The Christopher Nolan movie Robert Downey Jr hated: “That’s not my idea of what I want to see”
More than 50 years after making his screen debut in his father’s bizarre 1970 comedy Pound, Robert Downey Jr reached the pinnacle of the industry when he collected an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ for his turn in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
It would be one of the industry’s biggest understatements to say the star had been through the wringer more than once in the intervening decades, having come perilously close to destroying his reputation and ruining his personal and professional lives during a lengthy battle against addiction.
Of course, few in Hollywood history have ever vanquished their demons to a similar extent as Downey, who was crowned the newest A-list megastar on the block when Iron Man was released in the summer of 2008, just five years after Mel Gibson put his hand into his pocket and paid the insurance bond so that he could play the lead role in The Singing Detective after every major studio in town deemed him unhireable.
Before that, and long before they collaborated on the filmmaker’s Oscar-bothering historical thriller, Downey and Nolan met to discuss a potential role in Batman Begins. The latter knew from the beginning that the former wasn’t the right fit for the part, but he wanted to take the meeting anyway because he wanted to come face-to-face with a performer he admired and respected.
The year Downey completed his phoenix-like rise from the ashes was a banner one for superhero cinema, with Nolan’s The Dark Knight arriving in multiplexes mere weeks after Iron Man. They were completely different films with vastly opposing approaches to their shared comic book source material, and the actor was less than impressed with Christian Bale’s influential second stint under the cape and cowl.
“I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get how many things that are so smart,” he said, per Huffington Post. “It’s like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and scriptwriting, and I’m like, ‘That’s not my idea of what I want to see in a movie’. I loved The Prestige but didn’t understand The Dark Knight.”
“Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character, and in the end, they need him to be a bad guy,” he continues. “I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so highbrow and so fucking smart; I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.'” Evidently, he wasn’t a fan, but there may have been a hint of the age-old industry rivalry at play.
Summing up his feelings on The Dark Knight, widely regarded as arguably the greatest comic book adaptation ever made, Downey offered a succinct: “Fuck DC Comics. That’s all I have to say, and that’s where I’m really coming from.” It remains unknown if Nolan ever caught wind of his comments, which could have created an awkward atmosphere on the set of Oppenheimer were the director to pull out the receipts.
