“It was awful, wasn’t it?”: the movie Robert Downey Jr hated every second of watching
Even if he didn’t want to be an actor, Robert Downey Jr had little choice about being exposed to the industry at an early age, thanks to his father’s position as one of his era’s independent mavericks.
He made his screen debut at the age of five in his old man’s bizarre 1970 comedy, Pound, and his next two credits were uncredited cameos in Robert Downey Sr movies. When he finally broke out on his own, he didn’t waste much time making a name for himself as a potential generational talent.
It was clear from the beginning that the second-generation star was a hell of an actor, but he kept getting in his own way. These days, he’s a beloved and respected veteran with an Academy Award and several billion-dollar movies to his name, but as you’d expect given his parentage, he wasn’t exactly raised on a steady diet of mainstream fare.
The ’70s was a decade of two halves: one of them saw the ‘New Hollywood’ era begin to take over, with a fresh wave of exciting auteurs operating with the freedom their ‘Golden Age’ predecessors never enjoyed, but the other saw Steven Spielberg and George Lucas continue blurring the lines between art and commerce with the big-budget crowd-pleasers that dominated the multiplex.
Before he’d turned ten, Downey Jr had been exposed to several pictures that were hardly suitable for a child of such tender years. One of them was George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which he didn’t have too many issues with, although he drew the line at Marco Ferreri’s 1973 effort, La Grande Bouffe.
The Marcello Mastroianni-led farce satirised consumer culture and the decadent, hedonistic ways of the society’s wealthiest subset by focusing on a group of friends who plan to eat themselves to death. The future Iron Man was eight when it was released, which was apparently old enough to serve as the basis for a father/son trip to the cinema.
“Wasn’t that great?” he sarcastically asked Fresh Air, when reflecting on his earliest theatre-going memories, before asking another entirely rhetorical question. “It was awful, wasn’t it? I just remember the scene where the couple is making love and someone’s knocking at the door and the guy says, ‘I’m coming’. And I was like, ‘Why is that funny? God, I don’t get anything.'”
He might have been too young to understand the obvious sex jokes, but everything else that was unfolding onscreen wasn’t to his taste, either. That’s not surprising when La Grande Bouffe wasn’t devised with the eight-year-old demographic in mind, regardless of whether or not your da is an idiosyncratic provocateur.
