Yes, teenagers on the bus are annoying – but things could be worse
If you’re the kind of person who gets annoyed by teenagers on buses, you just shouldn’t get a bus at 3.15pm, especially if you live next door to a secondary school. And I know all that, but there I was, on a bus at exactly the wrong time, getting annoyed.
The sharper-eyed reader will know I have teenagers of my own, so I should lean towards infinite love and forgiveness for the whole generation. I also remember what it’s like to bethe annoying teenager, against all the odds because I can’t remember much else from the 80s. My sister and I got a coach once from London to Leighton Buzzard – we were about 13 and 15 – and as we were getting off, this guy exploded: “Thank God! I couldn’t have taken one more minute – they’re like a pair of chipmunks.” We didn’t even realise he was talking about us until our mum said: “Try living with them.” We were just thinking, ooh, where are there chipmunks?
It’s never just chatting with young people, though, is it? They’re extremely loud and very sudden, liable at any moment to exclaim with a vehemence that would only be warranted if they were on fire, and instead is because someone dropped a receipt near them. They are enemies of the headphone and need to blare TikTok content out of their phones that is, somehow, even more inane than the conversation they’re having. There’s a lot of fake reaction: pretending to cry, pretending to fight, pretending to scream, and this creates a constant war of adult responsibilities, where you half want to check the crying-not-crying one is OK, and half want to mind your own business in the time-honoured way of the person on the Clapham omnibus.
I did once read something useful, though, about the condition of adolescence – that as you grow into your adult skin, you are driven to annex public space, stamp yourself on it and make it your own. This is not just natural – it is essential. Far from minding the noise, we should be pleased. If they weren’t doing that, they’d be doing something worse: marking their territory with urine.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
much grist to the mill.
Smith, an otherwise fairly laconic individual, says it was inspiring to watch Downey Sr at work. “It was very inventive, it was very loose.” But he adds that there was “a different set of criteria” at play. “[Downey Sr] said we would be unsuccessful if half the audience doesn’t walk out of the film.” And Smith remembers the interview they shot with actor Alan Arkin. “At one point in the interview, Alan gets up and says, ‘I want to go grab a kumquat.’ He walks over and he grabs one and comes back. In the Senior cut, that was the only piece used from that whole interview.”
Smith evidently didn’t entirely share Downey Sr’s perspective: there’s no kumquat shot in the “legitimate” version, and quite a few of Arkin’s affectionately waspish comments are kept in. (“I don’t know how he came up with his casting ideas … it was like he went down the Bowery half the time and just picked up people who were half in the bag.”) Smith says discussions are ongoing as to whether the full Senior cut will actually see the light of day.
In piecing together the varied strands, Smith faced a complex task: dipping in and out of the Senior cut as well as accommodating the father-son Zoom sessions, Downey Jr’s to-camera observations, archive clips of Downey Sr’s old films, and so on. “We wanted to embrace Senior’s looseness and his spirit. But also try to make something that functioned as a movie.” Smith says
Downey Jr was initially very resistant to the film being about him … but then “things evolved and changed”. Partly due to the still-complex relationship between father and son, with much apparently needing to be said, and partly due to Downey Sr’s advancing Parkinson’s. “It sort of morphed into this film about fathers and sons and a meditation on life in general.”
For Downey Jr, there’s undoubtedly a therapeutic dimension to the documentary. In fact, we even listen in on a session he has with his therapist in which they discuss his father’s impending demise. For Downey Sr we can’t be so certain, but his wife, author Rosemary Rogers, says in the documentary that working on it “was energising and exciting” for him. “With Parkinson’s you lose a little bit of something every day, but he’s fully focused on the film. It’s everything for him.” Smith says Downey Jr was very trusting and, while Downey Jr and his wife, film executive Susan Downey, acted as producers on the project, he had little interference. “I took notes from them, for sure, but believe me, if there were issues I’d tell you.”
Downey Sr died in July 2021, shortly after finishing his cut. Downey Jr filmed a final interaction with him and his own son, Exton. Smith also got to incorporate a little of the informal tribute the Downey family held for the late patriarch. Downey Jr has his documentary/memorial, and Smith is grateful to have been in the right place at the right time. “I think everyone just felt happy and blessed and fortunate that we were able to preserve and capture a little bit of the life force that surrounded this person. I think that was such a gift. We were just lucky to be there at the right time.”
• Sr is released on 2 December on Netflix
A lot of us thought it would be hypocritical to not have our kids participate in marijuana
Robert Downey Sr