As we’ve reported here on TG, strong buzz is building for Birdman, including Oscar talk for Michael Keaton. It’s an intriguing idea for a movie, a drama about a washed up superhero, but is it the best movie of the year?
At least one place, Rolling Stone, has proclaimed it so, and in an interview with writer / director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, the filmmaker said he cast Michael Keaton not because he’d already played a major superhero because “I really just needed someone who could do both comedy and drama equally well, and there really are, to my mind, very few actors who can do that better than Michael.”
At first Keaton responded by asking Inarritu, “Is this a joke? Are you making fun of me?” After about five minutes of Inartu explaining the role, Keaton realized he was serious and said, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do this, it sounds great. I’m in.”
Inarritu is also apparently not a big fan of superhero movies, telling Rolling Stone, “They are ruining things in a lot of ways…Look, I’m no purist – there are good superhero films and there are bad ones…It’s just that we’ve been overwhelmed by these movies now. They keep taking up room that could be going to smaller films.”
