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http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0307downeyjr
From esquire.com.
It's a 5 page interview. A really good read.
Here're the parts on Iron-Man
____________________________________________________
May God Bless and Keep Robert Downey Jr.
Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey Jr.'s ripe and ready for his close-up.
By Scott Raab
2/21/2007, 7:15 AM
From Page 1
The first time I spoke with Downey was on the phone a couple of days before I flew to L. A. "This is little Bobby Downey," he said by way of introduction, and when I told him then that I couldn't avoid touching on his tabloid history, he sighed. "'It's all you talk about in the press junkets,' " he said, mocking Earnest Journalist." 'But you've never talked to us about it'--and they go back and flash the jailhouse pictures. Okay, I get it--it's still there--and then something just broke, like, three months ago, where people stopped asking. It became about more interesting things.
"Iron Man is kind of a definitive--something so possibly two-dimensional and vapid and pointless in the bigger scope of life--but it points to a dividing line between me being identified as one thing which I'll always be and me being identified as another thing which I'll always be--someone who came out here to ****in' make movies and I didn't wanna be a busboy anymore."
Maybe he's right, although Iron Man won't be out before May 2008, and there is no story in any language about li'l Bobby that doesn't devote significant space to the more sordid aspects of his past. But the more salient point--the here-and-now truth of the matter--is that, fancy allusions aside, the guy sitting out on the Chateau veranda with my tape recorder resting on his chest and the Camel straight dangling from his pillowy lips is more than the sum of his rap and call sheets.
____________________________________________________
From Page 4
Sasawashi turns out to be the leaf that sushi's rolled with, and the clothes turn out to be lacy and frilly and sheer and gossamer gorgeous--and that's just the men's line.
"This is so fabulous," Downey coos, copping a pinkish-gold shirt patterned in a shiny, froggy green. It's diaphanous, with sleeves nearly down to his knuckles. "If you guys don't mind, I'm gonna shower with this on--a little bird-bathing--to see how it feels."
Instead, he tries on a plaid organic-poplin jacket and comes out of the dressing room looking positively feral--with maybe just a smidge of minced Mizrahi--as the costume designer for Iron Man arrives with her assistant and her dog, Hunter.
"Isn't that the oldest dog in Hollywood?" Downey asks.
"She kept her girlish figure," says one of the clothes ladies.
"I'm very careful about that," the costume designer says. "She was on a raw diet for most of her life, and then when she started getting older and couldn't handle that much protein, now she gets the juice pulp from the juicer every morning mixed in her food--living enzymes."
"I need ta take a bunch of herbs," Downey says, heading for where he left his purse on a table out back with the rose-petal water. "I'm gonna smoke a Camel non-filter in my sustainable T-shirt."
He looks good--Downey, not Hunter. He's lifting five days a week, taking pharmaceutical creatine to plumpen the muscle, and his upper body, front and back, is ten years younger than his face--smooth, hairless, blue veined, and rippling--and by Jove, I think maybe I've lingered too long in this witches' den of nancy-hip couture.
You look buff, I tell Downey, fairly certain that I have never before used the word buff in any form or setting in my entire life.
"Yeah," he says. "It's goin' up, too. I'm on swoll status."
You're Iron Man.
"I am Iron Man. Now, what kind of Iron Man do I wanna be? The Daniel Craig, someone-just-packed-clay-on-my-shoulders-and-chest thing is played out. So I'd rather go a little more Enter the Dragon style."
Either way, there's a whole cult of comic-book dorks who aren't gonna let you off easy.
"No, the geek closet has swung wide open. Dude, I'm running into guys--some Fortune 500 guy at some thing, and all of a sudden he unloosens his ****in' Prada and goes, 'Dude, when ****in' Tony Stark came back in the second incarnation and the Mandarin and dadadada'--and I'm goin', Wow, this is no joke.
"Here's how insane life gets--I'm doing a ****ing biopic? It's the same pressure as Chaplin, except there's no reference. You're creating the reference. So again the hustle is, How do I write a line between doing something that wasn't expected and how do I trust my brother, Jon Favreau, and how do we have this ****in' thing happen where we are both the guy--because to me, that's a movie, when the director and the lead guy create this third thing that is the character.
"Between where he's at and where I'm at, and the fact that he pushed for me and that panned out--because I was not on anyone's A-list for this part; why would I be? I came in and aced a screen test and was throwin' heat all day long. I prepped myself into such a tizzy. I whipped myself into a ****ing fury, to where the entire house, everybody backed off, like, Oh, okay, ****in' Shaman Boy's back, it's rain-dance central. I refused to lose this part to anything or anyone. I hadn't felt that way since Chaplin. The only time I've screen-tested since Chaplin was for Iron Man.
"Why am I the guy for this job? Because the story is the most duplicitous and conflicted of all the Marvel characters, because he's really just a guy who gets put in an extraordinary set of circumstances--partially due to his own character defects and partially due to his lineage--and you can pick a ****ing million Joseph Campbell myths and look 'em up, but none of them apply more to me, and there's nothing I could bring more to than this job and this story."
Back inside, the costume designer's explaining why she can't explain why she may or may not be able to use some luxury eco clothes for Iron Man. "We have a whole massive part of our movie where he becomes sort of a POW, and the people who capture him give him clothes, so perhaps we could create something perfect. I'm not supposed to say much. I can't give you any more information. Truly, he"--she means Shaman Boy--"and I will be assassinated."
Which, it turns out, is not so far from the truth.
"I have an Airsoft assault rifle in the trunk," Downey tells me as we roll on to Iron Man HQ, "so I don't want you to be surprised if I descend on the production office like a sniper--'cuz we're goin' from Earth Mother into Butchathon."
Planet Butch is unfazed by Downey's attack--nobody bats a ****ing eye, frankly--but the atmosphere is quickly engulfed by a gaseous cloud reeking of corporate tension when the alien life-form with him hauls out a tape recorder and a digital camera.
"Is this supposed to be a natural conversation?"
Jon Favreau asks. "Because with cameras and tape recorders and reporters, it's hard to be natural."
Favreau, bless him, does not seem pleased to be saying this.
He is but a simple director/actor/writer, a flannel-shirted honeybear in nominal charge of a Marvel ComicsÃÂfinanced film project with a somewhat star-crossed history--Iron Man has ricocheted around Hollywood for years--and a dweeb brigade locked in vicious online debate over possible casting, villain selection, story line, and hero-suit design. Now, with shooting starting in mere weeks, his office walls are flush with hush-hush body-armor sketches, and only his wife and God know what nerdgasmic revelations lay in the black-and-white-marbled composition book on his desk.
No photos, little chat, and all the inchoate dread and paranoia a couple hundred million can buy. But this much--without fear of finding my spicy tuna roll dosed with polonium-210--I can tell you: Unless Favreau's prop master can gin up a CGI catheter, Iron Man will piss into a bent-glass carafe, so that Downey won't need to be extracted from his armor every time he has to whiz on the job.
Also this: When we--Downey, me, and Downey's sidekick, Jimmy, a gruff young roughneck who hails from the capital of Butch, Pittsburgh, and has a Steelers logo tattooed on the skin above his heart, "my brother," Downey says, "my Secret Service, the guy who'd ****in' take the bullet"--duck into Downey's wee on-set office to wolf a take-out lunch and I decline the ginger ale on the grounds that soda makes me fart, Iron Man takes it as a personal challenge.
"Go for it, dude," he roars. "Dude, I'll ****in' match you thunderclap for thunderclap. I'm chambering one up myself." On the way home, as the Mercedes' windows glide up and down, Buddha weeps.
From esquire.com.
It's a 5 page interview. A really good read.
Here're the parts on Iron-Man
____________________________________________________
May God Bless and Keep Robert Downey Jr.
Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey Jr.'s ripe and ready for his close-up.
By Scott Raab
2/21/2007, 7:15 AM
From Page 1
The first time I spoke with Downey was on the phone a couple of days before I flew to L. A. "This is little Bobby Downey," he said by way of introduction, and when I told him then that I couldn't avoid touching on his tabloid history, he sighed. "'It's all you talk about in the press junkets,' " he said, mocking Earnest Journalist." 'But you've never talked to us about it'--and they go back and flash the jailhouse pictures. Okay, I get it--it's still there--and then something just broke, like, three months ago, where people stopped asking. It became about more interesting things.
"Iron Man is kind of a definitive--something so possibly two-dimensional and vapid and pointless in the bigger scope of life--but it points to a dividing line between me being identified as one thing which I'll always be and me being identified as another thing which I'll always be--someone who came out here to ****in' make movies and I didn't wanna be a busboy anymore."
Maybe he's right, although Iron Man won't be out before May 2008, and there is no story in any language about li'l Bobby that doesn't devote significant space to the more sordid aspects of his past. But the more salient point--the here-and-now truth of the matter--is that, fancy allusions aside, the guy sitting out on the Chateau veranda with my tape recorder resting on his chest and the Camel straight dangling from his pillowy lips is more than the sum of his rap and call sheets.
____________________________________________________
From Page 4
Sasawashi turns out to be the leaf that sushi's rolled with, and the clothes turn out to be lacy and frilly and sheer and gossamer gorgeous--and that's just the men's line.
"This is so fabulous," Downey coos, copping a pinkish-gold shirt patterned in a shiny, froggy green. It's diaphanous, with sleeves nearly down to his knuckles. "If you guys don't mind, I'm gonna shower with this on--a little bird-bathing--to see how it feels."
Instead, he tries on a plaid organic-poplin jacket and comes out of the dressing room looking positively feral--with maybe just a smidge of minced Mizrahi--as the costume designer for Iron Man arrives with her assistant and her dog, Hunter.
"Isn't that the oldest dog in Hollywood?" Downey asks.
"She kept her girlish figure," says one of the clothes ladies.
"I'm very careful about that," the costume designer says. "She was on a raw diet for most of her life, and then when she started getting older and couldn't handle that much protein, now she gets the juice pulp from the juicer every morning mixed in her food--living enzymes."
"I need ta take a bunch of herbs," Downey says, heading for where he left his purse on a table out back with the rose-petal water. "I'm gonna smoke a Camel non-filter in my sustainable T-shirt."
He looks good--Downey, not Hunter. He's lifting five days a week, taking pharmaceutical creatine to plumpen the muscle, and his upper body, front and back, is ten years younger than his face--smooth, hairless, blue veined, and rippling--and by Jove, I think maybe I've lingered too long in this witches' den of nancy-hip couture.
You look buff, I tell Downey, fairly certain that I have never before used the word buff in any form or setting in my entire life.
"Yeah," he says. "It's goin' up, too. I'm on swoll status."
You're Iron Man.
"I am Iron Man. Now, what kind of Iron Man do I wanna be? The Daniel Craig, someone-just-packed-clay-on-my-shoulders-and-chest thing is played out. So I'd rather go a little more Enter the Dragon style."
Either way, there's a whole cult of comic-book dorks who aren't gonna let you off easy.
"No, the geek closet has swung wide open. Dude, I'm running into guys--some Fortune 500 guy at some thing, and all of a sudden he unloosens his ****in' Prada and goes, 'Dude, when ****in' Tony Stark came back in the second incarnation and the Mandarin and dadadada'--and I'm goin', Wow, this is no joke.
"Here's how insane life gets--I'm doing a ****ing biopic? It's the same pressure as Chaplin, except there's no reference. You're creating the reference. So again the hustle is, How do I write a line between doing something that wasn't expected and how do I trust my brother, Jon Favreau, and how do we have this ****in' thing happen where we are both the guy--because to me, that's a movie, when the director and the lead guy create this third thing that is the character.
"Between where he's at and where I'm at, and the fact that he pushed for me and that panned out--because I was not on anyone's A-list for this part; why would I be? I came in and aced a screen test and was throwin' heat all day long. I prepped myself into such a tizzy. I whipped myself into a ****ing fury, to where the entire house, everybody backed off, like, Oh, okay, ****in' Shaman Boy's back, it's rain-dance central. I refused to lose this part to anything or anyone. I hadn't felt that way since Chaplin. The only time I've screen-tested since Chaplin was for Iron Man.
"Why am I the guy for this job? Because the story is the most duplicitous and conflicted of all the Marvel characters, because he's really just a guy who gets put in an extraordinary set of circumstances--partially due to his own character defects and partially due to his lineage--and you can pick a ****ing million Joseph Campbell myths and look 'em up, but none of them apply more to me, and there's nothing I could bring more to than this job and this story."
Back inside, the costume designer's explaining why she can't explain why she may or may not be able to use some luxury eco clothes for Iron Man. "We have a whole massive part of our movie where he becomes sort of a POW, and the people who capture him give him clothes, so perhaps we could create something perfect. I'm not supposed to say much. I can't give you any more information. Truly, he"--she means Shaman Boy--"and I will be assassinated."
Which, it turns out, is not so far from the truth.
"I have an Airsoft assault rifle in the trunk," Downey tells me as we roll on to Iron Man HQ, "so I don't want you to be surprised if I descend on the production office like a sniper--'cuz we're goin' from Earth Mother into Butchathon."
Planet Butch is unfazed by Downey's attack--nobody bats a ****ing eye, frankly--but the atmosphere is quickly engulfed by a gaseous cloud reeking of corporate tension when the alien life-form with him hauls out a tape recorder and a digital camera.
"Is this supposed to be a natural conversation?"
Jon Favreau asks. "Because with cameras and tape recorders and reporters, it's hard to be natural."
Favreau, bless him, does not seem pleased to be saying this.
He is but a simple director/actor/writer, a flannel-shirted honeybear in nominal charge of a Marvel ComicsÃÂfinanced film project with a somewhat star-crossed history--Iron Man has ricocheted around Hollywood for years--and a dweeb brigade locked in vicious online debate over possible casting, villain selection, story line, and hero-suit design. Now, with shooting starting in mere weeks, his office walls are flush with hush-hush body-armor sketches, and only his wife and God know what nerdgasmic revelations lay in the black-and-white-marbled composition book on his desk.
No photos, little chat, and all the inchoate dread and paranoia a couple hundred million can buy. But this much--without fear of finding my spicy tuna roll dosed with polonium-210--I can tell you: Unless Favreau's prop master can gin up a CGI catheter, Iron Man will piss into a bent-glass carafe, so that Downey won't need to be extracted from his armor every time he has to whiz on the job.
Also this: When we--Downey, me, and Downey's sidekick, Jimmy, a gruff young roughneck who hails from the capital of Butch, Pittsburgh, and has a Steelers logo tattooed on the skin above his heart, "my brother," Downey says, "my Secret Service, the guy who'd ****in' take the bullet"--duck into Downey's wee on-set office to wolf a take-out lunch and I decline the ginger ale on the grounds that soda makes me fart, Iron Man takes it as a personal challenge.
"Go for it, dude," he roars. "Dude, I'll ****in' match you thunderclap for thunderclap. I'm chambering one up myself." On the way home, as the Mercedes' windows glide up and down, Buddha weeps.
