Robert Downey Jr. : The Father of the Man

JT: What effect has acting had on your personality? Do you feel, for instance, that playing many different roles has splintered you, or that you were splintered to begin with, or that you're not splintered at all?

RD: I only know that I love doing characters, and those characters light up an archetype in me, and when that happens I feel I'm just a conduit for an idea, usually ancient in origin.

JT: So, are you like a medium when you're acting?

RD: Sure. Nothing makes me happier than sitting down with some friends and going through 10 different characters in the course of an hour. All representations of different personality types. Most of the characters I do are pretty sick.

JT: I felt that the only way to get you to become Blake Allen in Two Girls and a Guy was to let you feel as if he were your character.

RD: There's nothing worse than when a director tries to tell you about a character, walking you around saying, "You know, this guy is from ..." I always just want to say, "Shut your mouth!" I used to internalize it and then take care of myself by pulling an all-nighter, and then go to the set defeated and ashamed only to convince myself that this guy must know better and that I should just take direction.

JT: But you've never believed that.

RD: No. And now there's no excuse for me. I've learned. And I've grown. But I'm of two minds. One is that you shouldn't have to tell someone what you need, because if you do it was ill-fated to begin with. On the other hand, ultimatums work because either you get what you need or the situation is over.

JT: You may not like confrontation, but what you get by avoiding it is much worse than the momentary awkwardness of making a person hate you--which is really what you're afraid of.

RD: Right. And I also like to be nice to people because I like people to be nice to me.

JT: But I don't understand your fear of confrontation, because it usually occurs in people who have a history of brutal fathers. Your father was the exact opposite, wasn't he?

RD: He was. But for me the problem is different. Before you go into the ring with somebody, you should have a pretty good idea you're right, but something I learned from acting is that you should always be ready to admit you have no idea what you're talking about. What I do in moments of confrontation is second-guess myself.

JT: That reminds me of something the great basketball player John Havlicek said. He was one of the great pressure-players in the game, and his answer for how to deal with moments of huge importance was to take a second and say to himself two things simultaneously. The first was, This is the most important moment--in the game, or the season--and I must succeed. The second was, This is just a basketball game and it means nothing in the larger scheme of things so it doesn't matter whether I succeed or not. Holding that paradox in his head always raised him to his greatest skill and power.

RD: Giving them both equal weight, so that neither truth is diminished. Mel Gibson's like that. He definitely has that. I learned a lot from him. He's someone who has lots of integrity and lots of child energy, which is the best combination.

JT: How would you spend the next year or two if all of a sudden you did not have to work for a living at all?

RD: I'd be recording all the music that I've written over the last 15 years. I think it's the most personal mode of expression I've ever found.

JT: I always think of films as partly musical expression. I can't imagine a film without specific music that I'm choosing. Would that not be a way of doing it?

RD: I bet in 20 years we'll look back at this period in filmmaking as the time just before the great awakening, which is recognizing that visual images and music can combine to achieve transcendent spiritual heights. I don't know exactly where it's going to go with all of the computer shit. What do they call it?

JT: If you're asking me, you are asking the wrong person. Are you into high-tech stuff?

RD: I've tried to be. But this computer thing has got me miffed. I've owned enough computer equipment that I could have launched the space shuttle from my desk. And now, I swear to God, I can't even get into my Rolodex.

JT: "Techno" is a current buzzword in music, coming mainly out of the London rave scene but really coming out of Edgard Varese, the grandfather of electronic music. It seems to express the sleek, impersonal digital sensibility of the future. Do you feel like a misfit in that culture?

RD: I think I know my strengths and weaknesses pretty well and I don't believe that this techno future--if it's coming--is going to render whatever skills I have outmoded. I just have to use those skills reliably. And I will. If there's one thing I know about myself it's that I have never and will never drop the ball when the chips are down. I pride myself on that. The higher the stakes, the happier I am, the better I will be.

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James Toback was Oscar-nominated for his screenplay for Bugsy _and is the writer/director of _Fingers and The Big Bang, among other films, as well as the upcoming Two Girls and a Guy.

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