The son of cult filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., Robert Downey Jr. lived a Hollywood life that nearly swallowed him. His struggles with addiction were well publicized throughout the '90s and early '00s, but in the past few years, the focus has again shifted back to his acting. Which is as it should be. Robert Altman once called him the greatest actor of his generation, and Downey has racked up a body of work that makes a good argument for the claim, stretching from his turn as a drug-crazed L.A. kid in Less Than Zero through his Oscar-nominated portrayal of Charlie Chaplin in Chaplin, memorable collaborations with Altman and James Toback, and, more recently, a great starring turn in Shane Black's meta-buddy film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Currently, Downey can be seen in Richard Linklater's animated Philip K. Dick adaptation A Scanner Darkly, playing a paranoid, drug-addled roommate to Keanu Reeves' equally addicted undercover cop. Downey recently spoke to The A.V. Club about paranoia, conspiracies, and other pleasant subjects.
The A.V. Club: I'll start with the hardest question of all. Whose decision was it to put you in a beret for much of this movie?
Robert Downey Jr: If I remember correctly, I just thought that he should be getting more and more of a French underground/fascist/MI5 look as we went along.
AVC: How familiar were you with Philip K. Dick before doing this film?
RD: I was a relative dummy. I essentially would see his name when I went to see Blade Runner or Minority Report or the like. But he certainly is my kind of strange.
AVC: Did you read a lot of his work before making the film?
RD: I didn't read at all, I left that to the other professionals. I figured Woody Harrelson would come in and decide that if I did something off-beat, he'd do something more off-beat. And Keanu did all the research and Winona looked pretty, so we had everything covered.
AVC: The film is about drugs, and several cast members have had very public histories with drugs. Did that feed into the experience of making the film?
RD: You'd think it would, but it's such a technical endeavor. For me, it was just a lot of memorization and a lot of choreography, because it was a very short schedule. So I essentially remember it as kind of a [Richard] Linklater boot camp of shoot, gym, eat, study, shoot.
AVC: Did the fact that you knew you were going to be animated later affect your performance?
RD: It just gave us a lot of leeway that we may not have otherwise been afforded. If your body mic is sticking out, if your hair needs a trim… It's just like "Oh, we'll fix it later." It would be kind of great to do every movie like that.
AVC: Do you see this becoming a viable approach for making films?
RD: I think, just like Rick said, that it was a good idea for this film. Pretty much everyone has said, "Wow, using the rotoscoping to tell this story was very appropriate, and therefore it was cool that he chose to go that way." Now after he did Waking Life, I don't think he was saying "I've got all this technology, what other film can I do and tell it this way?" It just kind of came to him that it would be a way of enhancing this Dick-ensian story.
AVC: People are going to talk about the relationship between the government surveillance in this film and the Bush administration's accessing of bank and phone records. How do you see this film relating to the current situation?
RD: You can always make comparisons, whether they are acute or broad. I would leave that to the people who like to assert themselves in those areas.
To me, it's cyclical. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, there were similar issues coming up. Technology has advanced to the point of where... It's funny, I read the other day that Sky Dayton of Earthlink is going to make the city of Anaheim the first Wi-Fi city. And I thought that was strange, seeing as how A Scanner Darkly takes place in Anaheim. It's as if good filmmaking—the timing of telling a story—by necessity aligns itself with something that's—for lack of a better word—synchronistic and timely. I don't know that A Scanner Darkly would be as interesting a film in '99 or '98.
AVC: You've called your character in Short Cuts your first "creep." Your character in A Scanner Darkly is another one. What does it take to play a creep?
RD: You've gotta think creepy thoughts. The great thing about Linklater is we'd be futzing around and rehearsing in some Austin, Texas Hilton boardroom and some girl would come in with the eggs, and she'd have, like, a really big zit on her neck or something, and I'd go like "Wow, nice bug bite" when she left. Next day, you come in and there in the rewrites, I'm calling someone a bug bite. So I guess everybody has a little creep in them, that kind of self-conscious thinking about other people, thinking about people in a derogatory way, thinking about how you can manipulate and alpha-dog the situation. In A Scanner Darkly, everybody's pretty much such a wreck that it's that scramble to get an upper hand while you're losing your mind.
AVC: You're also playing a particular sub-species of creep in this, someone who has a lot of paranoia going on. How do you get inside that mindset?
RD: I would just venture a guess and say our generation has a predisposition to understanding that we're on the fucking verge of something, and yet that something seems a little nebulous and remote because it hasn't happened. And some people say the writing's on the wall, and I say, "I don't know. Who put it there?" But when those inclinations are activated, they tend to result in something paranoiac.
This whole idea of conspiracy and manipulation, it's as old as the trees, because life is messy and hard. And to consolidate things down into a belief that a few people are evil and that they're doing this… It's just not that way, if you ask me. There are some root assumptions and some directives that a whole myriad of societal bigwigs have. It's kind of like they all went to the same school, and the same school is very Nietzschean in that anything that doesn't increase your power is not worth investigating.
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