The stars of 'The Soloist' talk about getting into character

Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx and Catherine Keener discuss (albeit kind of vaguely) on how they get into character when it comes to portraying real-life people.

The Soloist opens this weekend.

From MoviesOnline.ca:

Q: Jamie, you have the ability to transform yourself into any individual. How does that happen?
JAMIE FOXX: All of us, you want to be the person. I got a change to go down to LAMP and watch Anthony Ayers from a distance without meeting him. Because, a lot of times, when people meet us, they’ll be on their best behavior or they’ll change. I just wanted to see him in his element, how he ordered his food, how he talks to people and, within five minutes, you would have seen four different sides of this guy; he was happy, we was angry, he was jubilant. He was all these different things and so, by doing that, when you’re doing a character you want to do the nuance. I dropped some weight, got my hair done nicely [laughter] and then I got a chance to meet him and I filmed him on my phone while he was talking just to capture some of those little nuggets.

It was also a little scary to play someone schizophrenic. We’re all artists and we all go different places in our minds and I don’t know how they feel [the other actors] but I feel this way; if I were to lose my mind, I would lose everything. So, that was a little bit of the fear going into the project. But, that was it. You had to get it. You had to get it and once you get it, you feel it and you feel like it’s really that person. Like you’ll say it in your mouth, you’ll say whatever that person says and you’ll hear it in your mind and say “Okay, I am that person.”

Q: Robert, Steve Lopez said that you asked to go into his closet to see who he was…

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: Where does it all end? [laughter].

Q: How do you decide how much you want to get to know a person when you are portraying them? Where is that line for you? What did you find in his closet?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: Oh, well, you’re supposing that he allowed me into his closet. He marvels at the idea that I asked. He never even dignified it with a response nor would he allow me to interview him at distance or at close range. We had a cigar together and we talked. He wanted to tell me that to impersonate him would be to do a disservice to the movie. But, it’s different every time. I knew that the technical prowess and the degree of difficulty was going to fall on Jamie and that I was to observe and report on that as if I were an audience member and Joe Wright said it was really important that I do next to nothing and listen a lot which is very counterintuitive to my kind of ectomorphic disposition so it was an equal challenge for me in that way. I had a couple of ideas, thought maybe my hair should be short. Next thing you know Keener was shaving my head on her first day of rehearsal with this number two scissor blade.

Q: Not to quote from Tropic Thunder out of context, but I can’t help but think of Kirk Lazarus’s speech about “Don’t go full retard.” [laughter]. How important is it not to get so involved in the character that you are indistinguishable from them?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.:  I think we would all agree that job one is aesthetic distance.  Mr. Jellison, my theater arts teacher from Santa Monica High School, it’s right there in the first three pages of the book on Theater Arts, you know.  But then it’s that thing of just because you’ve read the owner’s manual doesn’t mean you can use the machine that way.  But I think it’s really important.  I guess the thing here was it was this journey. By the end, and Catherine and I were talking about it, because she was serving several functions different and separate from what they were in the story, we were literally talking about and writing this end scene with us in the house that we used to be married in, about what happened to this and that.  I had this idea about likening it to the Northridge Earthquake which is something that I think every Angeleno could relate to and that having to do with when my own first marriage or things had started to tip up for me and what it was and all the promise of L.A. and what it really is so, to answer the question, you don’t want to cross the line but what you want to do is bring as much of yourself to bear as you could.

The funny thing is I would see Jamie who essentially created a system of playing cello and violin.  I played violin a little bit when I just did Sherlock Holmes.  It is mind-numbing! Mind-numbingly insane and I utilized your system just to get a take or two down.  We did it day by day by day.  And then we would be at Disney Hall and he would go over, because it had been a particularly difficult day, and he was entertaining the hundred extras we had there while we were night-shooting during the scene that he had to have a melt-down in, so he would be out of character, cracking jokes going “I got twenty bucks for anyone who can tell me when Fred Willard was in a movie in 1979.” [laughter].  People were going “Isn’t he about to go crazy.” It was like he was throwing a party in Miami for these people.  Then they’d say “rolling” and you’d go in and you would have this complete psychotic break, literally.  But, I think the way out was to be yourself.  The way in was to bring as much of yourself to bear as you could.  We were always trying to infuse it with a sense of “how can we be us, somehow in this movie?”