Institute for Robert Downey Jr Studies > Required Reading

My Kind of Guy

In the midst of his troubles, Robert Downey Jr. invests Two Girls and a Guy with breathtaking sexual honesty.

A bizarre flashback from the shooting of my film The Pickup Artist had always lingered reproachfully in my memory: I was passing by the makeup room one morning and noticed Robert Downey, Jr. the movie’s star, staring at himself in the mirror. His mouth was stretched open wide. Suddenly, he exploded in a paroxysm of laughter. Then he turned and saw me watching him. “I just discovered something,” he said with the unalloyed directness of a four-year-old. “I have an immense mouth.”

“No kidding,” I said.

“Here. Look.”

It was, indeed, cavernous worthy of Joe E. Brown’s notorious bouche. “I never knew I had such a large mouth,” Robert added, continuing to flex it and howl.

What disturbed me about the episode is that I had done nothing in The Pick-Up Artist with that exuberant oral revelation. I had been given a provocative hint, and I had ignored it. I promised myself that if when I directed Robert again I would be guilty of no such negligence.

In the intervening years, I would see Robert periodically usually by accident, often with a vague agreement to work together again “soon.” It is possible that soon would have been never had it not been for an oddly epiphanous moment I experienced while watching CNN Headline News late one night in 1996 in a condition of near nod-out exhaustion. Suddenly, my consciousness cleared at the appearance of a frail, clearly frightened wraith of a figure, handcuffed and dressed in prison garb. It was Robert in custody in L.A. ... drug possession ... passed out on a stranger’s bed ... violating bail. The phrases pricked me into alertness. The freest of spirits had been cornered, stopped.

I hope it will not seem too ruthless to confess that my first thought was. If he can get through this nightmare he will be ready, finally, to become the great actor he has never quite been, his suffering purging his cuteness, the twisted complexity of his fascinating soul invigorating his dexterous talent. Not too ruthless, because my second thought was. If Robert finds his way back to physical health, he is going to need a filmmaker to take a risk: with him, get him insured, announce to the world that “He’s back!” And I knew that I wanted to be the one to take that shot.

So while Robert was in rehab, I was searching for a role, a theme, and a story worthy of a reborn entertainer. Duplicity seemed a natural subject. Robert had, after all, been leading at least a double and perhaps a triple life for quite a while. And sexual duplicity seemed an ideally specific form of deception for such a naturally sexual actor. Money (or the lack of it) would also need to be a factor. A budget of $1 million seemed realistic, which in turn meant shooting in one location and each thought leading to the next featuring just three characters, a modern version of the classic romantic triangle: two girls and a guy, in a movie observing the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. (A great pitch to a Hollywood executive: “I want to make a film faithful to the Aristotelian tragic unities.”)

The idea jolted me into gear. I sequestered myself in a one-room beach cottage in Florida for four days and wrote Two Girls and a Guy. On the Saturday morning that I finished (synchronicity, serendipity, fate!), I learned that Robert had been released from rehab to serve as host of Saturday Night Live. I flew up to New York and went straight to the after-show party at Maxim’s. It was a large and noisy crowd. Nestled at a corner table was Robert, his head resting on his mother’s shoulder, eyes shut.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

“Definitely,” he answered, before opening his eyes. “Anything you want me to do. I’ll do. You gave me my first break, and I’ll never forget that. Now,” he added with a smile, “having already agreed, would you like to tell me what the movie is about?”

“Sure,” I said. “Duplicity.”

“Something you and I know absolutely nothing about,” he said. “What’s the title?”

“Two Girls and a Guy.”

“Who are the girls?” he wanted to know.

“We’ll find them.”

“When do we start?”

“As soon as you finish your rehab.”

“One month. There isn’t a script, by any chance, is there?”

“Of course.” I withdrew it from the protective cover of the New York Post and handed it to him. “You look great, by the way.”

“I feel great. I’m ready to do my best work ever.”

“I know you are. That’s why I’m here.”

“To cash in on my misery and my unbridled talent?”

“If not I, who? If not now, when?”

Robert laughed. “Why the fuck did we wait so long?”

“Because we’re both self-saboteurs.”

“Isn’t that stupid? You think we’ll always be like that?”

There was a wistful undercurrent to the question. As the commotion swirled around us, the best I could do was shrug a response: “Let’s just take it one film at a time.”

“Make it great and redeem ourselves,” Robert said. “By the way, do you have the money for this movie?”

“Uh-huh.” This was, strictly speaking, false. “It’s not in my pocket tonight,” I admitted.

“But it will be in two days.”

In fact, I didn’t know how or even if I could lure the money into my pocket in two days. But as luck would have it, I got it in one. Producer Edward R. Pressman (Reversal of Fortune), with whom I had grown up (same apartment building in Manhattan, same school, neighbors at the beach), agreed not just to produce the film but to finance it as well.

The logistics took quick shape. I hired Barry Markowitz, a great young cameraman who had shot The Big Bang for me and later Sling Blade. The producers found a dazzling loft in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood the movie’s only location. I still needed the two actresses, who would have to resonate with clear even polar distinctiveness. The casting director, Georgianne Walken (Christopher’s wife), set up two days of readings with 24 actresses at a suite in the Shangri-la Hotel in Santa Monica, close to Robert’s rehab, so that he could be part of it. Heather Graham (blond, tall, and passionate) with Natasha Gregson Wagner (dark, petite, and witty) seemed as close to a perfect mix as I could have found if I had searched for a year.

I suspected that having just three actors, one week of rehearsal, and eleven days in which to shoot actually might endow the film with a greater chance of success than a more normal schedule say, 40 days. With no changes of location, no new actors every day or two forcing adjustments, all energies could be fixed on the scenes at hand. We were, in effect, trapped with nothing to do but work.

Shooting began in late January at 79 Leonard Street at 7 AM. I arrived on the set at 6:30, a few minutes before Robert. “Do you remember,” I asked him, “during The Pickup Artist you burst into hours of hysterical laughter when you discovered what a large mouth you have?” Immediately, Robert cracked up again. “And how you displayed it to everyone on the set, including several people who found it more than a bit peculiar?” Robert continued laughing. “Do you know why I’m reminding you of that now?” He shook his head. “Neither do I.”

He laughed again. I was not lying. I did not understand the purpose of conjuring up the big mouth, only that it wasn’t just to put Robert and myself at ease.

The movie springs from a simple premise: A two-timing lover’s girlfriends, previously unaware of each other’s existence, arrive independently at the deceiver’s loft to surprise him upon his return from a trip. Once they understand the dimensions of his duplicity, they plot immediate revenge.

Shooting in sequence and in real time proved an exhilarating glide. But on that first afternoon the flow began to congest. There is a scene in which Robert, singing You Don’t Know Me to himself in the mirror, sees Heather pop out from behind a pillar, revealing that she has, unknown to him, been waiting in his loft. The rhythm was off, the actions telegraphed, the behavior morning of believable moments forced.

I took Robert aside. “Listen,” I said. “I love the language in this movie or it wouldn’t be on the page. But if you can’t make it feel right in the scene, throw it out. Come up with your own. Anything you try that doesn’t work, we’ll burn. Anything that does, we’ll use.”

Robert became atypically serious. “If you really mean that I’ll give you some very strange and interesting things,” he said.

I didn’t have long to wait. The next afternoon, the first psychologically crucial scene in the movie was to be shot. Robert, having been caught in “a web of lies and deceit,” was to lecture himself in the mirror, to give himself “one more chance” to stop destroying what he cares about. I watched him deliver the lines and was a beat away from calling “cut” when I saw his lips begin to quiver and twitch, his eyes to bulge, and his mouth to widen into the limits of its gaping hugeness at which point he launched into a wild and grotesque send-up of You Don’t Know Me. Voice, eyes, and contortions of facial muscles, as well as the cosmic black hole of his mouth, all coalesced into a pure representation of madness. After emitting the final grunts of impacted rage and despair, he collapsed, spent.

Then he disappeared for a few minutes and returned, ready for the next scene. “Is that what you had in mind?” he asked.

“Not until you put it there,” I said.

“Cool.”

The shoot was going remarkably well, but there was one cloud of dread I seemed powerless to remove: Near the end of the film, Robert and the audience discover that the two girls have been sexually duplicitous too. It was a scene rich with dramatic possibilities which the script had failed to exploit.

My first intention had been to fix the scene before rehearsals started; my second, to fix it before shooting started; my last, to take a stab at it before the day it was to be shot. Unfortunately, I went zero for three.

“You know,” Robert said that morning, “the scene we’re supposed to shoot today doesn’t do justice to the rest of the movie at all.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Write it.”

“The whole scene?”

“Now and here. I’ll call an early lunch. See how far you get, then maybe I’ll help.”

This plan seemed to unnerve Robert as much as it excited him. I approached Heather and Natasha. “We’re going to break for a little while to try to get this scene right.”

“Good,” Heather said, relieved. “I don’t think it lives up to the rest of the movie.”

“I don’t either,” Natasha said.

“Great,” I said. “Now we all know two things: (a) we’re in deep trouble, and (b) no one has a solution.”

The passage Robert produced some twenty minutes later was not so much a scene as a (perhaps shameless) justification for his character’s duplicitous behavior which was fine, as long as it functioned as merely the setup for a demolition by the two girls, who, in turn, after the disclosure of their own duplicity, would need to be leveled by Robert.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s good. It’s great.” Robert waited. “As far as it goes.” I looked for Heather and Natasha. “I’ll show it to the girls.”

Reading Robert’s assault. Heather reddened noticeably. “I would never let him get away with that!” she insisted.

“Then don’t,” I said.

“Well, what do you want me to say?”

“What you would say,” I responded. She calmed, then smiled in anticipation. Natasha, overhearing, waited. “And you can join in with whatever you want as long as,” I looked at both of them, “we establish that you have been duplicitous as well.” They seemed equally pleased.

Twenty takes, much improvisation, and 200 shooting minutes later the scene was done. It would prove the most difficult, and, ultimately, the most satisfying scene to edit.

There was only one other exception to the smoothness of the eleven-day journey. Since Two Girls and a Guy was to be a film about the consequences of sexual duplicity, it was clear that a sex scene embodying each of the characters would be central. Where it needed to happen became clear in the writing. What needed to happen, however, could only become clear after the dynamic among the actors had been explored on and off the set.

I did know that Heather’s intention would be to pull Robert into the bedroom, get him to come quickly, then vanish; that Robert’s intention would be to stop Heather from leaving, excite her, and induce her to come (and stay); and that Natasha, the closed bedroom door excluding her, might respond in any of a range of different ways listen but not intrude, open the door and watch but not join in, join in but just with Robert, or Heather, or both together. Two girls and a guy.

Knowing Robert to be a fundamentally oral personality (back to the Big Mouth), it seemed likely that he would use his mouth to please. Heather, the daughter of an FBI agent, seemed a classic case of rebellion barely contained. Natasha’s nature appeared less distinct, and I couldn’t claim that she would be best served by any one of her options. She, on the other hand, could. And did.

“I’m going to sit on the stairs by the door,” she told me the day the scene was to be shot.

“And do what?”

“Not what you want me to do,” she said, laughing.

“What do you think I want you to do?” “I know what you want me to do. But I feel that I would just listen and wait and go through the whole array of painful emotions I would be going through: rejection, anger, excitement, despair.”

“Fine. Then that’s what you should do.”

What went on inside the bedroom between Robert and Heather was as close to mutually spontaneous erotic discovery as anything two actors have performed onscreen. Only Barry Markowitz and I were present during the hour, at the end of which both Robert and Heather broke into a joint laughter of relief and release as if to say: “That was fun!”

Of course, the MPAA’s rating board —that pretender to the throne of Guardian of the American Parent— would have to be appeased. Since the NC-17 is a bogus rating preventing a movie from being widely advertised or exhibited I would be, and have been, forced to trim the sex scene in order to procure an R. In response to an appeal, the head of the board said that the film’s sex scene was “unprecedented in the history of movies.” Much as I would like to plead guilty to such a charge. I’m afraid that if it is indeed true, it is more the result of the historical dread of real sex in American film than of anything explicit in Two Girls and a Guy.

Robert’s recent relapse into alcohol and drugs after Two Girls and a Guy is a reminder of the relentlessly sneaky power of addiction. Jail will surely devastate him; if it also bullies him into sobriety, I hope it is not at the cost of suffocating that exuberant spirit that has made him such a marvelous artist and man.