Who are you calling a washed-up superhero?
Michael Keaton tells Robbie Collin how he flew the long way round to get from ‘Batman’ to ‘Birdman’, the film tipped to scoop this year’s awards
WHEN he was seven years old, or maybe eight, Michael Keaton discovered that showing off could save his skin. During a slow afternoon at the St Malachy Catholic School in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, Keaton was whispering something to the boy next to him.
“The nun called me on it,” he says. “She said, ‘Stand up’. So I stood up. And she said, ‘Do you want to share what you’re talking about with the rest of the class?’ And I said, ‘Not really’. And she replied, ‘ Well, if you’re so keen on being entertaining, why don’t you sing a song?’ ”
Now 63, Keaton still remembers feeling trapped by the unwanted spotlight. “Weirdly, for someone who wanted to be funny, I didn’t like a lot of attention. I remember standing there and my face turning beetroot red.”
Then suddenly, he figured it out. “I realised she thought by telling me to sing that she’d got me, and the only way to beat her was to do it and enjoy it. So I didn’t just sing Baa, Baa, Black Sheep. I totally committed to it.”
The classroom went into uproar. The young Keaton sat down, grinning from ear to ear, and a strange thought occurred that has stayed with him ever since. When all eyes are trained on you, vulnerability can be the best form of protection.
“I don’t think twice about taking my clothes off and running through Times Square,” he says, “but I don’t want people knowing anything about me.”
This scene of public nudity is the centrepiece of Birdman , the new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which Keaton plays Riggan Thompson, a fading Hollywood actor who is directing and starring in a Broadway play of his own devising in one last, mid-life-crisis-triggered swing at respectability.
During a disastrous preview performance, Thompson slips outside for a cigarette, but the stage door snaps shut, snagging his dressing gown, along with the last remaining scraps of his dignity. The only way back on stage is through the theatre foyer, which is a brisk walk along West 43rd Street, then left on Broadway, and left again at Bubba Gump Shrimp.
Keaton really did march through Times Square in his underpants for the scene, which was shot at around 2am, when the crowds were more navigable. Aside from a few dozen extras lining his route, the shocked faces and flashing cameraphones are real.
It’s an electrified, daredevil sequence, particularly for an actor whose recent roles have often felt like “remember me?” cameos: a street-racing fixer in Need for Speed, a befuddled father in Post Grad, the voice of the Ken doll in Toy Story 3. Compared with the rest of Birdman , though, it doesn’t feel unusually bold. The whole film is a streak in public.
That is because the character Keaton plays is the ex-star of an enormously successful superhero movie franchise called Birdman . Thompson quit after film No 3, and his career foundered and never picked up. Birdman himself was invented by Iñárritu for the purposes of his film, although for anyone who has seen Keaton in Tim Burton’s two Batman movies, the gruff voice, black cape and beaky mask may ring a bell.
Birdman is emphatically not a Keaton biopic — for one thing, Thompson has telekinetic powers and starts the film cross-legged and lev-
It clacks the lives of its star and protagonist together like jumper leads, just for the spark-flying fun of it
itating one metre off the floor of his dressing room. But it clacks the lives of its star and protagonist together like jumper leads, just for the spark-flying fun of it. And in this bizarre, complex role, Keaton is better than he has ever been. In both senses, it is the performance of his career.
MICHAEL Keaton (born Michael Douglas, a screen name he couldn’t use for obvious reasons) is the youngest of nine children, two of whom his parents lost. They didn’t have enough money to visit the cinema, but his father won a second-hand black-and-white television set in a raffle, and the young Keaton discovered films on that. Westerns were his first love, then comedies.
After leaving school, he enrolled at Kent State University in Ohio to study speech and drama, but money was short and after two years he quit his course and moved back to Pittsburgh, where he drove a cab, took a job on a construction site, and then found work as a production assistant on a children’s television series.
He was writing comedy in his spare time, and friends urged him to try out his material in public. He remembers his nervous excitement in 1974 when he scored a slot at the original Catch a Rising Star club in New York. Also on the bill that night was Larry David, “who was really funny, and really cynical”, Keaton says. “And, to some degree, intimidating too. He seemed so sophisticated, and I still looked like I was about 10.”
Nevertheless, Keaton went down well. At the end of the night, he and David were the only acts to be rebooked. Gigs in New York led to more gigs in Los Angeles, where a comedy-writer friend suggested him for a walkon, one-line part in a sitcom.
In 1981, after six rounds of au- ditions, Keaton got his first film role in Night Shift, a zany comedy about two morgue attendants who run a prostitution ring. The director was Ron Howard and the reviews were good; particularly for Keaton, whose firecracker energy nudged his then betterknown co-star Henry Winkler to the edge of the spotlight.
Howard offered Keaton the lead role in his next feature, Splash, a romantic comedy about a man who falls in love with a mermaid, but Keaton was preternaturally anxious about getting stuck in a rut. He turned Splash down (the part went to a then unknown Tom Hanks) and also the Bill Murray and Harold Ramis roles in Ghostbusters— decisions that looked increasingly catastrophic with every drab comedy and unwatched drama that followed. (Keaton also left Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo a few days after shooting began, and the director replaced him with Jeff Daniels.)
But his work in Night Shift had caught the attention of Tim Burton, who cast Keaton in the title role of his 1988 horror comedy Beetlejuice.
As Betelgeuse, the shockhaired, snaggle-toothed “bio-exorcist” who specialises in scaring humans out of haunted houses, Keaton is barely on screen for 20 minutes, but the entire film is in his thrall. He improvised much of his dialogue in the heat of the moment and describes his performance style as “going f***ing nuts”. Cinemagoers everywhere loved him, but it was a love that only lasted a little under four months.
BEETLEJUICE was released in the US at the end of March 1988. In July 1988 Warner Bros announced that Burton would direct its wildly anticipated new Batman film, with Keaton in the suit. Keaton was known for frantic comedy, and Batman fans feared the new film would be a laughing stock — a throwback to the then hugely unfashionable 1960s television series with Adam West. A reported 50 000 strongly worded letters were sent to the studio in protest.
In November, the outrage had grown loud enough for the Wall Street Journal to run a 1 200-word front page article on this impending disaster. “Michael Keaton is no Sylvester Stallone,” the paper warned, in all apparent seriousness. Warner Bros responded by cutting an “emergency trailer” that would play in cinemas over Christmas, reassuring fans that Burton’s film would treat their idol respectfully.
Yet Burton’s film had almost no respect for the comic books at all. It was cloaked in 1930s gangster movie shadow, with few action sequences. Even so, it was a global smash hit, with Keaton unimaginably subtle, wounded, sexy and most of all plausible as Batman. Blockbusters often date badly, but Burton’s film plays even better today.
Of course, Keaton went back for more. Batman Returns was released in the summer of 1992. It was markedly less successful than the original, and he quit the franchise almost as soon as Burton did, sensing “things were about to go south”. He informally pitched a third Batman film that would examine Bruce Wayne’s past, a narrative course that has since been staked out by Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. HE following 20 years bore mixed fruit, although Keaton says he is pleased on balance with how things turned out. The lows don’t come any lower than Jack Frost, in which a boy’s recently deceased father comes back from the dead as a snowman. The highs included the Ramis cloning comedy Multiplicity , and the same drug-enforcement officer in two Elmore Leonard adaptations: Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown .
I meet Keaton the day before Birdman’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. He is in talkshow mode, gags and anecdotes at the ready. Only one word brings him to a stop: “comeback”. I ask him if he thinks this film feels like one. “No,” he replies. “But it’s OK if you do.”
I ask if it stung his pride to have a respected filmmaker such as Iñárritu approach him with a script about a middle-aged has-been giving it one last shot.
“No, no,” he says. “I didn’t take it personally because it wasn’t pitched to me that way at all.” A brief pause. “Although I have to admit I’m an actor and I was in Batman, and this thing’s called Birdman and it’s about an actor, and a bird is like a bat. But I’m sure if he had any sense at all, he thought of about five or six different guys for the role.” Another pause. “I mean, I would’ve.”
Except, of course, Iñárritu didn’t. “There was no other option,” he tells me two days after I meet Keaton. “He was the one.” The director recalls sending Keaton the script with his heart in his throat, and arranging a dinner so they could discuss it in person.
It helped that Keaton was a fan of Iñárritu’s first film, Amores Perros, and his English-language follow-up, 21 Grams. “He knew the film wouldn’t make fun of him because he trusted me,” Iñárritu says. “I was absolutely honest with him. I told him, ‘I can count on my fingers the number of guys who have worn that cape, and you are the pioneer. Only you have the ability to do the drama and comedy that I need for this film. Only you have that authority.’ And he said ‘yes’ that night.” — © Robbie Collin/Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014 Birdman is on circuit
It was a global smash hit, with Keaton unimaginably subtle, wounded, sexy and most of all plausible