![]() He calls Richard Attenborough (“Chaplin”) “a super wise loving grandfather.” Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) was “like a brother.” Movies were and still are, Susan Downey says, “the family business.” He often found with other directors something just as comfortable and rewarding. “I think I had the advantage of it already feeling natural before I came into that quote-unquote industrialized version of entertainment,” Downey Jr. genuine, live-wire performances surely owe something to the frenetic energy he had known on his father’s sets. There are also ongoing discoveries.Īfter such an unconventional indoctrination to cinema as a kid, Downey Jr. came out, he felt, emptyhanded.īut in “Sr.,” the two films each are making ultimately seamlessly meld into one, suggesting a deeper understanding between Jr. Like most sons seeking such definitude, Downey Jr. “I was going to get to the bottom of it for once and all,” he says. goes into his father’s room, with the camera trailing, to find some final answers. has noticed how the film becomes a projection of others’ experiences losing a parent. Since premiering “Sr.” at the Telluride Film Festival, Downey Jr. and his father watched together was the music biopic satire “Walk Hard.” They laughed their heads off. “He was a saint compared to us Downey boys,” Downey Jr. Susan Downey, too, lost her father, in 2020, to Parkinson’s. When Downey Sr.’s health waned, they moved the film’s editing suite into his bedroom. “I can relate to that, too, up until this current administration, the never-ending Susan Downey empire,” says Downey Jr. ascribes a metamorphosis in his father to his second wife, Laura Ernst, who died in 1994, and his third wife, Rosemary Rogers. He replies: “I would sure love to miss that discussion.”īut “Sr.” is in many ways a portrait of how both Downeys recovered, stabilized and found peace through family. raises in the film: “We would be remiss not to discuss its effect on me,” Downey Jr. On those ’70s films, Downey Sr.’s cocaine use was rampant, an environment that surely had an influence on Downey Jr.’s own struggles later with drug addiction. ![]() There’s wonderful things that come with that, and then there’s probably avoidance patterns that are kept up because of that.” This is a secret power that you guys have. “And I think you deal with anything uncomfortable through humor. You’re hyper-aware of what’s going on around you and comment on it, much as Sr. “You absolutely have your observation of the world. “I would never necessarily marvel at the fact that a duck had baby ducks and those ducks got big.” “I did not get his wildly optimistic ongoing super-curiosity,” he says. made his debut in his father’s antic 1970 dog pound comedy, “Pound,” at the age of 5. “Sr,” which debuts Monday on Netflix, was made with the intention of capturing his last days: a last stab at gaining some understanding of him, wrestling with their shared demons and, once again, making a movie together. died last year at the age of 85 after having Parkinson’s. And it winds up pulling you into a rabbit hole that I kind of needed to go down in order to process and ingest the totality of our relationship.”ĭowney Sr. “It’s like a little string you pull at, you know. said in a recent interview by phone from Los Angeles alongside his wife and producing partner Susan Downey. I didn’t know that it would be the quickest way to the heart of things,” Downey Jr. “It was a way to put something between us in our own relationship and closure. puts it, “My dad and I are pretty flawed dudes.” his entry into moviemaking and whose outsized personality did much to inform his son, for better and worse. It’s a son’s loving reckoning with his iconoclast father, a freewheeling cult filmmaker whose experimental films gave Downey Jr. but with his father’s own insertions peppered throughout. It’s a kind of home movie, mostly made by Downey Jr. ![]() “Sr.,” directed by Chris Smith, is a work of father-son harmony more than might be suggested by Downey Sr.’s typically brusque assertion of filmmaking independence. “I just go, ‘Man, hats off to you, Pops.” “The key point in this is when he goes, ‘OK, I think we should split into two camps: The (expletive) movie and the one I’m gonna make,’” recalls Downey Jr., laughing. ![]()
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