Robert Downey Jr.

Interview By: Harry Kaplowitz
HarryKaplowitz@TheCinemaSource.com

Playing James Barris in this summer's A Scanner Darkly proved to be a bit of a challenge for seasoned actor Robert Downey Jr. A flamboyantly scatological and paranoid man in a not-too-distant, Big Brother future, Barris is perhaps the antithesis of everything that Downey Jr. is. But the separation, he said, wasn't hard to figure out.

'As an actor, you're supposed to have aesthetic distance. I'm in my forties and I have the ability to separate what I'm doing from where I've been or where I'm going,' the 41-year-old New York City native said of his performance. 'You know, it's the first thing they teach you in theater arts: aesthetic distance, I remember it well.'

A Scanner Darkly, adapted from Philip K. Dick's nightmarish 1977 cautionary tale of a novel about a world that has lost the war on drugs, also stars Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane. But it wasn't the stellar cast or the intriguing subject matter that got Downey Jr. to sign on for the performance. It was the film's director, Richard Linklater.

'It's always the director even more than the subject matter because you can have great subject matter and a crappy director and you might as well just stay at home,' Downey Jr. said. 'So, I really, really, really like Richard Linklater, and if you look at the variety of films he's done, I think he's what America needs more of, which is somebody who essentially is really in himself as an artist and knows how to vacillate between more commercial and more personal type projects.'

And A Scanner Darkly has proved to be one of Linklater's more personal projects, as it uses the same interpolated rotoscoping technique that marked his 2001 cult classic, Waking Life. And for Downey Jr. , seeing himself animated onscreen proved to be a surrealistic experience in itself.

'There are some parts of it where you feel it corrects genetic imperfections that you tend to focus on. It kind of rounds out your corners and takes the sharpness off some of your edge,' he said. 'It's weird. You kind of think about a lot of stuff when you see your own image and it's been so much lately. It was a really nice, contemplative thing.'

But A Scanner Darkly isn't the first Dick novel to be adapted for the big screen. Previous Dick adaptations include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and Paycheck, all of which Downey Jr. said found themselves extremely adaptable, particularly Blade Runner.

'It's not about the setting, it's about the people. There's a lot of sci-fi stuff that's come out in the last decade or so, it was pretty prevalent in the '80s and '90s that was like, 'Wow, that was quite a spectacle ' I don't care,'' he said. 'Whereas it seems, with Dick, you care because you relate and you understand that these are conflicted people, these are people who, on one level or another, don't fit in and have given up and don't even care for redemption.

'And again, that's why I love and I miss Harrison Ford. I don't miss him because he's still doing his thing, but what he was able to do. We've got Tom Cruise nowadays, and he's ample, and I respect what he does, but Harrison Ford crossed all these genres,' Downey Jr. continued. 'When he did Blade Runner, it was so down and dirty, but when he did Han Solo, you understood what a serendipitous hero was, and then Joseph Campbell told you 15 years later that he was someone who really only did the right thing kind of by accident but he was supposed to have that experience ' I love that. I love characters and archetypes and all that.'

But A Scanner Darkly didn't present Downey Jr. with the opportunity to emulate Ford. Instead, Downey Jr. was able to tap into his own belief system about living an authentic life.

'I love a serendipitous hero. I love that Bob Arctor, even though you would see it as a tragic cautionary tale, he's essentially been someone who unwittingly or unconsciously gave more than his soul; he gave his very ability to reason and understand his own mind,' Downey Jr. said. 'He's basically like, if in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in that one scene with Nicholson, he wasn't kidding and he really had gotten the shock treatment. But I think it's kind of about healing and about that generational split that happens.

'And it's always between, I think, commerce and following your gut to what an authentic life is. And obviously, the authentic life isn't the one that's happening under the influence of this escapism substance that is so damaging,' he continued.

A Scanner Darkly also allowed Downey Jr. to explore his ideas of what identity is.

'This movie is exactly about identity, and I also think it's about what your societal identity is and what you can do,' he said. 'In ideal situations, you just assimilate life lessons and metaphors and themes and lessons ' it's just a real turn on because you are behaviorally modeling things that are expectable to happen in your own life. It could be the loss of a loved one or a rage beyond your control or those things ' these big highs and lows.'

But the experience of filming the movie wasn't fun and games for Downey Jr.

'The nuts and bolts of the part were a thousand words a day as fast as you can say them, which means you need to have them memorized,' he said. 'I remember from my old training that you have to know it backwards and forwards 200 percent to be able to say it at the speed the character is required to. So this, for me, was boot camp. It wasn't a party, it wasn't a reverie, it wasn't cathartic, it wasn't any of that. It was pure execution.'

But the experience hasn't changed Downey Jr. 's perception of the film industry and what it takes out of its participants, especially in terms of how actors come to identify (or not) with the characters they play.

'The disingenuous and the fucked up part is that, much like someone who is dependent on some outside activity, whether its something dysfunctional like an eating disorder or a drug dependency or gambling, it kind of preoccupies your days and you're not really processing your own actual life,' he said. 'And the downside of making films is that you're there, and 12 hours a day you're spending being an appendage to this ' for lack of a better word ' machine that has its own rules and guidelines and desires and directives, so it's a little bit consuming and it's really hard to keep all the plates spinning.'

Currently filming David Fincher's Zodiac with Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo, Downey Jr. will be seen next alongside Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore and Robert Duvall in Curtis Hanson's Lucky You, set to be released on Sept. 8. He will also share the screen with Nicole Kidman in Fur, a biopic of revered photographer Diane Arbus, set to go into limited release this November.