Wednesday, April 17, 2013

I FELT LIKE A FIGHTER WHO HAD BEEN TRAINING FOR A TITLE BOUT THAT HAD NOT BEEN BOOKED YET:  Up until Iron Man, the biggest box office hit in which Robert Downey Jr. was involved was Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School. (For real.) He talks about his career turnaround with GQ this month, including whether he expects to ever receive an Oscar ("I, personally, would be shocked if we went to the end of the tape now and I didn't have at least one.... Look, even if I don't get one directly, eventually they're just going to have to give me one when I get old. So no matter how you slice it, I'm getting one,") and this:
"Here's the thing. At whatever point I'm done with [the Iron Man films], I'm going to have a bit of a crisis, because I probably haven't even fully ingested how much I've enjoyed it, how much it's meant. It so came out of kind of relative obscurity as this second-tier character from the Marvel universe, and I feel I was part of making it something more. But it also to me was just good filmmaking. It's funny, people will come up to me and go, 'Dude, how do you do it? How do you dress up and play these...?' While whatsisname is shooting the next David O. Russell or whatever, I'm, 'Here's the thing, you're either having a good time or a bad time, and you're either doing a good movie or a bad movie.' And I know one thing, which is that there is no guarantee that doing a movie you think is 'important' "—Downey enunciates the word important in a wonderfully withering way—"isn't going to be the worst piece of tripe I've ever had to sit through. Or that this kind of two-dimensional genre movie I'm doing isn't actually going to be thoroughly entertaining. Isn't that why you went to the movies to begin with? Whatever."

5 comments:

  1. I don't care who he was up against that year, I'm still ticked he didn't get the Oscar when he was nominated for "Chaplin." Thought so at the time, still think so now.

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  2. Adam B.11:04 AM

    Lost to Pacino on Scent of a Woman; should have lost to Denzel Washington for Malcolm X.

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  3. Pacino. Ptui.

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  4. bellawilfer8:11 PM

    FWIW, Team Downey has the 2nd most bad-ass offices in Hollywood. (First being Bad Robot). And Downey is massively nice in real life - worked for his agent a million years ago. Deserves all the good that's come his way.

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  5. isaac_spaceman9:09 PM

    In retrospect, it's hard to feel too bad for either Washington or Downey Jr., because the most indelible movies that year were ensembles (Reservoir Dogs; Glengarry Glen Ross).

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