Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

Variety’s The Movie That Changed My Life (Excerpt)

Robert Downey Jr, Actor

Robert Downey Sr is the director who the 1960s counterculture such seminal down-with-the-Man movies as Chafed Elbows (about the broken welfare system) and Putney Swope (in which a black man takes over a top Madison Avenue ad agency). The latter film’s poster, which superimposes a black model over a raised middle finger, became classic 1960s wallpaper in college dorm rooms everywhere.

Because he was only four years old at the time, Robert Downey Jr can’t remember a world without Putney Swope. To say it changed his life is an understatement. It was his life. “My dad was always outside the fray,” he says. “He has always been a bit of a weirdo.” That outre status worked to Downey Jr’s favor when, in 1970, he made his film debut playing a puppy in Downey Sr’s canine comedy, Pound.

Going to the movies with Dad also qualified as a trip. “My dad took me to see everything—probably illegally,” Downey Jr recalls. “They were R-rated, and he just kind of walks in and goes, ‘Relax.’ It’s no secret that my Dad is a film snob, so oftentimes I’d get all excited, get the popcorn, and we’d go in and the credits would roll and the opening frame would be mediocre and we’d walk out. And I’d be like, ‘But didn’t we just get here?’ and he’s like, ‘Trust me, kid. This ain’t going to go right. I’d be like ‘Wow! I guess he knows.’”

And Downey Sr took his son to see Philippe de Broca’s 1966 antiwar classic, King of Hearts, about a soldier (Alan Bates) who is mistaken for an explosives expert. “We sat there,” Downey Jr says, “and the opening credits rolled, and we were almost through Act I and we hadn’t left yet, and I kind of kept looking at him and he was observing and watching and seemed to be enjoying it and [was] engrossed. So I would kind of look at him and look back at the screen and then take it in. I felt that without saying a word, he was telling me, ‘This is the kind of movie we’ll stay for.’”

If it’s true that liberals beget conservatives, and vice versa, then it’s easy to see why Downey Jr’s early taste in film is strictly mainstream—but with a slight twist.

“Bad News Bears is about a bunch of weirdos winning, and I really got off on that,” he says of the 1976 kiddie sports film. “Nobody even really liked each other until the end of the movie. I liked it because the weirdos win.”

In life, that isn’t always the case.

“I am just really grateful that I was born into a family that put its art first,” he says. “The downside is that when you put art first, it doesn’t always pan out so well.”

Downey Sr did not go on to have a long, commercially fruitful career in Hollywood. And his son’s filmwork has been bumpy from a box office standpoint—until recently. Having headlined such big-budget extravaganzas in 2008 as Iron Man and Tropic Thunder, Downey Jr is proud of his current popular appeal in Hollywood. “Wow! It’s just so nice to be in the game,” he says.

When he landed Iron Man (“I did fight for this part”), it prompted a celebratory phone call to Dad, which ended up with the elder Downey exclaiming, “God, the last time I heard you this excited was when you were screen-tested for Chaplin.” That 1992 film won Downey Jr an Oscar nomination.

Playing a superhero in Iron Man fulfills an old fantast, one Downey Jr enjoyed until he was about eight years old. “But it was beaten out of me,” he reveals. “And then I turned forty-two and I’m finally doing this movie.”

Not that he has gone so big-buget that he can’t remember his indie roots. A favorite recent movie is Little Miss Sunshine. “When I see that dysfunctional family, demonstrating to us how we can all be okay,” he says, “I kind of feel like it’s a triumph for weirdos.”