Robert Downey Jr. is still a wild man, but now he's using his powers for good and not evil. On the set of Iron Man last summer, he goofed off, to Jon Favreau's chagrin, between takes in Tony Stark's bachelor pad. Even come interview, he's all over the place, but all serving his passion for the comic book. He even unbuttoned his shirt to show off the chest piece.
Crave Online: Why are you cut and bruised at this particular moment?Robert Downey Jr.: He goes through a lot. I don’t know what I can talk about or not. I guess it’s safe to say that he’s 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 figured out a way to escape. I don’t know much about these sorts of things, but I know you can get pretty bruised up escaping.
Crave Online: What are you shooting today?
Robert Downey Jr.: He’s been back home, he’s had a press conference and he’s talked to his partner in front of this legacy energy device that he’s in essence miniaturized, which is keeping him alive, but he’s back home. But back home, there’s nothing that’s normal in this whole film. He’s "just back home," did you see 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 a very kind of isolated opulence.
Crave Online: How does it feel to wear that costume?
Robert Downey Jr.: I love Stan Winston and Shane and all the guys on him team. There are several stunt men, Oakley we call one of them and Mike Justice and these guys. It’s me and those fellows, my stuntman and my stand in who wind up really being Iron Man, because it’s just such a massive undertaking. We said at the first that we wanted to do as much of is practically as possible. I was coming into the set going, "Oh yeah, practical, practical." I was like, "Cool." But it’s tough, really tough and really great. Like that first time you try on the suit, I swear to God you could put the least mucho superhero looking man or woman in the suit, I swear to God in 15 seconds you could believe that any of them could destroy the nemesis. This has been a really grueling shoot. It’s also been a really magical shoot, because I sh*t you not, every day we’ve come in, and it reminds me of reading about Chaplin in the early days, where 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, but we’d go in and 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 kinds of films?" I'm actually starting to think that they're a really, really, really high order of art because there are so many things that you professionally have gone through and understood and experienced to be able to not be overwhelmed by the fact that 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.
Crave Online: If you met Tony Stark on a street corner, what would you guys have to talk about?
Robert Downey Jr. : 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 old enough to have a pretty strong aesthetic distance and I remember the days if it was Less than Zero or Chaplin where I would throw myself into this tizzy of prep or dance for the roles for 16 hours. The same makeup gal doing this did Less Than Zero and she was blowing menthol in my eyes and putting latex on my lips and I was doing pushups before the scenes and my heart was racing forever. 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, "I don’t think Tony would…" which is essentially saying what I want to do in the scene. But if there’s ever been a character in the history of my career that I would happy to meld with and associate myself with, it’s Tony Stark, because it’s the coolest job I’ve ever had. The history of it, and I got to meet Stan Lee. I took him to the Grill in Beverly Hills, and I asked him, “What was the real origins of this?" And he said, "I kind of did it on a dare. Could you make a billionaire industrialist, womanizing heathen, somehow through this vulnerability of his own…” And also you think about it, it’s interesting, roughly 30 years ago and history and da da da, but it was a time when there was a very strong anti-establishment, anti-military industrial complex, anti-rich, over 30 energy, and so for him it was just a huge challenge. They said they got more female fan mail than for all their other heroes 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. You’ve got a small token-like reactor in your chest, that’s the reason you’re not dead in the movie, how can that be a metaphor? It's like saying, "This aqualung under water, this reed I'm breathing through…"
Crave Online: We heard you changed the press conference scene to have all the reporters sitting down. What was that all about?
Robert Downey Jr.: Well, first of all, 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 are a lot of these concepts that everything’s like everything else for film, so I’m not coming in going, "This is all wrong, relight." But I’ll come in and 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. Tony Stark is really, I don't know how this could come across, but it's really Jon and I are creating Tony and through that half the lines are his and half the ideas are mine, and then we have all these really great people at the top of their field who are exasperated with the fact that we are vetting an idea. I come in every day and 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 so far out they go, "Will you just go put on your chest piece?" But more often than not, if anything I feel the onus 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 it shouldn’t be an art form. I think audiences are continually underestimated. At the same time I love C.H.U.D. I can go see a pretty crappy movie and love it, if it’s got a couple of things that work. I’m like a soccer coach with kids who probably shouldn’t be playing soccer.
Crave Online: What made you ask the reporters to sit down?
Robert Downey Jr.: What was going through my mind was I walked in the room and everyone's standing up and I go, "Here we are" and they're screaming, "Mr. Stark, Mr. Stark!" and all that thing. 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 that he's interacting with, like reporters, that's the press and we do our sound bites and we do our damage control and we do our propaganda and that's it. I think he's starting to relate to seeing large groups of 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 suddenly be waving flowers and wanting to join hands and sing Kumbaya but I think there's an equalization that occurs. Still that is a little bit strange. It's not like he raises his finger and everyone sits down. I think it was just kind of making him nervous and I thought it's a strange thing to do and also later on, they're supposed to think that maybe Tony's gone a little koo koo and I thought that would demonstrate, even though that's not why he did it. It's that thing of miscommunication of intentions and ideas.
Crave Online: But you're doing it to serve the film, not just be a diva.
Robert Downey Jr.: It’s so easy to get spun out, and you see people who have no challenges outside of their Hollywood problems come in and they regularly have meltdowns on sets, or they turn into a bitch, or they say and do things because they’re under pressure, or because they think they’re something they’re not. It’s really a trip to be number one on the call sheet and getting a movie like this, and it’s always kind of an inside game and I forget that occasionally but they keep writing the sh*t and the toggle switch, it's that thing. and you realize at the end of your day that you spent most of the day just making sure that all that other people's energy and all your own mindtalk wasn't ruining what had started off [as a good day]. Like the day plans to be good and then you come in like CRASH CRASH CRASH trying to VROOM VROOM VROOM. "Can I just dot something in your eye, can I just blow some sand in your eye right before the take?" Why? "I don't know. I'm the head of the blow sand in your eye department." Then there's a whole thing. We did a photo shoot in here the other day and it wound up going great but you see this picture of Tony Stark, kind of looks like Tom Cruise except more handsome and more buff, the suit and his hair's blowing in the wind and it's curly and you go, "Can we do a shot like that?" And the hair lady's like, "I can try." And I'm like, "Let's not go Something About Mary here. This, I've got this." So it's been a lot of that just outside issues, like, "Hey, look, man, the suit." You're tired and you get swayed back or it's like I'm not particularly tall and I'm surrounded by giants and it's a kind of weird. I'm not walking around like Don Adams on boards or anything but all these elements of what when I see this movie, I want to be able to believe that this guy is the guy.
