|
Downey's back with a bang
21/10/2005 14:58 - (SA)
|
|
|
 |
|
| Robert Downey stars with Val Kilmer in the new film Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. (Carolyn Kaster, AP) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
David Germain
Toronto - The notion of destiny - right person, right place at precisely the right instant - underlies Robert Downey's film-noir caper Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.
Even as he cracks wise about destiny guiding real life, Downey ends up embracing the thought that his journey from brat-pack star to Academy Award nominee to addict and jailbird to Hollywood reclamation project had providence behind it.
After recurring drug and alcohol problems in the 1990s, prison time, court-ordered rehab and probation that ended in 2002, the clean and sober Downey has a new wife and a career as busy and varied as he's ever had.
"I think part of my destiny has to be realising that I'm not the poster boy for drug abuse," Downey said at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang played.
"I'm just this guy who has a really strong sense of wanting home and wanting foundation and having not had it, I now choose to create it."
Downey, 40, connects the dots that brought him to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a comic crime tale in which he plays a petty crook who blunders into a shot at a Hollywood audition and a training session with a private eye (Val Kilmer) working as a movie adviser.
Old friends
First among the connections is producer Joel Silver, who gave Downey an early break on the 1985 teen comedy Weird Science.
Twenty years later, Silver produced Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, after also overseeing Downey on the comeback trail in 2003's Gothika, the actor's first studio flick since putting his drug and alcohol problems to rest.
Gothika also was the film on which Downey met Susan Levin, one of Silver's producing partners. Downey and Levin married in August.
Helping Downey land his role in Gothika was old buddy Mel Gibson, with whom he co-starred in 1990's Air America.
Then there's Kilmer, to whom Downey had no connection other than that people sometimes confused Downey's Weird Science with Kilmer's Real Genius, which came out the same year.
Now, they're fast friends. Kilmer gleefully recalls Downey putting colleagues in stitches while filming Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as he spun tales of lost weekends and sordid meetings with drug suppliers.
Healthy preoccupations
"I remember literally aching from laughing, with him telling the darkest story you could ever imagine because we'd just passed a motel where he'd spent three weeks one night waiting for the guy to come," said Kilmer, adding he was confident Downey had left that life behind.
Downey's character in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang a thief-turned-actor-turned-gumshoe does all the wrong things and somehow lands on his feet, a story arc resembling the actor's own.
"If I never did another movie again after Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, I feel like I finally reached that critical mass where I made a friend that I was going to keep forever and that I loved and that's a comrade, and that's Val," Downey said.
The son of underground filmmaker Robert Downey, the actor made his first screen appearances as a boy in some of his father's movies.
Downey co-starred in Rodney Dangerfield's Back to School and earned one of his first starring roles in James Toback's The Pick-up Artist.
He had an Oscar nomination for the title role in 1992's Chaplin. After that success, Downey's life began to spin out of control with a decade of fitful career choices and a party that seemed it would never end.
As his partying days wound down, Downey had a brief career resurgence with an acclaimed role in Wonder Boys and a stint on Ally McBeal, a job he lost amid a new round of cocaine arrests.
Now, Downey talks of healthy preoccupations, his wife, his son from a previous marriage, his fitness regimen and his work, which is piling up rapidly.
- AP
|
