it's hard to tell a story any more interestingly than the way it actually occurred so I was saying right before Chapman did a film called the kid with Jackie Coogan his wife had had a miscarriage so that was his way of healing from the trauma of that loss he was like robot the audience I was like it's too episodic we have to make this admirent anyway uh you realize you're not the director when you're not directing but a great director will incorporate all of your strong um associations and the things that you feel are really important and find a way to to help you get them into the character I didn't want him to come in and he insisted I said you got to stay at home but he doesn't listen to me such a stupid son of a killed him didn't I oh [Music] wow sorry hey good luck Kiss Kiss Bang Bang that was a film shot entirely at night I think there was one day shoot and one split so the rest of the time we're getting to work at sundown and we are working all through the night every night so Shane black is a night owl Shane black is a legitimate genius and he'd written what I thought was almost a perfect script and then Val Kilmer and I had kind of fallen into this good repartee and at that point I'd never played a character who was so overtly not intelligent but lovable and I think it was very freeing for me because I'd hithertube and associated with these kind of fast talking Smart Guys which I'm not necessarily I've just had had some experience doing it and Harry Lockhart in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang he's kind of a dummy and it was so freeing for me what happens when they drag the lake you think they'll find my pistol Jesus look up idiots in the dictionary you know what you'll find a picture of me no the definition of the word idiot which you are as far as working with Val on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang he's Val Kilmer it's vintage Val Kilmer he comes in with such an kind of off-center point of view on things and yet he's playing the one who knows everything and he's smart and he thinks that Harry is kind of an idiot but they become friends so I just found it so delightful to be staying up all night with valcomar shooting these ridiculous scenes about these two oddballs that are chasing this kind of uh my case in your case that same case he's a really sophisticated artist and I have nothing but fond memories about Kiss Kiss Bang Bang okay just one thing is it true they got a print off the cup yeah they got a partial in blood that is not the publication all right hey come on hey it's me did he say they got a print [Music] partial working with David Fincher on zodiac was a once in a lifetime opportunity he is an absolute master of this art form and I remember also the subject matter is really really intense and so it wasn't like you know a you know Fancy free set and because I knew that this was something that was really part of David's own history of his own kind of contemplation of evil you're trying to serve the the director and be respectful of that but I I mean I remember you know Ruffalo and Gyllenhaal and I look at each other knowing we're getting a real education in doing things in an extremely disciplined way that said when I watched the film there's a lot of kind of like fun and lightness in it which uh David Fincher always knows how to capture it's just not he doesn't lean into any sort of indulgence he's a really disciplined guy and then the crazy thing is David Fincher is your best lunch date you could ever have he's so fun he's so witty and yet when you look at his work you know he doesn't take himself seriously but boy does he take his film seriously that's the only place that word and that symbol ever appeared together before the letters because she stole his logo off of what I've been somebody who's killed 13. he claims he's killed 13 people but which ones can we actually confirm there's three in Vallejo one in Berryessa the cabbie that's it Bobby you're almost disappointed working with David Fincher you will learn that you're more durable than you thought a scene can devolve into where it just feels really perfunctory and you're you're kind of almost on an automatonic mode but it doesn't matter because the craft of trying to get things done like there was a scene where he was trying to get it done in one shot and we had to have done 40 or 50 takes and people were a little bit exasperated he said down here come here do we have it yet and I watched the takes and at the end of it I said you want to use this in one he goes yeah I go you know he goes down he's right we don't have it yet uh Delete all 40 of those takes and we'll start again after lunch and everyone looked at me okay you know right is right truth is I am Iron Man no problem trusting John Favreau uh his film is a Thora and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang came out on the same weekend and tanked and I think we were both really hungry to try to re-establish ourselves as a formidable Duo albeit individually again just like Attenborough his endorsement of me to play that character and then Kevin feige having the wherewithal to say okay bit of a risk let's do it we like Risk wound up being you know a life-changing 15 years what it's gonna be okay okay it's gonna be okay I I'm gonna make this okay oh okay you're gonna attach that okay base plate and make sure is that so hard that was fun anytime I was with Jeff Bridges and maybe even more so with Paltrow you just felt that there was this chemistry where you always kind of got the definitive version of a scene whether it was Loosely scripted or a little bit more um prepared but there's a scene where he's doing a weapons test and he says is it better to be feared or respected is it too much to ask for both and John and I were literally writing that line for line as we went along shooting it that day and I put on sunglasses because it was all on cue cards it was that kind of thing where you go it's more important that we feel like we're just coming up with this and we like it and there's no trick we can't employ to cover the fact that we're kind of making it up as we go along but again because you have that huge uh cluster bomb explosion in back of him because the air remover kind of pushed me forward and it was just one of those days there was another moment where Tony has escaped the cave and essentially become Iron Man and he lands in this kind of crater outside the cave where it's being held and there was a windstorm that day and we were trying to get this taken it was very star wars-esque in a way it was very reminiscent of what John has wound up doing since with Mandalorian and there was just this moment where it's like the storm this storm kind of settled and everyone kind of looked at everyone we were like let's get one more take and that's the one that's in the film so it even felt like sometimes the elements themselves were conspiring to help us do our best job every film was an art film if you treat it that way and the most important films can be garbage but it's always about teams and Leadership and partnership also that audiences evolve really quickly like they'll assimilate a new kind of version of a genre and then they'll phase out of it and you have to keep meeting and exceeding their expectations and I think that's where you know now we're in such an interesting spot because it's kind of like anyone's game anticipating what audiences will respond to next and I think it has really put the Cinematic and TV community on you know on point I did what I thought right you know I didn't just graduate from law school I graduated first in my class good I was first in my class I did really well Dad you're welcome David Dobkin I wanted to be in Fred Claus and I had seen the Wedding Crashers and I was like I love this David Dobkin guy turns out we kind of almost knew each other back in Upstate New York back in the day and he'd had this idea kind of a dramatization of a version of how he had had this strained relationship with his father and then we started talking about great movies like The Verdict is such a a rich fertile Zone to to try to dig in you know what was your reasoning 180 days that's solid maybe to cooled off maybe he doesn't kill hope maybe we're not here all the years you sat on that bench all the people that stood before you the legions the understanding the free ride goes to Mark Blackwell how do you explain that lapse in judgment we're really fortunate and that I had such good will for Warner Brothers with the having done several Sherlock films with them that they're like yeah we don't know if this one's really a fiscal win for us but we love the script go shoot it and uh those days are over it's just because the window is closing a bit it seems is there anything that you feel like you need to process in relation to the possibility of not seeing him again I just don't know senior which is the documentary I did about my pops with Chris Smith and my long-suffering Mrs Susan Downey started off as kind of a pre-pandemic and then into the pandemic for me I'll just be honest with a bit of an avoidance technique and that I knew he was in the throes of Parkinson's which is a awful disease and I'm not great at confronting inevitabilities always but it's almost like it was this journey for me to in my mid 50s kind of like grow up and take responsibility for framing how I had experienced my childhood and now how I related to that parent as he was kind of you know in the last years of his life YouTube met before you mean Junior and I yeah yeah we're getting to know each other I think anyone who sees senior it can be a tough watch but I would suggest that you find your way through it because there was a certain point where my dad made these very avant-garde movies and they didn't always even seem like they had a plot and we had amassed all this footage in senior and Susan came to me she said you can't make this documentary like one of your dad's movies this has to have an act on two and three I was like well what's act three and then act three wound up being his passing and US kind of figuring out a way to ingest that and make sense of it I don't know that there was any one part that was difficult when we started watching senior we saw it at the Telluride Film Festival we screened it in San Francisco at the same theater of the Castro where I had been with my dad you know when his films were coming out in the 70s and so for me it was more like I would be watching the film and it was the story of my life with him and and his death but it also wound up being this kind of thing of it brought me almost back to Chapman where you make art of your life and your life is kind of a movie but it's not it was this very surreal experience and then there was just the grieving part of it where and I think it's why some people say I wish I'd been able to do something like this for for one of my parents or a loved one is that it becomes this kind of Touchstone and it's a way to have a mechanism by which you can process a loss so it's I'm super fortunate to have it there and I think it'll be something that I I use as a kind of a you know you know a bit of a self-help tool for years to come I can't believe it oh here we are catch me up what do we know one of our b-29s over the North Pacific has detected radiation do we have the filter paper there's no doubt what this is White House sensors are down wishful thinking I'm afraid are those the long range detection filter papers Atomic test [Applause] [Music] the Russians have a bomb there's two Nolans there's the Nolan before you've worked for him where he's kind of this very distant Oz like figure he's just held as we all know in this very particular esteem because his Acumen and his his Mastery of this medium and then there's what happens as you approach and get into the system that he uses it's so hard to explain but he's a very very singular uh fella so even the screen tests felt important and not important enough for high status way there's just an energy and an intensity to what he does so and then take the subject matter and then the fact that he's asking me to kind of transform into someone who's extremely subtle and plotting who doesn't have any um punch lines whose only Charming when he's trying to manipulate or undermine and I found that to be a great Challenge and Chris Nolan had said he was likening it a bit to Amadeus where there's a Mozart and that's not you sometimes your Mozart usually your Mozart this time you're salieri and so I really took that um to heart as him kind of challenging the entirety of my career trajectory and saying don't use any of those things that have served you well find new resources and now the race is against the Soviets not unless we started Robert they just fired a starting gun what's the nature of the device that I've made data indicates it may have been a plutonium implosion device like the one you built at most there's something about straws that I find he's very conservative and very devoted and very much lived a life of service it reminds me a little bit of my grandfather who was a captain and did multiple tours in World War II and then came back and had a glass company and did all the glass for the Chrysler Building I mean those old American lives where you go like wow that was a really exceptional generation but I also know this thing of comparison of why don't I have what he or she or they have it's ugly and it's a preoccupation I think that is can be particular to a kind of American exceptionalism and so with all these forces that were at play during the Cold War it was great for me to have held this position of kind of a righteous indignation with what all these liberal Geniuses were up to in a way I felt like I got to be a Critic of what might be a perception of myself or others throughout the entirety of my career and so I got to do that Counterpoint it was almost like I was in a debate with the aspects of myself that I have glorified and I was able to look at each one of them and say that's not entirely right and maybe you don't deserve that and it's it's been a great dialogue and I have a feeling part of the reason Nolan wanted me to do this was to give me that kind of 180 perspective but I also at the end of the day I truly believe that Lewis dross did everything he did for reasons that he thought were correct and I don't mean that like a superhero bad guy I mean that legitimately as a human being so I find it really kind of fascinating that I'm still a little bit up in the air about who was uh on the right side of History it's like a currency the cultural significance of Cinema and films and TV and I think that part of my generation just like part of the Maverick generation part of it was kind of yeah this is nothing you know we're so cool we're really like dark and brooding and honestly it's a privilege it's a matter of precision and discipline and sacrifice to be able to do it correctly and I think that's been that's been the one lesson that I've over a long period of time been able to finally assimilate and accept [Music]

Channel: Vanity Fair

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Keywords: career timeline, chaplin, entertainment, films, iron man, iron man cast, iron man interview, kiss kiss bang bang, less than zero, marvel, mcu, movies, oppenheimer, oppenheimer cast, oppenheimer interview, oppenheimer robert downey jr., pound, rdj, rdj interview, rdj vanity fair, robert downey jr., robert downey jr. career, robert downey jr. career timeline, robert downey jr. interview, robert downey jr. kiss kiss bang bang, sr., the judge, vanity fair, zodiac

Id: yE-8iTNMlro

Length: 22min 51sec (1371 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023

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[u/decline_inline]

Big missed opportunity for an Ally McBeal segment (or was the end of his time on it a sore subject?)