Back with a ‘Bang’

“We both came to this with a lot to gain and a lot to lose and it’s just so nice to not be leaving Vegas empty-handed as usual,” Downey Jr. said while recently publicizing the movie at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Popular young movie stars in the 1980s, Downey Jr. (“Weird Science,” “Chaplin”) and Kilmer (“Real Genius,” “The Doors”) were celebrated the following decade for their unforgettable performances in more grown-up films.
Their successes were marred, however, as personal demons eclipsed their work. Downey Jr.’s career was sidelined by his addiction to drugs and the jail time he served in connection to it, while Kilmer endured a high-profile divorce from his actress wife, Joanne Whalley, and developed a reputation for being unconventional and difficult on set.
This new movie offers both actors a terrific vehicle by which they can remind audiences — and filmmakers — just how talented they really are. Produced by Hollywood titan Joel Silver and directed and penned by “Lethal Weapon” scribe Shane Black, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” is a noir-ish action comedy in theaters now.
“It was great just laughing with Robert right away,” Kilmer explained. “He’s very, very creative, so he always had lots of ideas for my character as well. It was great talking through things. I liked almost everything he suggested, too, and if Shane didn’t, we trusted him immediately and if we had a little routine worked out and he didn’t like it, we would just dump it and move on. There wasn’t time to debate it and have pride about stuff and I think the rhythms are really spontanous. I like watching it. I think I’ve seen it five times and I still like it. “
In the film, Downey Jr. plays Harry, a petty thief who stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood detective movie. Impressed with Harry’s “skills,” the producer sends him to Los Angeles where he is teamed up with a real hard-boiled private eye named Gay Perry, played by Kilmer, to prepare for his screen test. It isn’t long before the pair meets up with Harry’s childhood crush, an aspiring actress (Michelle Monaghan) whose dead sister might just have something to do with the case the unlikely new partners are investigating.
To Kilmer, the movie is a fairly realistic depiction of life in Los Angeles.
“Michelle Monaghan’s character is very accurate,” he said. “She is a girl who has a great spirit, a great ready laugh, but is kind of getting to the point where she pretty much knows it’s not going to work out and doesn’t quite yet want to face it and Robert Downey Jr.’s character is just coming out with the complete, wide-eyed hope that maybe he’ll get a movie and it will work out, even though it’s absurd circumstances, and my character has seen it all already and slowly comes to have a glimmer of hope that sometimes things can work out in Los Angeles.
“Our story, personally, in relation to this film, is certainly true because it’s not a movie that would (ordinarily) get made,” Kilmer continued. “In fact, Robert’s new wife, they were engaged at the time, but she was one of our producers… We met at a party I threw at my house in the Hollywood Hills for (Irish filmmaker) Jim Sheridan, but the film starts in the Hollywood Hills at a party where they are just meeting, so it was quite strange to read those first couple of scenes.”
“How fantastic is Val in this movie?” asked the 40-year-old Downey Jr., the son of Irish and Jewish parents. “As a matter of fact, I was even more proud because at this massive screening (in Toronto) there were times when they were so on Gay Perry’s side, they were like spontaneously clapping and my guy has his bits and pieces throughout the whole thing and Michelle is fantastic, but, in a way, Val is kind of the heart of this movie and that’s just something else.”
Kilmer is equally complimentary about his co-star.
“It’s as if Shane wrote the role for Robert,” noted the 46-year-old actor who can also trace some of his family roots back to Ireland. “He gets to be charming and romantic and self-deprecating and he comes up with the goods in a strange way. Robert’s certainly not a bumbling character, or a fumbler. He’s got fantastic timing and, well, now he’s an athlete. He’s always had a lot of energy. His spirit is just perfectly suited to it and his wit and charm are really in full force here.”
Known for his meticulous preparation for roles in dramas like “The Doors,” “Tombstone” and “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Kilmer says he loved the working relationship his gay detective had with Downey Jr.’s thief-turned actor-turned detective.
“I blew takes every single day for 35 days,” Kilmer confessed.
Noting he particularly liked the banter Harry and Perry exchange before they warm up to each other, he recalled: “It was just a ball. A lot of hard work because we didn’t have a lot of time, but there were really well-written characters and working out the rhythms with Shane Black, who wrote it and also directed it, and Robert Downey, Jr. It was just fun every day. It was just a pleasure.”
“It was fun,” agreed the now clean and sober Downey Jr. “And it was also all at night and we were giddy and we were wondering if it was going to work and there was a lot of faith. Literally, this was probably the most out-on-a-limb collective venture that any of us have been involved in in a while or will be for some time. You relish that. I don’t really know what to compare it to.”
Describing this particular film as a collaborative project with a script that “takes the cake,” Downey Jr. reveals that he thinks he and Kilmer got on so well, in part, because they have similar offbeat sensibilities.
“I think we just identified with each other on a certain level, you know?” he said. “He’s pretty eccentric and I am a little bit stupid like Harry. It’s not like I don’t have perspective. I just don’t necessarily always see the whole deck. People say, ‘Oh, wow, but you have such intuitive understanding about films and the scenes,’ and I go: ‘That’s one card in the deck. There’s a whole other myriad of things that occur in life,’ and I think that’s what it is. Harry doesn’t quite get life on life’s terms.”
Downey Jr. can also be seen now in a supporting role in “Good Night, And Good Luck,” George Clooney’s love letter to Edward R. Murrow, and will next star in David Fincher’s thriller, “Zodiac.”
“I’m going to play a reporter. Got any tips?” he quipped. “It’s going to be great.”
He also reveals he may possibly play 19th Century horror author Edgar Allen Poe in an upcoming feature.
“The rumor is grounded and founded in that Sly Stallone wrote a great script and I am talking to him about it,” he said.
Kilmer can be seen next in the crime thriller “10th & Wolf” and the drama “Alpha Numeric.”
“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is in theaters now.