Robert Downey Jr.

30:36Based on our experience, we have our own experience of what they're saying. And something new happens. Of course, it's the ultimate, right? It's unbelievable. Yeah. How much of the craft is physical body language, let's say? Well, I think that you bring the body and the mind will follow. I think blocking is the most important thing an actor will do to any point in the day of getting ready to do a scene. I've seen actors whose blocking is so free, you just need to unscrew the camera tilt because you never know where they might go. I've had flashes of that, but I'm a little more plotting in that I like to know the architecture of what it is.

31:20I'm trying to say with my body. And then less and less over these last couple years, particularly after working with Nolan, I realize what you say is so much less important than how you say it. And then it reaffirmed what I was believing about blocking and where I put my body. That's interesting. And that goes to us not understanding the song lyrics. Same idea. Yeah. Tell me about Nolan. What was that experience like? I mean, I just turned 59, right? So the fact that I could have some of my most valuable lessons at this point in the game, a, it took a little bit of adjusting to. And also, you must always get out of the way because the minute I enclosed the council, the minute I have contempt prior to investigation, the minute I've decided that I'm not necessarily as teachable as people would like me to be.

32:15I'm fucked, but it's a hard lesson to keep coming back to. So it was old dog new tricks. And he was the vehicle for this. Of course, it helps that it was an astonishingly intuitive story to tell at scale when he told it because no sooner were we about to start than things went bananas. You had the timing's unbelievable. Yeah. It was one of those things where again, like you were saying a few minutes back. Oh, okay. So that means that that life is doing something and it's assigned us these participation points if we're willing. And just get on it and start the ride and see where it goes because something's happening here.

33:04And it was a very blessed production as far as I could tell. Even the elements conspired. The day of the Trinity test, rather than having to bring in these huge air pushers and these massive fans, it just happened to be blowing harder than they ever could have made it with all the machinery. And my boy, Killium was out there. You know what it's like trying to not look like an idiot when you're walking through a wind storm in the desert. Yeah. And yet there was a take where he pulled it off. That's in the movie. I'm busy. Take where he's climbing up where the, you know, the safety and the stunt rigors and all that said, we don't know if he should and Nolan said, I'll do it.

33:53And he went up and safety tested it. And once the director does it, he's kind of saying, I won't ask you to do anything that I'm not willing to do. And I wasn't willing to do it because I'm foolish. Yeah. I saw how it was built. I believe it's going to be okay. Yeah. This is the role of a producer. Yeah. Someone who takes a project and decides the direction it's going to go in. How he hosts it. Was it a hard decision to sign up for the movie? No. I hadn't. It was a no -brainer. That's great. Yeah. That's great. Not for me. Everybody else said, there's no way you're not doing this. And I was like, hold on.

34:30Let me at least go through my usual heel digging. They're like, you do all you want. But you're doing this. You're showing up. Yeah. And I was like, yes, I am. So my resistance. And great experience. Incredible. Incredible. And when I say exacting, you know, I regretted using this phrase a few days ago, picking fly shit out of pepper because it was probably on purpose taken out of context and made to seem like it was like, you know, a shitty job. No. It was an excruciatingly wonderfully enlightening experience of doing something very meticulous. I said, it's the closest thing I could compare it to would be like 100 people making a watch.

35:12Yeah. So are super detail. Yeah. And focus. But because it's so detailed and focused, Nolan himself, he's not worrying about that. He knows that the best in the business have that all under wraps. Yeah. He's intuitive. How should we block this? I wonder where Robert wants to move. I wonder what all the narrow and right is going to want to do at this point in the transition and the scene. Let me watch that. Let's twist it again. Let's give them a little more time to really feel like I'm not rushing them to figure out where their bodies want to be before their mouth say the words. And so it was just so spock chest next level.

35:51I needed it. I desperately needed a corrective experience.

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37:36How different are the different directors you've worked with? Tell me the range. Sure of what you get. I'll go back to the beginning. Less than zero American Yaskar read out of the bat easily from the top five directors I've ever worked on. That's interesting. And he was so put off by the experience that I don't think he ever did another film. And yet I'm so glad that he went through what he had to go through to be put off and left me with that because he invested me with ultimate authority to express this character. Amazing. He was awesome. How early was that in your career? Within the first three, four years.

38:19Wow. Yeah. Which is astonishing. And then Lord Richard Attenborough for Chaplin. Wow. That was like having the most emotionally connected Seegung master. He was bomb watching on the top of Rada when he was growing up during the Blitz. You know that. Gandhi cried freedom. All of these films he did. Then Bridged Too Far. And then he decided that I was going to be his choice to express a modern artist in the 20th century's trials and tribulations politically, personally, creatively, sexually. And that was great. Oliver Stone. So shall commentary once in a generation artist. John Favreau. This spirit with which we created that first Iron Man and wound up being part of this big cosmic thing of the MCU being born.

39:24He's like a brother to me. Todd Phillips, who I did this film with him in Zach Galafanakis is just so bright and open. How is Zach? I never met him. I'm a fan from afar. He does not disappoint. Now remember when I said sometimes you just have to unspool the camera thing because you don't know where he's going to go. I was doing a fucking scene with Zach Galafanakis and he just walked off the set because he said, oh, I'm going to have to go. I'm going to have to go peepee. And he like his character. Yeah. Because I was saying, or hey, man, we're going to get back in this car and we're stuck in this car together.

39:57Do you want to use the bathroom? And he's just supposed to say something. He says he goes, yeah, I'm going to go peepee. And he starts walking towards this building like a waffle house where there might be a bathroom. And I was like, how's that going to cut together? And Todd was like, don't worry about it. Did you end up in the film? Yes. And I'm like, this fucking guy. Yeah. He's free. Oh my god. So free. And yet also part of his freedom is giving himself freedom to walk out of the frame in a scene that is not established that he goes anywhere but into a car. But practical enough to go, well, it doesn't matter.

40:30It's going to be a cut, whereas I can be if anything a little too wedged up sometimes because I want to be a still want to be a good boy. And I want to be a good first ad and I want to be a responsible collaborator. You want it to work. I want it to work. And you don't want to do something good and then have it not be usable for some technical reason. That was based on a choice you make. Correct. Which also then means probably on the shadow side is I do not want to be seen in unfavorable light. You think so? I think that sometimes I am too much of a behavior. Sometimes. Okay. He's talking about the different great directors.

41:11Yes. specifics about what's different about them. Well, I'll put it this way. I did two films with Robert Altman. And there was this long scene where my character is trying to get past a police line. And he's kind of a schmuck. And he said the night before he goes, whatever you do tonight, don't memorize your lines. In other words, he was to the extreme of, please don't spoil the opportunity with preparation. Let's keep it all as loose as possible. That's interesting. And I've heard that it's not uncommon for people to say, let's press the rainbow reset and try to have no preferences based on previous experiences for what we're going to do.

42:01Which by the way, it's a great direction to give. It's a really hard one to follow. Yeah. If you don't really believe that the person means it when they say it. And there's certain folks. Yeah. Altman was one of them who is when he said it, there was no way he clearly meant it. Clearly it was not obtuse. It was not sarcastic. He would say it with a glimmer in his eye because he loved chaos because everything was pretty controlled. But you know, yeah, of course, sometimes you just have people who go like, oh my god, I just realized that I have signed up to do a film with someone who has no business directing this film.

42:43Has it happened often or not too much? No, maybe 10, 12, 20 % of the time. So the averages are low. What was working with Oliver like? He was making a statement about the media and American culture and our fascination with violence. And it was so prophetic. That's reborn killers. Now, at time, it was with Woody too. Yes. I mean, come on, dude. And by the way, Ryan D 'Agaistino just also interviewed Woody. This would be for Ask Quiet magazine. And Woody kind of cut loose. So I was like, all right, I can start telling some of the real story. The night before Woody had one of his biggest scenes, I pounded on his door at the La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe and wouldn't let him sleep a wink.

43:35I brought in all my extra curricular party favors and I force fed him a wild night. But during the course of that night, I also brought up some questions about his characters, back story and truth that were relevant to the scenes he was going to shoot the next day. So even that crazy semi -debosh interaction we had where I'm sure he was cursing me the next morning, he did say after the fact that it was kind of a critical turning point as far as the way he was exploring playing Mickey Knox. And so even in those moments looking back, we loved it. Oh, that was just, you know, misspent youth and we were also irresponsible.

44:23It was like, no, even with that lost kind of super sex drugs and rock and roll generation at the heart of it, people were trying to move the needle forward. And all of a sudden is the kind of director who you realize you're working with someone who's trying to say something that could be important and you can be part of that. So you don't want to fuck it up. Yeah. The positive part of the night before. Yeah. Was that intentional or just happened to happen? Oh, dude, I was just out of my mind. I also was happy to be on location. And there were these other two folks who were playing the film they're called the barbarian twins or the barbarian brothers or something.

45:04They're these big guys. It was that time right before the downside of heroin chic had come back in and there's so many things that I had yet to even experience as far as my own prickly lividies and all that stuff. It was back in that kind of like manageable partying too much phase. And then kind of like the society that Oliver was predicting in a small way society itself kind of did go over this indulgent cliff and we have, you know, the myriad tragedies that followed. Yeah. Yeah. Have you read his book? Oliver's? It's so beautiful. It's his biography, but it's just the first part. And I think he's writing the second part now and it's so beautifully written.

45:52You'll love it. Can't wait. It's great. And his untold history of the United States. Unbelievable. Can't get enough of it. What I love about it also is you can watch it over and over and continue to see new things. That's the thing, dude. It's believe it or not. Here's how so dense. Yes. Here's how weird I am. And I've always wondered about people. It's like this guy eats a tuna fish sandwich and potato chips with a snaple every day for lunch and I go that says a lot about this guy, but I'll fall asleep or drift off to Oliver Stone's untold history United States. I've done it hundreds of times.

46:29And my wife goes, is it soothing you to drift off the sound of how it serves the Cold War in Gorbachev and the age of terror. And I go like, I'm just trying to figure out what the fuck era we're in. And I don't want to miss the references because I want to try to be additive. Maybe the way I can be additive is in making a statement within the context of what Nolan did, but there's some part of me that just I don't want to miss the message. Yeah. You've been on the top of the mountain. You've been in the bottom of the pit. Do you feel like you're the same person the whole time going through these cycles?

47:13I feel like it at essence, nothing's changed. And these fragment personalities that either were hardwired in by events, not necessarily traumatic ones. I'm also a bit of an imitator and that I noticed that a lot of my life has been taking on the characteristics of those, not an assimilator, not in a Ripley way, but like there's a lot of my uncle Jim and me. There's a lot of Anthony Michael Hall in my wit because he was the person who brought me into doing my first studio comedy. There were some James Woods in there. There's some Oliver Stone in there. There's even Nowadays a little bit of Chris Nolan in there.

47:57So, I'm not wanting for my own personality, but I've noticed that at times when I've been more or less secure, more or less well, more or less attuned, I can see a conflagration of several key selves kind of fighting to take center stage, but the source self clearly has largely unsoilbed. Beautiful. Beautiful. Great. Would you say you and yet I wonder if happiness is as a goal is rough. Happiness is a byproduct of right action. I love it. But sometimes I can do all the right things and gain no satisfaction. That's what I need to reflect and say what defect or what limitation that I come to believe is holding me back from because, I regret nothing except the times that I have beat myself up or been too emotionally or psychologically tough on those around me because we're all trying to do something that is so difficult and so to tighten the screws on any of it is just like, come on.

49:26How different will your performance be based on the person that you're acting with or against? In a vacuum, there's a range that, depending on external circumstances, will roughly be about where you think it is on the graph. And then then you never get to choose the winner or the who. There are things where there's a chemistry that transcends even the reality of the connection. Sometimes the universe just requires you to make music with her or them. And it goes like, this is our sweet spot. This is the music at the spheres. And once in a while you wind up with a scene partner or a creative partner where you go like, all we got to do is show up.

50:21It just seems like this dance works no matter what we do. Now it's still work. Jude Law in the Sherlock series is such a natural partner. Wouldn't you like look into each other's eyes? Yeah. Feel like I'm on a strong team. Is that what the feel like? What's the feeling when it's working with a collaborator? Regardless of what the implied status is, it's that you know I'm here to throw up the balls and you're going to serve them. Or I'm great on the returns. You're great on the volleys. And you just kind of understand, without any ego you go, I see you, Navi. It's an avatar thing. I fully see how we fit together.

51:07And I'm not going to pretend that even if I wish it was a little different than it is. And correspondingly, one of my favorite phrases is if you can't be an athletic supporter. You know, and lately the crazy thing is, is after all these years, I'm back to being a supporting actor. The thing I just celebrated one. Fine. Yes. Yeah. And crazily enough, the first little prize I ever got was Santa Monica High School, 1982, best supporting actor for playing Will Parker in the musical Oklahoma. Somehow or other, I didn't lose it. It must have gone through 15 storage containers, but I kept it. That's amazing.

51:57And now between that and what happened in March, it's very odd. Like sometimes you have these things that are a sign of a probable future if the stars align. God's willing, are you? And then sometimes you hold up that other pillar. And you just feel the energy of the million steps that happen between. Yeah. That has been a very odd meditation.

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54:00One of the things that was interesting about when Iron Man happened, the first Iron Man, is that before that we thought of superhero movies in a particular way. And it seemed like, regardless of who was in them, they would dumb themselves down to be in that thing. And that changed with you and Iron Man. It felt like a real actor could make something happen in the context of this spectacle. And it felt like it changed the genre for the better. Yeah. And look, hindsight is 2020, but also Michael Keaton, Val Kuhmer, George Clooney. There had been extremely talented people in those roles. And I enjoyed all those films.

54:52The funny thing was, it was almost like we had to come from the underground. And thank God, it was considered to be a B level superhero, not a top tier one. And thank God that Stan Lee had actually thought about it a superhero who had no powers in and of himself. It was technology. You could say the same thing about Batman, but Batman also had this weird psychological bent where he wanted to essentially cause play. You know, Tony is much more of an outward schmuck who undergoes this extremely symbolic transformation. But he's a tech guy. And how weird is that for nowadays? As a matter of fact, all my Silicon Valley friends and I met more and more of them over the last couple of years and I find them fascinating.

55:45They say their pillars of films are social network in the first Iron Man. Amazing. What's the first movie you remember seeing in childhood? I think it might have been Fantasia, dude. And do you remember being good experience? I found it mortifying. I also remember being scared shitless of Bambi. Well, sad Bambi. Yeah. Maybe it was something about, I think people underrate how good the screen and sound qualities were even back in the 70s. Yeah. Like, you know, sensor round was for real bro. Yeah. Yeah. It was. And the screens were bigger than two. The screens were bigger. Even the Hayden Planetarium.

56:29I remember going there and feeling like, whoa, this is too much. And I remember going to those 42nd Street theaters, going like, bro, it's a little skanky in here. But man, what an experience. And what a group participation Gestalt therapy. We're all having and blah, blah, blah. I think it was just scary to grow up in a massive urban environment like that. And, you know, being a thousand or 1500 days old and all this stuff, the air is thick with all of this cultural and international conflict. And I heard it. I heard it all going on in the kitchen and over the poker table. And in the arguments and my dad yelling at the black and white TV at Johnson and Nixon, I heard it all.

57:18And the idea was like, hey, man, you know, like we're seeing this, we ain't fucking cool with it. You know, it's like, what? And New York in the 70s was like, it was a rough place and they were boarded up buildings. Yes. It's not New York now. Yeah. And the crazy thing though is I love it when people say New York is over and it's so scary on the streets and I go like, the information age has modulated up the mildest threat to seem like the cover of an important publication. But also when you don't know any better, like, you know, I love the kids under 12 that are growing up in New York City right now because they understand.

58:01It's not step on a crack brick your mother's back. It's watch out for that Uber and that e -bike. They will crown you as you're trying to step off the curb. And that situational awareness that our generation had to learn writ large for whatever little trauma it left, how valuable to just go like, there's a big grid of activity going on here. And like, I am an aunt. Yeah. Okay. Speaking about that, can we talk about prison? Sure. What? What was that like? Okay. Not terrible. Jail and county jail in particular. And also you never forget your first time. Yeah. You never forget your first time. The first 12 days I ever did were in a psych module just because they wanted to keep me away from everyone.

59:02And they were just terrible because the all there is is the mattress. And do you ever ever heard of court cam? It's this rather impressively entertaining show about everything that goes wrong in court when you have all these like bailiffs having to attack the guy who's charged him and the other. If you just Google court cam and just do highlights 2023, I guarantee it. Just my experience. Yeah. County jail, first 12 days psych module, gnarly. And psych module, when I hear psych module, I think of hospital. I don't think of bars on the window. Are there bars on the window? Rather than bars on the window because someone could be crazy and try to squeeze through those bars and get caught.

59:51And then you got a common side of the bars off. Imagine those kind of metal doors with a glass square window with chicken wire going through it like that. I saw this one dude. I just saw his face and he was this old bearded dude. And he looked like John Barrymore. He was crazy. And he was shit talking the correctional officers all day long. Just like mother fucking them and you are a mental midget and blah, blah, blah. I found it very entertaining because he was kind of witty. And then one day they said, God damn it, Bert, that's enough. And they popped open the door. And he had one leg. And he wasn't wearing a prosthesis where he was amputated from the knee down on the other leg.

1:00:37And I thought, this motherfucker has been standing on one leg all day just so he can talk shit to all these cops. And I was like, respect. That's unbelievable. That was the first 12 days. Then I fell short of Judge Lawrence Myrish designation for what the conditions of my suspended sentence were. I had a three years suspended sentence which meant I can send you back for three years if I decide right now. It can be out on the street if you do the right thing. I didn't I pissed early or something like that. And he sent me to county and I think I did four months and 19 days. That was far and away.

1:01:25The most disgusting, awful 139 days of my life. Is it because of the place, because of the other inmates? What makes it bad? Well, jail is usually a year or less, which also means nobody is designated of whether you're a petty criminal, whether you're a child molester, whether you're a white collar crime, whether you didn't pay your parking tickets or whether you're someone who they haven't figured out yet is a serial killer or a homicidal gang banger or whatever. And you're all just together. Now they have different designations. The smell, the energy, the lack of time outside, the need to and I'm on their side control this criminal element.

1:02:22The fact that these sheriffs are there in there with you. They're doing time fucking with these people and they're trying to keep right. And it's just it's it's fucking purgatory. Yeah. So I would take this kind of naughty white blanket and then put a sheet over the top of it because that way it would lock in the heat. And I remember sleeping on my side when I got in somehow where they're managed to get in trouble while in jail. Do you remember what you did? Yeah.

1:02:58And I was laying on my side. And when I woke up in the morning, the cockroaches would just kind of scurry off the thing. And there was what's known as freeway Freddy's, which are all the little mice and stuff that are scurrying along back and forth trying to outrun the sheriffs that are walking down the hall and they know if they see them they'll call maintenance. So you could just see like you hear the door crack and you hear the first few steps of a boot and you just see a bunch of mice and shit go by big cockroaches just I mean like nightmarish and yet I got used to the fact of you're in a hybrid native state.

1:03:39The less hours of the day you are awake the better this is going to be and you got to do the time or it'll do you so you can't fall out of season with the day. In other words, you don't want to be up all night and sleep all day. That's depressive. You want to get up, you want to get your morning chow, you want to try to entertain yourself, you want to blah, blah, blah, if you're not in a lockdown module because you misbehaved which I often was, you try to get out to the day room. And so that's jail, right? So we talked about psych module. Who do you make friends? They say in those situations you don't make friends you make acquaintances.

1:04:18I'll tell you a story about a friend I made later. Okay. So psych module in jail, you know what that is. Jail in general, whether I was in Old Men's County, which was what I was just describing or the twin towers, which were affectionately called the Glamour Shlamer because they were more modern. There were times when I just had a single cellmate in the door would close at the end of the day, not to be opened until morning shift in chow, where you realize you will never be safer than you are for those seven hours. As long as you know, your cell is crazy because you're inside somewhere that's impossible to get into and nobody would try to, this cops everywhere.

1:05:11And you've been locked in this two men cell. When I had that realization, remember it like it was yesterday, I was like, this is a realization I didn't need to have. You dumb fucker. What have you done? And I was like, don't worry about that. Let's just get through this. Then later on, when I further disappointed the judge and he threw the book, his wig, the gavle and the bench at me, I wound up catching a chain, which means they send you to a processing center before they decide what prison you're going to go to. Now you're out of the small time leagues of jail, you're less. Now you're going up the river, as they say.

1:05:54And would the other people who are up the river be people who had similar issues that you had or would it be more like murderers? 80 % of all crimes involve someone usually being under the influence of something if not multiple things at the time. That's more exacerbated mental illnesses. So I catch the chain up to the processing center in Delano. And that three weeks that I spent there before I was designated where I was going to go, which wound up being Quarkin State, which is where Manson was at the time on a different yard. Those were the most terrifying three weeks plus because everybody's up there and they have yet to be designated, but there's more freedom.

1:06:52So it's like a very unfiltered prison. And more dangerous, would you say because of that? Of course, because people haven't been designated, but they're starting to realize that they're going away maybe for the rest of their life. And then there's some punk over here who blah, blah, blah. And they have nothing to lose. No, yeah. At one point, this Japanese guy asked me to come and hold hands with him and pray. And I was like, and I looked around, I was like, I could take this guy. I'm going to ever take his hands and he was like, oh, dearly father. And I was like, fuck. And he goes, what brings you here?

1:07:29And I was like, a parole violation. I go in you. He goes, I killed my wife. Many other incidents there. And then prison in and of itself is the least daunting of all of them because it's much more organized. And also, I was in what at the time, SATF substance abuse treatment facility yard, it was trying to introduce that proposition in that was giving people rehabilitation, et cetera. So I was there for a year, 14 months, 16 months. And then they realized that I'd been over sentence. And so I got out a few months early. I mean, you want to talk about banana shit. Don't get in trouble to the point where you have suspended sentence, particularly if you have no way of really knowing how to stop the behaviors that got you there to begin with.

1:08:27And yet, I really came to appreciate the law enforcement side, which is people need to be fucking aware of sometimes. And I wonder looking back if I didn't need to be for that period of time. It didn't cure my alcoholism by any stretch of the imagination. But it gave me a reference point for - Did you have insights through the process? What do you say? Absolutely. Stings album brand new day came out. And I got it on CD. And I had ordered through the canteen system a little cheapo CD player. And that album albums before that, I remember 1983 when Elvis Costello's Imperial bedroom came out. There's certain albums.

1:09:12In this case, I was a captive audience. There was no reason to not listen to this album. And I was able to dissect every note of what I consider one of the best albums. And that same song brand new day was great. Anyway, I did make - You could say acquaintances with your typical guy, like, you know, Figueroa Slim, the Pimp from Downtown Los Angeles. And he told me all these stories. I'll never forget. But I did make friends with somebody who had been in for a long time, then got out, and then was facing a three -strike case who was going to be sent away forever. Me and some friends got him off that third strike life sentence by rallying around him and giving support and asking the judge to offer blah, blah, blah.

1:10:00And he did get off that life sentence. And was not able to correct his behavior. So it is amazing how many lashes we can take and still not get the first principle lesson of what the universe is reflecting back to us when it comes to, bro, you can't fucking do that. Because we're so unconsciously wired to be unaware of our actions. And in some way, it speaks to your strength. It's like, do you know what I'm saying? It's like, you have to be very strong to not get the message. Correct. And to continue to be beaten down and still stand up for whatever it is that you're standing up for, again, it's not in your best interest, but it's interesting.

1:10:56You're onto something big. And it's this. And I think that the weird thing is it's a character trait gone awry. The character trait is this. I will not capitulate. Yeah. And I go, oh, don't lose that. But apply it here. Because not capitulating is a noble gesture. Yes. Yeah. And it was just misplaced. And yet, you know, and I don't know, maybe you could give me some insight. I don't know. Was I? Did I have to have that and have that be part of my story to be who I am? Well, it is. So there's some perfection in everything that happens. Maybe not in the moment that's happening. Right. Sometimes I talk about it in the book.

1:11:41If you can zoom out as if you're watching a movie. Yeah. And thinking, how's our hero going to get out of this? Yeah. Because that's what we see in the movies. It's like you're putting these terrible situations. You're on the edge of your seat. You don't know how about somehow by the end of the movie, it works out. Yes. And that's why great creatives too, like the the Russo brothers who I did the last two Avengers films with and Civil War, either three Marvel picks with, have projects with now, went back recently and watched arrested development, which they were directors on. They literally get ahead of the game.

1:12:21They love creating themselves into a corner that is impossible to find an unpainted way out of because they go, that's when I grow. And of course, that's all happening within the realm of our creative venture. So it's relatively safe. Those real world stakes are gnarly. I'm just so glad I don't care how gnarly the rearview mirror is. Yeah. I don't care. As a matter of fact, I can take pride in the rearview mirror. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you did it. You did your time. Yeah. And you live to rise above.

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1:14:24I was there any point along the way we felt like I'm not going to make it? I had a moment of clarity on July 4th, 2004 where I said, dude, it's over. I had never heard it with such authority. I'd seen all these instances of outside authority telling me where the boundary was, where the limit was, where the end was, where the punishment, the result was, the repercussions, the wreckage was, but I'd never heard it so clearly. And because I was struck with a moment of open -mindedness to say, that sounds legit. And I'm not saying that all of my proclivities to self -medicate were lifted, but again, it was a blasting cap and it began this process.

1:15:24Any idea what triggered it? Part of it was a fear unlike any fear I had felt before. And fear will motivate us for a while. But sometimes fear is a great first stepping stone, but you can't stay there. Because, you know, boy, it's crazy how short lived the memory of an inherent mortal threat is. Yeah. So from that moment, what changed? Well, according to Attenborough going back to Lord Richard, he said, Robert, one day you shall find your ambition and when you truly grasp it, all of these behaviors will just slip away. And I was like, this guy's fucking dead a little long in the tube. You did that beautifully, by the way.

1:16:17Thank you. That was beautiful. And I never want to say that anything is definitively one thing or the other, but it turns out Dickie was right. I had boarded completion of even getting more than just up to speed only to be derailed by a foggy ambition. And I thought, what if I actually, without requiring specific results, just said, I kind of want to wind up personally, professionally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, first and foremost, in this new area. And the crazy thing is when we straighten out spiritually, everything else follows. And yet it's the most subtle and the most elusive. Yeah.

1:17:01So what was it? You know, the love of a good woman putting me in check and saying, I don't do this. I don't do this, Sid, with, you know, sober Nancy. I don't play this fucking game. And I was like, God, she's not kidding. You know, it was a little of that. It was a little ambition. It was a little, you know, I'm sensing that there's a future where I can be reflecting all this. And I can be additive. And I will be invested with these properties that I may not even actually possess. But they're in the rearview mirror. And they're on paper and they happen. So why not step into that role? I could be in elder statesman one day.

1:17:44Yeah. Did you ever have the feeling like I've already done that? Was that a thing? I think it's normal to self -protect and say there's very little left undone. I mean, for your old life though. Oh gosh. Like, do I wish I'd turned over a couple more stones? No, no, no. I mean, if you've had enough experiences of escape, yeah, where you feel like I've done that enough to know what that is. And now I'm going to do something different than that. Sure. Well, I would temper that with adding in this little subtle thread, which is the bottom is where you stop digging, brother. And if you have a preclivenity to not capitulate and that non -capitulation is tainted or twisted in a weird direction, there is one way this ends and you know it.

1:18:43So, start telling the story of where you broke the chains of bondage. Start believing that that story is coming for you. Amazing. Would you say your use was to get high or to escape? I think it was everything. It was to commune. It was to differentiate. It was to prove how hard core I was. It was to give me permission to be kind of like a boring continuation of that mid -century ideal of live fast or young. It was for my father's approval. It was to try to fix the things that had broken. And more than that, it was for the effect. And then strangely, when the effect turned from a pleasant effect to a horrific effect, then clearly it was for that effect.

1:19:47So then what was I addicted to? If the effect changed, but I stayed on that button, then what am I addicted to? And what is that setting? Tell me a little bit about your spiritual life. I'll start with yesterday. I was doing some Qi Gong and in Wing Chun, there's this thing called the Way of the Small Thought, Qi Lim Tao. And you're following this ball outside your hand. And you're moving with it, letting it come back. And doing it again. And by the time you're done with this Qi Lim Tao form, you've actually expressed every block you can use. But it's this meditation unjust, this small thing. So the small thing is the ball?

1:20:39The small thing is the ball. The small thing is the thought. The thought is it's only the ball. When in fact all these myriad computational complexities of the physical frame are occurring in a very coordinated and specific and evolved way. Yet the small thought is just that I'm guarding my center. I'm using two hands at the same time. I'm not fighting force with force. I'm using all the tenets of this system. The way the small thought, right? Our friend Isaac introduced me to TM. I was killing it for a couple weeks. I got busy. It slipped off. And so I think that the important thing is that I never want to fall off the continental shelf.

1:21:28I always want to feel that I have little systems at play where there's always something I can do to get me out of the monkey mind. But it started. When I was very young, I was so attracted to. I was reading Richard Hittleman's 28 -day yoga book. I was one of the first people to be eating health food. I was reading Shirley McLean and books about the appendix odds and human energy systems and KC and the Seth material. I was obsessed with all of it while refusing to use any of it to my immediate advantage. And then it was my love of the discipline of whether I was singing in Magicals, learning that melody in German because I wanted to compete in the Kwanisola Festival singing Schubert or the discipline of doing theater or the discipline of going, okay, I know it's the 80s and we're all partying, but I want to create a character here for this movie with Rodney Dangerfield.

1:22:37Maybe my hair should be different than I've seen and I should have these crazy wardrobe changes. And maybe Derek's just kind of like this wildfire cracker of a buddy. So part of the meditation or spirituality really was trying to infuse my work with my love of doing something hard and again providing that service. It seems like something that when you take on a role, it seems to take on a different life than what they have originally been on the page. Would you say that? Yeah. Yeah, there's been a bunch of times going back to Zach Galifianakis and Todd Phillips when we did this film called Do -Date, which is a high recommend.

1:23:27It's a weird romp, but it's a very evolved romp. I was playing a guy who's really just kind of pissed off and his wife is expecting and he stuck with this fucking guy and the guy got him kicked off a plane and they have to drive across country. And I realized as I was doing it that I was actually playing the angriest character I'd ever played and this guy had a hair trigger anger problem. Yeah. And I never thought of myself as an angry person, but I've also always thought that anger was the most embarrassing emotion. Worst than fear. Fear everybody can relate to anger feels more like a lack of control.

1:24:09And yet I got so much out of playing this angry uptight guy. Is it a comedy? Oh yeah. For some reason angry people are really funny. Something about it. Something about because it's always about like overreaction. Absolutely. It's funny. Yes, and it's also playing against Zach who plays this very, I mean, he's crazy making character, but honestly, very sweet good nature guy. And so the problem is my character Peter Heimann is stuck on Ethan Tremblay's annoyance to the exclusion of realizing that this guy is offering him a beautiful new perspective on life. So anyway, I loved it. I remember when I heard that Rihanna loved it.

1:25:04I was like, God, we did something right, dude. How important would you say humor is in your life? I mean, morning, noon and night, I need it. You know, it's also this expectation in my core relationships, which is everybody knows that we're artists and we can be moody and we're particular and you have to pack just carefully. Sometimes Susan calls me rainman, sometimes she calls me phantom thread. But underneath it all is this levity where she understands that I am conscious enough and recovered enough to know that none of us are easy. And I do love to keep things light. There's no greater joy than making someone laugh.

1:25:56Do you feel like you ever use it as a defense mechanism? Oh, yeah. And again, gamebred, you know, my dad and his generation and a lot of these guys, it was a way to avoid the topics that were not processable due to where their generation was at in the post -war era. So the crazy thing is I'm a lot more like them than I am like these kind of things. More emotionally honest and free generations I've seen popping up and so it's always something for me to keep just not going away at, you know. But I can always tell when I start taking myself too seriously. It's just the kiss of death. Yeah. Would you say you're satisfied with your body of that spark?

1:26:52Sure. Good answer. But I would also say this, it's so funny looking back on anybody of work that it's all with this kind of wavy, gravy stuff. Absolutely. And when you want to curate just a highlight reel and just do a sizzle reel of everything that went perfectly, I think you're not embracing. And again, you know, this is brought up in your book as was my last point, the totality of it's the glory, it's the mess. Absolutely. It's the miss. This is a wheel of the lowest moment to probably be great down in their own way. Seriously, 100 percent and maybe more interesting. But isn't it funny who would ever sign up for that?

1:27:33That would be as a matter of fact, therapeutically and spiritually, that should be on a loop because that's what we're afraid of. We're afraid of the low light. And they're always okay. The fizzle reel. That's what we're afraid of.

1:27:54How would you say you approach your craft different than your contemporaries?

1:28:02I would say that on many levels, I have a very particular set of experiences. And while I can get as wedged up as the next guy, that generally speaking, I approach things as though I'm walking around them, surveying them, and eventually I intend to wait in or strike or drain the swamp or do something that seems like more of an effort. But I try. And my default is always probably to over iterate. So it's two things. One is, I think I'm different than I'm just very fucking peculiar. And I think that I've grown to a point where I'm a little more like Bob Duval at the end of colors. It's that joke that Sean Pentel's about the bulls wanting to go down and bang the cows.

1:29:06He says, let's run down there and bang one of them cows and the older bulls says, no, no, let's walk down and bang them all. I'm a little more of that. Let's be conservative and let's deploy energy wherever we can. So I think what I am, I'm not saying that I do this better than anyone, but I think what I am quite good at is a measuring dispersal of energy over time. I think that I'm one of the more efficient actors around. That's cool. Yeah. Has a director ever asked you to make it bigger or do more? Of course. Really? Yeah. Yeah, more or do last please just do nothing this time. Yeah. Because the camera's going to pick it up.

1:29:52You know, enjoy it more. I remember on the second Iron Man, you know, Favreau was like, dude, why so angry? I was like, am I angry? He goes, yeah, maybe you're just working through something, but like, take the edge off. Tony Stark was aggressive, but not angry. Yeah. And I go, but isn't it different this time in the movie? He goes, yeah, but not in the scene. Just fucking calm down. And that's a weird one too, because you never want to be caught feeling like you're out of the vibe. Yeah. But I also just think I've been caught in the act of doing it wrong in so many different ways that I don't really have that much attachment to what I thought it was supposed to be.

1:30:33Yeah. And it's hard to know also because you're inside of you and the experience is outside of you. Yeah. So it helps to have a director who could say, if you were trying to get this, it didn't happen on the camera. Yeah. You know, yeah. There's this last element too, which is, I don't know when I started recognizing this. I think it was around the time that I was doing this film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with Val Kilmer, the Shane Black director, and then up through the first Iron Man, there was this year period where I did Iron Man, Tropic Thunder, and the first Sherlock. And I noticed in all these three very different stories, I would watch playback.

1:31:20And good lens and a good, you know, kind of shape. It just works. And so in a way, it was one of those things like, I'm not as important as I thought. The geometry. And doing less might keep the beauty of what's there. Correct. You could screw it up. I could screw it up. And my subtlest things. When I was doing them in a more subtle way, I knew that there was some intent behind it, but I never knew that I could do it well. Because on the notch, I think you would even just by the last hour, I'm pretty rubbery and animated and a little like, you know, spasmodic. So it's counterintuitive to just settle.

1:32:09How different was the experience of making a CGI movie where you're acting and what you're playing against isn't actually there? Fortunately, the very first movie movie I ever did was Weird Science. Oh. And I was watching Anthony Michael Hall and there's Pushing Missiles coming up through the middle of this party, Gone Weird Science and all that stuff. And I remember green screens and special effects, makeups and, you know, practical things where steam's coming out of the floor. So, and I'd heard about those kinds of films. And I knew that Spielberg made these big spectacle films and that, you know, some of these things, obviously, ET wasn't really riding a bike.

1:32:56So I knew that there were elements that were, you know, matte animation. So I'd gotten a glimpse of it and then kind of went more into, quote, unquote, more serious cinema for a while. So by the time I got back to it, it was jarring for a minute and then it just became very old hat. And the last couple Avengers films, I mean, there was a, there's one thing that happens.

1:33:25I think this kind of the snap where Thanos kind of wins. And I just remember that whole part of shooting was on the call sheet said, it's on the planet Titan and it just said Titan Continuous. And we were on Titan Continuous. It seemed like forever. And it was just this craggy set surrounded by green screens. Wow. And I came to love it because you go like, wow, however good it looks unfinished. Imagine what happens when these craft people put in all this stuff. Tell me about the chocolate experience. So around 1990, I'd done less than zero. I'd had a great experience working with James Woods making a movie called True Believer.

1:34:14And I was back in LA and I heard that at the time, Sir Richard Attenborough was casting to do a film about Chaplin. And I went into meat for it. And I was I guess not exactly Mr. First Choice, but then it came down to, there's two times in my life where it came down to a screen test and it was definitive Iron Man and Chaplin. And I remember obsessively preparing for this screen test that won't it being kind of chaotic and disproved and not really everything I was trying to get into a screen test, but it showed the promise and the potential when I was cast. Then in a time not unlike last year, there was something going on with the parent company Carol Coe and TriStar and it kept getting delayed.

1:35:07And because it kept getting delayed, I wound up having about nine months to prepare. And every three months or so, Dickie was like, Robert, I'm not sure. I was trying to get the funding. We're almost there. And I was just flying all around the United States and trying to learn as much as I did. So I gave myself a crash course in Vodville Slaps Dick, fall down, choreography. I really tried to get the reccee pronunciation RP, the phonetic alphabet for speaking the various types of English she did being a Cockney who then became more refined than became Americanized. Would you do this all on your own or would you hire experts to train you?

1:35:49They would provide some support and I literally went mental. I had a whole wall with the entire history of every biography, autobiography that had ever been done on Chaplin. I have his cross referencing dates. I actually sent the guy who wrote the definitive Chaplin biography, notes on things that he probably wanted to amend the next one because I was fact checking his shit. And he was like, my God, this guy's right. So I was out on a limb. I probably went full manic panic. And then we started shooting. And I was very inflated and very confident. And at burrow put me in check. And then was a sweetheart from the first day there.

1:36:37And I stood corrected. And I wound up having this lovely experience. And getting to work with Dan Acroid and getting to do scenes with Kevin Klein and Anthony Hopkins be the interviewer and having all these gals, Penelope Ann Miller and Marissa Tomey. And anyway, the list of the supporting players in this were astonishing. And then I remember by the end we're shooting where he's essentially been exiled after he went on this trip for his supposed communist leanings. And he never came back to the US. And I was thinking about this the other day. He had this beautiful house up on summit. And I guess he just never went back after 1952.

1:37:29And then he came back for the Academy Awards when he was given an honorary Oscar. And it was very moved by it. So we're doing that scene where Chaplin is 72, roughly 83 years old. And I'm in full prosthesis. And at this point, that burrow came up to me. I said, Robert, Sven and I have literally were wondering if you give us a single tear. And at that point I looked into my said left eye or right. And he goes, Sven would prefer the left. I said, no problem boss. And by the end of that shoot, he had so lovingly trained me and imparted all of his knowledge of the 60 years he'd been doing this beforehand.

1:38:15That we were technically on a shorthand where he could ask me to produce anything. And I could ask for specifics on that and make it happen. And it's simple. You'll let them well up. But you keep this, try to blink this eye somewhat less significantly. Feel the feelings for sure. And then just give it the slightest tip and like gravity take over. Unbelievable. And I reproduce that. It's like, oh, Sven said, sorry, I just wonder, could you angle it a bit more, this way he's going to move a light. But you do the same thing. And I think I produced that highly technical result three or four times.

1:38:51Unbelievable. And yet it speaks to the prowess of an external thus not to make blanket statements. British approach, Gilgur, O'Toole, so many of these guys even though they're their emotional inner life was just so. So, so deep. That's it. Yeah. Beautiful. Did you have to learn to like roller skate or what are some of the things you had to learn to do, Chaplin? Pratt falls. Yes. And falling, there was this guy named Johnny Hutch. Johnny Hutch on the Benny Hill show. Yeah. He was the ball guy that Benny had liked that too. Yes. Johnny Hutch still had the transcripts from Karnos players. And he still had the exact choreography for skits that Chaplin was in when he was playing the drunk in the box.

1:39:44So, we attempted to recreate that. He was this little Scottish guy. Yeah. He drilled. He was amazing. Oh, dude, he drilled me within an inch of my life. And so I got that down. I worked with a movement coach named Dan Cayman and a bunch of other people. I learned to play tennis left handed. And the roller skating was a bridge too far. But my favorite memory of this is I'm doing a scene on the beach with Diane Lane who's playing Pullet Grudard. His third wife. And we have kids and I'm kind of playing for them and doing this thing that makes it look like I'm walking downstairs as I walk behind something.

1:40:27Right? And then I'm supposed to take a beach ball and spin it on my finger. Well, I'd gone and seen the Harlem Globetrotters, but I'd never spun a ball on my finger in my life. And it's a beach ball. And I'm trying to do it and trying to do it and it's windy. And I can't do it. And I look over in my periphery. And I see there's a 12 -year -old kid standing off site with another beach ball. And he's just spinning on his hand and making it go. And I said, motherfucker. And then we're going to go about 10 minutes. I go, great. And I go, kid, come here, come here. And I made him come in my trailer.

1:41:04Yeah. And I said, how did you do that? Because you just throw it up. I go, don't say, say you throw it up. Where are you starting? How do you spin it? Are you bringing it down? He goes, no, no, you kind of go up and meet it. And then you come down and they go, well, how many spinners you've got to kind of tip it in a little bit and all of a sudden, I was in a crash course from a complete non -descript absolute stranger 12 -year -old because there was a piece of business I had to execute. And again, and this is, you know, this is music to your ears that you've been playing and people are catching the buzz about again, which is you must be willing to check your ego so quick because you got to get the job done.

1:41:46And if you don't know something, you got to figure out how to do it. And if someone's doing it, it doesn't matter how it looks, just ask them. Yeah. And paying attention what's going on around you. It's so hard, dude. Yeah, it's because it's all around us. The information's there. It is. But man, it's hard. Why the resistance? Why? Knowing that it's required to even meet the basic metrics of what our job description is. Why? I don't know. Okay, bro. Was that the first time you played a character who was not a fictional character? I believe so. And how is it different in terms of the expectation of everybody knows what Charlie Chaplin looks like, how he moves.

1:42:32It seems like you have less freedom of playing Chaplin than any other character. Yeah. Well, like Iron Man, it was daunting in that I said, God, this guy is in, you know, he's a globally recognizable figure. I don't have his eye color. How will I have a high -value? And I got a one -way mirror. It's crazy. I got a one -way mirror and I had a TV screen and I was playing, stopping, forward -framing these Chaplin shorts and stuff. And then I would try to put it close enough to where my face would be right over his and I could see my face. And it was kind of like a, I was doing essentially an effect.

1:43:20Yeah. And I literally just, he would go, and I would go, God, damn, I didn't do that right. Did you go left or right first? And I would just match, match, match. So, you know, a lot, a lot, a lot of monkey -see monkey -do. And then I thought that I have to make this my own. And then once you learn the basic kind of 144 touch points of what his graph was of expression, then you kind of go, all right, it's kind of kind of be one of those. It's a 76, not a 84. It's a 47, not a 12. And you could kind of approximate. And it was a joy. Even this little thing called the dance of the rolls where he's got two rolls at the end of two forks, right?

1:44:04It's fantastic. I thought that that was pretty easy and you do a dance. And then by the time I looked and broke down how he did it, he made it so that it was exactly like the movements of the knee joints because he probably was watching dances on a real stage back in the late 19th century at a dinner theater with rolls. And it came out of his own experience of entertaining people showing that he could match the dance. Anyway, it was that sort of stuff. By the end of it, I felt like I had this transformative experience. I started when I was 26. It came out when I was 27. And I was still 11 years away from drawing my first truly sober breath.

1:44:59So there were some weird ways to come. Fog of smoke you were doing all of this. Yes, I was. And by the way, you know, and I know that this has never been your particular challenge, but you've seen it, you know, through and through. And the crazy thing is sometimes it was always done in spite of the self -medication. Sometimes it was done to give ourselves permission to party even when it had long passed the point of being recreational. And sometimes there was this wild interplay between the two where the pain of one was informing the joy of the other and likewise. So you want to talk about efficient.

1:45:42The most efficient thing I can do is be Eddie clean head Vinton because I'm the jazz player who needs to be 1000 % accountable for where I am in time and space. And because of that, whatever excellence used to occur in spite of my best efforts, now it's expectable because I am at the ready fully functional as I can be. And I have no excuses. Yeah, not a one. Yeah. So with Chaplin, there's all this expectation of what you have to do to make that character believable as that. Is that a limitation or is that does that give you more freedom than a character who nobody knows who they are and you're creating them from scratch?

1:46:39Well, the funny thing is for a while after that people associated Chaplin's countenance with my physical image and say, go, my God, in a way, what a great opportunity to be associated with someone who I still to this day look at and go, maybe one of the great geniuses of all time. And I see him when he was young and the beauty of him not even knowing what his future was and all the twists and turns. And I'm almost kind of like, I feel like I get to be a little bit of a guardian angel of the sanctity of him. But there came a certain point during the shoot where I realized I'd hit this critical mass and now I was his proxy.

1:47:22And what an honor it was. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. As actually wrong, five years earlier, I had played a historic figure that no one ever really knew. Mussolini's son, Benito, in a TV miniseries with George C. Scott playing Mussolini. Cool. How was George C. Scott? I'm a fan. Yeah. Yeah. Guy, I was so badass, so talented, so in his cups, old school. But, you know, cut the line, wasn't drinking it work, but man, was that guy of a different era. And there was a couple nights where he called me and he said, go over my room, Goddamn. I was like, it's two in the morning. We got a 7 a .m. call. He goes, I just flew in from some stolly from Moscow and pushed the call to 10, get the fuck over here, kid.

1:48:15And he would call me over. We were in Yugoslavia when it was still an iron curtain country. And when he had thrown a few back, he would tell you all the stories about all the great things. And I would of course, you know, pick his brain about strange love. And you know, all the many great things he'd done. He was patten. He was just patten. He was unbelievable. Unbelievable. Believe it or not, my dad, senior, used to play on a like Broadway based softball league with him. That was the thing. Us Downey's Royce kind of once removed from the really well -known people, but we knew them and like these kind of social, yeah, like, you know, social construct settings.

1:49:01Yeah, we're in Central Park, we're playing softball. So cool. Yeah. We'd someone like George C. Scott when between him in the scene and then cut and the guy after how different was the human versus the guy we see on the screen. Well, he's playing Mussolini and so I saw him just do a little bit of a tilt towards this kind of doomed to fake character who had this amazing arc. And obviously he was a fascist and so there's all that stuff. And then when the cameras were cut, I was looking at a guy who probably had one of the coolest lives right now that you could imagine having been George C. Scott for a long time, going like, oh, fuck am I doing a new go Slavya, you know what I mean?

1:49:49So he was a little bit like and he probably, you know, hadn't imagined that he'd be doing an NBC mini series in the, you know, third activist career. Yeah. So he was probably a little bummed out. But as a kid, I can't give a shit. I was just like, bro, it's fucking patent. This is amazing. Yeah. I love those. There are 70s, mini series, a bunch of them that are the coolest things of all. Yeah. In the same way that when we look back on great movies, they're not in the canon. They're just hidden. Yeah. And that was because, and I think by design, there was this demarcation line that they were not considered art on anywhere near the same level as cinema.

1:50:39So I grew up watching those and to this day, they'll compete with me for whatever the Academy Award -winning movie of the year was. Yeah. Just storytelling, so cool, great acting. And sometimes because they were less precious, they have this reality to them that just feels, they're easier to watch in some way. He used to watch, but even then those artists knew that they were kind of taking a quick money gig. And maybe they knew the director because they'd come out of movies or were going into movies or done a bunch of reputable other stuff. But it's that weird thing where you're like, wow, wait, maybe in a way they were more free because they were wondering, should I even trip on this?

1:51:22It's just gonna air. This is just gonna air for a couple nights. I don't want to be on, you know, a million dollar movie or be on those midnight hours, you know, second run stations. You mentioned John Barrymore earlier. I love John Barrymore. And I never made the connection before, but I feel like you could be in that lineage. I never would have seen the connection if you'd bring them up. Yeah. But like 20th century is as good as it gets. So good. And his son, Barrymore, Jr., who is Drew Barrymore's dad, I got to know him a little bit. And he had that amazing, haunted, Richard Harris kind of just stark, intense beauty of his lineage.

1:52:15In very odd circumstances, back in the mid to late 80s and into the early 90s, right off to Panga. If you went up to Panga, the first left you can hang this thing called rodeo grounds. And over rodeo grounds, you went over and there was this huge stream. And you have to cross this stream. And I would usually be doing it in a car that shouldn't be crossing a stream. And back there was my friend, this character actor, and a Michael Green, and a bunch of crazy to Panga Canyon artists. And they had this community back there. And that's where I would see John Barrymore, Jr. Wow. As a matter of fact, once I was in my friend Michael Green's kitchen, and right out of this jungle, Bramble came John Barrymore, Jr.

1:53:04Completely in white. But like he'd been walking through the thickets and stuff. And he just came and he said, put out that cigarette and told me to sit down and just engage with me and thrilled me. And then like you rub some olive oil on his arms and put some in his hair right off the table and just walked out and I was like, bro, was that? And he goes, yeah, JB Jr. stops by a couple of times a week. I was like, wow, you dug it. I got to hang out here more. So cool. How would you say your relationship to your day job has changed over the time you've been doing it from then to now? I almost always felt like I was on the outside looking in.

1:53:58And that there were these high functioning systems that I was trying to find a way to be accepted and acknowledged by. And low these many years later, guess who's become part of the establishment? And it's been this really amazing journey where these kind of defeatist projections I had on the man, I realized, wow, it gives me so much empathy for the entirety of mankind because we're almost always having contempt prior to investigation for things we don't understand or we feel are out of our reach. So it's been, it's been an enlightening, particularly these last five years finishing out that long run with that stretch of the Marvel contract and falling into not a K -hole, but just enough what's next?

1:54:59Because once I got there, I thought this is kind of as good as it gets, but I still want to do other stuff. And then that ran its course, that particular history of it. And the crazy thing is, if you stick around, everything comes back around, things become relevant again, genres become reinvented and luminous to a new audience. And you go, okay, I was kind of here the first time that happened, except it's not like the first time. Now it's being discovered again for a third time by a fourth generation and you're supposed to host that experience in some way while still putting the twist on it to keep it interesting for yourself.

1:55:43And you go like, wow, it's fun aging up. That's cool. Yeah. Do you ever ad lib? I love to. I think I'm good at it. It's also funny to me how often people say you're improvising if you say something besides what's written. To me ad libbing is a little different and that you're filling in the blanks with different words. And by filling in the ad lib with a different word, then the one you would expect can give it a different context. So I always try to stay within the realm of character and also think about I don't want to just be some self -indulgent person who's like going off script all the time.

1:56:31And there's people who are better at it than me. But I would love to do a project that is very loosely designed and relies almost entirely on improvising along the lines of a predesignated set of like trebuchism, for example. Totally. That'd be super fun. For those Mike Lee films, like, did you ever see naked with David Thulis? No, it's good. Yeah. And Mike Lee is a British director who's renowned for he'll rehearse things for months and months and months and just kind of talk about them and then by the time you do it, there isn't really a script. There's just an extension story. Yeah. And you know the story.

1:57:12Yeah, dude. I would love that. That'd be fun. Tell me about the experience of the project with your dad, the new project. Well, how'd it come to pass? Yes. Well, my dad and I had been looking for projects to do. In fact, at one point, we had this thing called the very special where we wanted to do some like limited series where I was playing all these cracks. A good name. You have the very special. And we actually got paid to write some scripts for that. But then they weren't great. And then I think we got sued to give the money back for the scripts. And we were looking for something to do together.

1:57:51My dad was also, you know, now diagnosed the Parkinson's. And to be honest, my first impulse was to use it as a deflection mechanism from really dealing with him. And my dad was always like, oh, the project. So the project wound up becoming this thing that my dad didn't want to deal with, which was doing a documentary about him. And the project became the thing he'd rather do, which is his own deflection. And for me, his son, the whole fucking thing was a deflection. And at a certain point, Chris Smith, the director, Kevin Ford, who was producing, operating, editing, and doing all this other stuff.

1:58:32And most importantly, my missus, they came in and said, Robert, this is going to be a god awful mess. You have to be willing to have this be a very orthodox approach to this unorthodox exploration. That needs to have a fucking beginning, a middle, and an end, like a three -minute song with a four -be count off and a fucking is a you can have your bridge and your instrumental, but this can't be fucking jazz hands. Or this thing that you're trying to make sense of will never make sense to you because you'll never even present it in a way where it can be made sense of you have to do this by the fucking book.

1:59:11And I go, well, what does that mean? Because your dad only experiences his life through the project he was doing. So you have to do a chronological exploration of his projects. And in there, you can ask him about the relationships. Very interesting. And the losses. Very great idea. And when his wife got sick, and eventually the project is how is he going to leave this earth knowing that he has a terminal disease? Yeah. And she goes, and we don't know how that project is going to go, but you have to show up for it. Yeah. And how's the experience?

1:59:50Fuck, dude. Change my life. Yeah. Did you learn stuff about him? He didn't know? I did in that he was very, very, very tied to Long Island and his dad there. And these memories he had of normalcy before he became kind of an outcast and then joined the army and then spent half of the time he was there in the stockade and then came back to New York and somehow or other decided he could be a playwright and then a filmmaker. I didn't know any of that about him. Yeah. Was he like the black sheep of the family? Oh my lord. I had no idea. Oh yeah. And when he was speaking of Jailson institutions, he was in Alaska on the international date line at one of these like, you know, tracking stations.

2:00:46Imagine this. And he like jokingly threw a bunch of blips up on the screen and said, oh my god. And the guy was like, what the fuck with the end of him? Because I'm just fucking around. And he was like, oh god, thank god. You fucking idiot. They put him in the stockade. So he was like pranking, you know, nuclear strikes.

2:01:09Can't make it up. No. He wound up in the stockade and he said, one of these times he was there, this guy came in and said, hey, as long as you're here, he may as well do something productive and he brought my dad a legal pad and a couple pencils. And it was the kindness of this absolute stranger who probably had no idea whether he was going to do anything besides write letters to his girlfriend or whatever. And that was where my dad began to think within the context of the confines of being punished for going too far that maybe he had some other ideas. Maybe there was other ways to express his desire to disrupt the status quo.

2:01:54Yes. And then out of that came this crazy thing. So anyway, here's the weird thing to the same way I can draw a parallel between my screen test for Chaplain and my screen test for Ironman. Doing senior started this whole new five -year chapter that went through senior and then being cast on Oppenheimer. And then while we're in post on Oppenheimer, director Park, a deed, Old Boy came and said, I'm doing this Pulitzer book called The Sympathizer about the fall of Saggone and a communist double agent, entire Vietnamese cast, but I would like you to play every white guy in the series. It was their idea for you to play all the characters.

2:02:36Correct. That's unbelievable. And Susan said, you know what, that's a really good pitch because you're going to have a hard time turning it down. So I went from senior to Oppenheimer an exploration of essentially the Cold War and nuclear right into Vietnam, era, fall of Saggone and the ramifications they're in, cold in this kind of black comedy fictional way, entirely from the point of view of a communist double agent. And it's revolutionized my imaginings about the soup that I was born into. Being a Vietnam -era kid. Yeah. And now I find myself at the end of this little triptick, the same way that I had my on the outside, it sounded so great.

2:03:30Dude, I'm doing Ironman, then I'm doing Tropic Thunder, and then I'm doing Sherlock, and I was like, yeah, it was great. How will I ever, and then this wound up all being these intimate things where... And again, you couldn't have planned it. There's no way, dude. Couldn't have planned it. No. I just had to be open to not getting frustrated past the point of refusing to understand that it was leading me somewhere. Yeah. Tell me about Tropic Thunder. Ben directed it, yes? Dude, yeah. And he is the closest thing that I've ever witnessed to a modern embodiment of a chaplain because he understands physical comedy.

2:04:14He's a writer -director. His aspirations to do something more dramatic have come to pass the same way that chaplain wanted to bring pathos into cinema. He's got those blue eyes. I mean, it's so crazy. When I was doing Tropic Thunder, I was kind of going like, this guy's kind of like a modern American version of chaplain. He kind of does everything. And the crazy thing about Ben is he literally could have been the head of any department on the film he was directing and done a great job. Because he was at that point in his career where he was at Seafood Status. Yeah. And I got to be there with him.

2:04:57Now, the fact that he asked me to do something which since has passed the expiration date of feasibility at the time seemed really daunting. But I knew that as a Jew, as an artist, as someone who would never want to be overtly a discriminatory or exploitative, it was patently clear to us that we're hearts were. And because our hearts were in such a pure place of wanting to send up the eccentricities of the American white artist, I never in my life more felt like I was wearing a mask that I could speak truth in. And it wasn't the mask of Lincoln Osiris. It was the mask of Cook Lazarus who's playing Lincoln Osiris who also played.

2:05:59And it was this thing. And so funnily enough, there's a bit of a comparison to be drawn between Tropic Thunder, Vietnam era. And now there's this weird connection with a different objectivity regarding the sympathizer. And so again, back to your point that we cannot hit home enough, you couldn't make this stuff up. And you're not looking for any of these meta stories. Of course not. You can't be. No, and nor whether you were looking for them or not. It doesn't mean that someone's been developing them for two years or someone wrote the books seven years ago. It's impossible. No, it's impossible.

2:06:36Exactly. It's only when the bleeding edge of synchronicity is right about to come to a tip and cross only to go off on a trajectory where it may or may not come back around in the sling shot. So yes, that can be comforting, but then you still have to go execute. It doesn't matter how synchronistic and how the opportunity feels like it's lighting up a constellation of internal associations is like because you know we've seen people go down that associative rabbit hole and you go you are soothing yourself to the point of insanity. And now you're going to start telling me whatever license plate means on every car the past is too, right?

2:07:18Because now you're stuck in an associative loop. The sequential types are that little sequential part of all of us. And I'm lacking in the sequential department sometimes, but I'm a good soldier. My area is always tight. My weapons are clean. My pack is ready. I got my ship by the door. I'm ready to deploy. I'm not like some guy that you got to reanimate every morning. You know. Can we talk about Sherlock Holmes? Sure. Let's talk about Sherlock Holmes. A big turning point for Susan and I in our creative relationship with her producing was Guy Richie. I had done Iron Man. I had gone away and done Chopped Thunder and then we go to London and we're doing a Guy Richie steampunk reboot of arguably the most plate character in the history of film and television.

2:08:17And what to do? So I leaned back a little bit into a chaplain education. At this point I've been doing Kung Fu for about three and a half years and was had a pretty good working knowledge of the basics and then entered Jude Law. Who I saw again recently and there was just something about he and I, the creative partner, he is the fact that even when he came for the meeting before he signed on every gal and half the guys on team down, he were like peering out, sneaking out in the hallway to see him walk by. He just has this draw to him and then Guy Richie directed us and what turned out to be a really kind of visceral reinvention of that kind of 19th century thing and it was great.

2:09:13Would you watch all the different iterations or is that not necessary? To read the books? Absolutely went deep on the books. Jeremy Brett did a fantastic series in the 80s but then you know, elementary and the other Sherlock TV show. Like sometimes you go like so many folks are doing this so smart. It was great. The Sherlock TV series is great. Banana. It's great. Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah. Like hard to match how smart the writing was. In fact, they did such a good job that it's kind of crippled us and trying to figure out how to do a third one that could hold up to all of the great Sherlock material out there and then that's my boy, you know, Benedict.

2:10:00Yeah. Amazing. Comeer best of the great, such a great job. But the main thing was going overseas and being force -fed the British civilized approach to making a $150 million action franchise is something that we adopted and it brought into every production sense. Another word. Amazing. Us Americans. Hey, you know, this weekend we got to get together in the grind and they'd be like, hold on, Rob. Hold on. Why don't you get some cheese and bring some food in. Many folks who want to come out overnight. Don't be a con. Rob, you know, maybe like, whoa. And they're also more efficient as well. Yes. Both.

2:10:44Big time. And that is the key word for Guy Richie is to him the highest praise you could give him is master of efficiency. Yeah. So that happened. These fight sequences half the time we would kind of be building them two or three moves at a time. He's a black belt. Juditsu guy. I was on the rise. So we had that whole kind of thing going. Judis is capable as they come with stage combat and all that stuff. So we had a blast. There was one scene. I think the guy's name was Robert Gelle. He was a Canadian. He played this character dredger. There's a scene where this guy who's tall as a door frame comes in.

2:11:29And we wind up having this fight sequence. And we had a couple shots left and we were doing that thing of kind of choreography. Not you don't improvise choreography. But I was like, what if I did this and then I'll do a release and I'll come in the lopsa. Park punch. You come with another thing and I'll block it there. How about that? And he was like, yes, I think I can do this. And then it was all right. Five, four, three, two. This is what guy Richie would do when he was tired of waiting. Five, four. And everyone scrambles. Three. Really sound. Two positions. One action. That's how he got it done.

2:12:10Five, four, three, two, one. That's awesome. Banana. Awesome. But he came in a little quick on the five for me because I was still talking to Big Robert about how to do this. But five. And I was like, you got it. You got it. He goes, yes, do you have it? I was like, yeah, I got it. But I didn't. And so we go boom, boom, boom, I go, boom, boom. And his hand was the size of a canelope. I saw flashes of light. I heard orchestral music. And the next thing I knew, I was lucky where I got in a handout. Yeah. And I was down on the ground and the poor guy was mortified. I wanted to buy him a bottle of champagne.

2:12:54And this was the turning point with me and guy Richie. He goes, ah, cut. And it looks like he goes rope. And inside of the mouth, I just ripped open one of my teeth as wobbling. I'm just gushing blood. And I go, can you shoot something for an hour while I go get this stitched up. He goes, yep. All right. Moving on. He goes, but you'll come back, right? Yeah. I go, yeah, he goes, ah, that's my boy. And so I was like, get me out of here. We went to a place. They numbed it. They stitched it back up. I came back. I finished the day. And it was that day. The guy Richie realized that was not some Hollywood puts.

2:13:33Yeah. We're going to have a good time. And that was another beautiful amazing. And the show must go on. Oh, boy, mustn't it? You've been lauded and reviled in the culture. Yeah. And can you remain in the center of you regardless of the outside noise? Most days, yes. Love and marriage. I can't have one without the other. It's all true. Yeah. And if I'm just okay with even the stuff that I bark at, it's just true. I mean, it's not accurate. And it's not real. And it's not a reflection of your, it's true. It's just all true. If I have nothing to defend when it comes to the opinions of others that I can't control anyway, I'm so free.

2:14:30And so even recently, like, dude, I got the best reviews of my entire career. And then in a few things that have happened since, or maybe a misstep, or my project after that, of course, there's some people want to go, you know, but he ruined the next there or whatever. And just go, you know what? Yeah, it's all true. Look at the end of either of our IMDb's. Yes. You have who we are and what we've done. Yep. And then you have the counterpoints. Yeah. Why were both fucking complete assholes? And I go, ah, the defense rests. Yeah. I got nothing for you. As a matter of fact, what do we call it? The fizzle reel.

2:15:15Yeah. I'm not spending enough time embracing the fizzle reel. Yeah. Because the truth that is or isn't in there. Yeah. It's a great starting point because then the only way is up, brother. Yeah. And it's fun. It's fun. It's fun. It's all okay. It is okay. Yeah. I love the game. The game is beautiful. The game is complex. The game is the towel. Yeah. And if you understand the towel, you're never playing a game that you win or lose. You're only ever playing a game that you know how to play. Yeah. And the worst part of life is when you don't know how to play the game. Because then you're never really on the field.

2:15:52You're never really on a level playing field. You're always playing catch up. You're always getting slammed. You're always on the sidelines and you're everything's a fucking Hail Mary. You know, that is defeat. And yet, as you know, there's levels to this game. Which level are you playing, my kind friend? Speaking of the Hail Mary, you believe in God. I believe in good orderly direction. And I believe that there is nothing but evidence of a creative intelligence at play.

2:16:46You, you, you.