The brilliant Michael Keaton talks meta film roles and enjoying his own performance for once
“Whatever I lack in talent, I most of the time make up for in guts – I’m not really afraid of much, you know. And Birdman could have been a huge failure, but I was working with people who aren’t afraid – people with passion and poetry, who were not being coy about how they felt. It was really exciting. And the thing is I love watching this film, I went into the editing suite – I just popped my head in and thought, ‘I’ll just see how its going’, but I ended up watching the whole thing – and I thought ‘God, I really like this movie’. And then I thought, ‘wait a minute, I’m in this movie!!’
"You can hate this movie, but you have to deal with it" — Michael Keaton
The logistics were extraordinary – you can tell that at first glance. The amount of choreography and specifics was more than I’d ever known, and I can’t imagine ever doing that kind of thing again, because I can't imagine there will ever be another movie made like this. But once I saw it I realised you couldn’t tell the story any other way. The audience becomes a participant, whether you want to or not – it kind of shakes you off sometimes, sometimes it lures you in. You can hate this movie, but you have to deal with it. You’re in it – you’re repelled and seduced and shocked and upset, and you laugh. I don’t think it could work another way.”
Much has been made of the parallels between Michael Keaton’s leading role in the 90s Batman franchise, and his latest part as Riggan Thomson, an ageing actor best known for playing the titular Birdman in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s exhilarating play-within-a-film. “I mean, he played Birdman, I played Batman – both superheroes, whose names have two syllables that start with a B,” Keaton says. “But you know. I think people think I think about things that they think I think about, way more than I think about them.”
Leaving aside what Keaton himself admits to being the undeniably “meta” elements of the role, Birdman is an extraordinary tour de force by actors, director and cameramen alike. Woven together from winding takes that last up to ten minutes at a time, the audience is dragged through the peeling backstage of a Broadway theatre, through marital and filial spats, Y-front clad fist fights and hysterical breakdowns by insecure actress. Riggan, as director, adaptor and lead actor, is the captain of this crumbling ship, yet his mind is similarly disordered, represented by the suited up incarnation of his most famous role who lurks in the mirror, goading him as he removes his toupee. Rapturously scored by Antonio Sanchez using only percussion, Birdman is that rare thing, a film whose energy and humour blast you out of the cinema on a wave of euphoria and ideas.
Birdman is out on January 1, 2015.
Words Tish Wrigley
