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 Robert Downey Jr.
Interview By: Harry Kaplowitz
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 ... |
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