This is how a film festival works: I was supposed to be talking to The Judge director David Dobkin this morning, in a lovely air-conditioned room at the Shangri-La, and somehow I’ve ended up in a mini-junket for TIFF’s opening night movie The Judge.
A mini-junket means round tables with half a dozen other journalists. We try to avoid round tables at NOW, because everyone comes away with the same quotes, but this is the only chance I’ll have to sit down with Robert Downey, Jr. … and you just don’t pass up a chance like that.
So here we are, talking to Dobkin and producer Susan Downey (Robert’s wife, and frequent behind-the-scenes collaborator), and then a door pops open and here’s Downey himself, switching places with them. He looks happy and only slightly weary from their arrival in town the day before.
“I have no complaints about Toronto,” Downey laughs when we ask him how things are going. He picks up a heavy plastic toolkit he’s carried into this room like a briefcase and shows it to us. “As a matter of fact, I’ve actually distilled socialism in this box. It wasn’t easy. I’m bringing it back to America.”
The Judge casts Downey as Hank Palmer, a hotshot Chicago lawyer who returns home for his mother’s funeral and finds himself defending his aging father Joseph (Robert Duvall), a local magistrate, on a murder charge. The legal stuff is merely a gimmick that lets Dobkin pit two of the finest actors of their respective generations against one another – and Downey couldn’t wait to get into it.
“There was something extremely unpredictable about it,” he says, especially after “the sorts of movies I’ve been up to since 2007 or so. And that was the big surprise, that I surrendered to a very natural return to something that’s the grosser part of my ambition anyway.”
Grosser?
“Bigger,” he says. And what he means is, you know, acting. Not that what he does as Tony Stark isn’t acting, but there’s something more realistic and painful at work in The Judge.
“I was crying all the time,” he says. “But not really out of [fake sobbing] ‘This is reminding me of my own [life]!’ It was more just that I got caught up in the reality that the movie expresses. Hank’s mom’s funeral is every funeral, and Hank’s cutoff with his dad is every cutoff that anyone’s ever had. It’s not even particularly a father-son story you know, the judge could have been the mom. And I just think about these kind of family dynamics, and they just light up constellations that are very emotional.”
The trick, he says, was realizing that he didn’t have to carry all that emotion around all the time.
“You can’t just play 120 catharses in a row, you know?” he laughs. “And also, I hate it when I see that in movies. It’s like, ‘All right, is everyone always crying in real life?’ Hank is really observing this situation that’s happening around him, and to him … it was really just about doing less and less and less and less and less and less and less. And I like being busy, and I like to talk, and I like to be active and all that stuff, so sometimes I felt like I was literally just sitting on my hands.”
Downey had plenty to do behind the camera, helping to develop the project with Dobkin and Susan.
“I think some of it’s just a function of age, that it’s a requirement,” he says. Whether you’re credited with being one of the kind of – I wanna say ‘pallbearers’ [laughter] – and also just one of the pillars of something that’s kind of a difficult endeavour, and so many personalities come in that just to stick to the principle of being kinda vigilant and trying to be of service – it’s just good medicine, because it takes you out of your own ego’s head anyway.
And as our time wraps up, someone asks him how the blockbusters are doing. Will there be another Sherlock Holmes movie? And after The Avengers: Age Of Ultron arrives next summer, can we expect to see Downey in Iron Man 4?
“I can tell you for sure that we’re obsessively working on another Sherlock, yeah,” he says. As for Tony Stark’s future, well … he’s not saying anything definitive. But he doesn’t really have to. “The Marvel universe seems to self-perpetuate,” he laughs.
This interview was previously published during TIFF 2014.
