Flying High Again: Alejandro González Inárritu on the Making of ‘Birdman’
The man is sitting, cross-legged, in his dressing room. It’s a shot you’ve seen before in movies about actors and the theater — the star performer in repose, waiting to go onstage. Except this time, the guy waiting to tread the boards is…wait, is he levitating?!? Later, we’ll see this same gent — a movie star named Riggan Thomson, best known for playing a feathered superhero named Birdman in a series of blockbusters — moving objects with his mind and flying throughout New York City. (The fact that Thomson is played by Michael “I’m Batman” Keaton adds on a whole other layer of meta.) Thomson has fallen on hard times, it seems, since leaving the franchise. So he’s come to Broadway to stage a theatrical production based on Raymond Carver’s bleak short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” His costumed alter ego, however, keeps popping up to talk trash and undermine his efforts. Did we mention that a giant, screeching metal eagle also shows up? And that the movie you’re watching is essentially made to resemble one long, continuous single shot?
An anything-goes backstage comedy about an actor free-falling through an existential crisis, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is already being touted as a major Oscar contender and the official start of a Michael Keaton comeback. But it’s also proving to be a career reboot for Alejando González Iñárritu, a filmmaker who’d made his name making multi-layered, multi-narrative dramas (see Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel) and who had self-admittedly hit a bit of a creative dead end. Like Riggan, the Mexican director felt dogged by chronic self-doubt — and like his protagonist, he went out on a limb and gambled on something completely different to shake things up. With help from Keaton and a cast of A-listers (including Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts and Zach Galifianakis), Iñárritu has found his groove again.
In a rollicking, no-holds-barred interview with Rolling Stone, the filmmaker talked about he mined his own artistic rut for Birdman‘s story, how he pulled off getting Keaton to run through Times Square in his underwear and why he thinks blockbusters are ruining everything.
Would it be safe to say that this film came from a place of personal creative frustration?
[Laughs] Yeah, it is very safe to say that! I have a lot of what you might call creative self-loathing — I have pretty high expectations, and they seem to consistently be higher than what I’m able to accomplish. Or let me put it to you this way: Inside me, there’s a chronically unsatisfied guy who is always telling me that nothing is ever good enough. I finally got to the point where I just said to this guy: “Who the fuck are you to tell me this is wrong? This is all that I can do!” It took years of meditation to recognize who this internal dictator was, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I thought, this has the makings of a movie, I just don’t know how I could make it work. It wasn’t until I came across the idea of an actor trying to put things back on track that I felt like I’d found a way to do it. That planted the seed.
So how did this vague notion develop into what became Birdman?
Well, the next step was to put down some defining lines. I knew immediately after I had the idea that I wanted to do it as if it was one single shot. I really wanted to submerge people in Riggan’s point of view — the ego is such an abstract concept that you need to be right there with him as he’s experiencing what is a kind of madness. You wake up every day and you live your life as if it’s a Steadicam shot, so why couldn’t we do the film that way? It became a puzzle to solve as I was putting it together in my head. So I contacted some friends of mine — [screenwriters] Nicolás Glacobone, Alexander Dinelaris and Armando Bo — told them basic idea and what I was thinking. I knew how I wanted to the movie to begin, with that shot of Riggan floating; I had an idea of what the middle point should be; and sort of knew how I wanted it to end. I had the spine, and nothing else. That kicked off two years of collaborating, and the result is what you see.
It’s smart to start off with him levitating in his dressing room — the whole notion of reality goes out the window at that point.
Exactly. Anything goes from here on out.