Michael Keaton Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

- If you pick open a script, a comedy,

and in all those pages, however many pages there are,

if you laugh out loud three times,

you have something.

Three times. That's if you go, "Oof. That's funny.

That's really funny."

[upbeat music]

"Batman".

- Don't kill me, man!

Don't kill me! Don't kill me, man!

- I'm not going to kill you.

I want you to do me a favor.

I want you to tell all your friends about me.

- What are you?

- I'm Batman.

- When they said "We're thinking of doing Batman,"

I said, "Wait, you're gonna make a movie of Batman?"

Yeah, there was "Superman", but that's Superman,

which Dick Donner did, which was really, really good.

Very charming actually.

And Chris Reeve was great and it had humor

and it was like, you know.

So the fact that Tim said, "That guy,

I want that guy."

Like why people even cared

one way or another that much is still baffling.

But still that was a ballsy move on his part.

We also had a nice working relationship,

you know, from "Beetlejuice".

So I think he felt he and I will get along through this

and we can, you know, we work well together.

[dramatic music]

[utility belt clicks]

We literally were figuring out how to make it work,

like the day before my first shot in the suit.

[dramatic music]

What his idea was, and a person would get in it

and this would actually work.

Was that, you know, that's a big leap.

And so a lot of it was

adjusting the whole thing physically, you know?

And also, how was I going to move?

You had to feel it.

You had to feel the vibe

and feel where your position was literally on a set

and what the impact was just in this,

and what the whole thing was.

And all the loneliness

inside that really deep lonely thing, you know?

The guy was already inside, you know?

Now he's really inside this thing.

Like I said, work the suit, baby. Just work the suit.

That thing will get you

three quarters of the way there, you know?

What I never talked about really, which was easy,

to be honest, was I never thought about Batman.

It was always Bruce Wayne.

Who's Bruce Wayne? You start with that.

- Could you tell me which of these guys is Bruce Wayne?

- Well, I'm not sure.

- He witnesses the murder of his parents. You know?

That's a lot to start with.

Especially the Frank Miller approach, which is what we took.

And also determining with Tim that he was so not cool.

Kinda odd, you know, an odd dude.

- If you wanna know the truth,

I don't think I've ever been in this room before.

- That scene wasn't even there.

That was me. We were working on it.

I said, "He probably has never been in this room."

Also, it was probably cold, kind of damp, you know.

Nervous about this date, you know,

and finding those spots to be funny, which was not there.

Where's this funny? You know?

More people have asked me about it

than I've even volunteered talking about it.

So people make a bigger deal out of this.

But it was really, really, really hard.

Like physically hard.

It took me a long time to realize,

when I just did "The Flash",

I don't know how stupid I could be.

I was training to be really fit.

And I was training one day. Jack Nicholson walked by me.

We were just starting to shoot

and I was kind of working on this bag.

And I had been training to get, you know, fit.

And he walks by me and he goes, "What are you doing?"

[chuckles] I said, "You know, just working out."

And he goes, "What are you doing that for?"

I didn't have an answer for him.

He just walked off and went into this other trailer.

I approached it totally wrong.

It's better to be real small and little

and thin inside the thing.

You can move, you can breathe. There's room inside.

I don't know what I was thinking, but I thought, you know,

I'm an actor and I'm gonna do all this stuff.

I mean, it helped in terms of

carrying the whole thing around all the time.

And I was part of something that was a frigging game changer

in terms of how they make those movies.

I mean that changed everything.

[upbeat music] "Beetlejuice".

[dramatic music]

- Yeah!

- I think he had some sketches

'cause Tim always has sketches.

I think even then, he wasn't quite exactly sure

what the whole thing was gonna look like.

But he clearly had images in his head.

He had set images and character images

and who these people would be and everything like that.

But he gave me something that I took home,

and I said, "Okay, let me start with this."

And then we never rehearsed it.

We never screen tested it.

I went and I said, "Here's what it's gonna be.

Here's what I wanna do. Here's the look."

And then Ve Neil and Tim had even better ideas, saying,

"Ooh, you know what I want? I want you to add..."

Like, the whole mold thing was only

because Tim said "He comes and goes

from different time periods.

I mean, he might be like buried under the ground for,

you know, he could be out, you know,

it could be anything, kinda."

I went, "Buried under the ground. Okay, buried.

Probably mold, you know, mold would be a good thing."

So I said, put mold, you know,

and that the idea that that he's kinda like

electric all the time.

- Welcome to Winter River Museum of Natural Greed,

a monument to the bored businessman.

Come on a little closer!

- I just started working on ideas

and you know, hit the ground running

and it was either gonna work or it wasn't gonna work.

It was one of the great "yes and..." experiences,

you know, you can have.

You know, that thing in improvisation, you don't say no.

You know, you're a FedEx man and you don't say,

"No, I didn't order anything."

You say, "Oh great, you know, just bring it over here."

And then you go from there.

As soon as he saw that, he started to get really excited

and then we ran through a scene

and that's when he took off.

It was like, "In that case..."

A lot of "in that case,"

"Oh if you're gonna do that, hold on a minute."

He really had to explain to me how certain things

or how the head spinning was gonna work.

He said, "Watch, I'll show you something."

And then he'd show me and I'd go, "Oh, oh, I see.

I didn't know what that meant when I read it,"

or "I didn't know how that works."

You know, literally,

I didn't know how it technically worked.

"In that case, you know, how about if I do this?"

And it was like that. It was just the most fun.

Just tremendous fun.

Just going off. There's nothing to lose.

Well, there was a fair amount of money

to lose from the studio, but...

- What do you think of this?

[horrifying snarl] [they scream]

You like it?

- Once you wear something,

man, very often you go from here to there.

I mean, when I was a kid, I would goof around.

I'd make my family laugh.

You know, walking funny or imitating somebody.

You might grab something and put a hat on.

You might put your dad's coat on or something, you know?

And you go, "Ah, yeah,

of course that's what he wears," you know?

"When you wear something like that,

you probably don't walk like that. You probably..."

You know, it's just, it's huge. It's huge.

I don't know why, but it's huge.

I mean, it's one of my favorite things,

if not my favorite thing.

If you had to put a gun to my head

and say, you gotta pick one.

just for the creativity of it all.

- [Producer] And now you're returning to

the role of Beetlejuice again.

- Yeah. The approach is, can I do it?

The rest of the cast is so good

and what's going on as the story is so solid.

Yeah, I got there again.

But I think for some of it, it was a little bit of oof.

Boy, I think I'll get out.

I'll escape because it's so good.

[upbeat music] "Mr. Mom".

- Dad. - Yeah?

- This is cold and the cheese isn't hardly melted down.

- Okay.

[iron hisses] [cheese bubbling]

- [TV] and I'm gonna stick around

to make sure that he's okay.

- There you go.

- [TV] What you're really interested in is the baby.

- I remember distinctly laughing about something

that I never normally would laugh at

ever in any other script.

I remember where I was sitting,

I was in bed, I was at the headboard.

I think my head hit the headboard.

I remember distinctly going,

"I can't believe I'm laughing at that."

Because people who love comedy

and read comedy and have done comedy,

you just don't laugh at a lot of things other people do

'cause you're kind of looking at it,

is that funny enough or is there a better line?

Or how do I do that? Or has that been done?

All that stuff.

And I went, okay, this could really be something.

So I meet with Hughes who came out from Chicago

and I'm listening to him and I'm talking about it,

and I looked at him, I said, "You should direct this."

I said, "You know how to make this movie."

"No, I just wanna write it."

And then he went off and he really never was much around.

And Harry Colomby and I, my manager

and partner would basically rewrite a lot.

And then if you look at that cast, that's really great cast.

The fantastic,

the greatest.

Teri Garr, who doesn't get mentioned enough for me,

Jeffrey Tambor and Martin Mull, you know.

When I read it I said, "Man, this is really funny,

but it has to be done a certain way."

'Cause I looked like I was about 10, you know?

So I go, okay, married young, I get that.

You know, I come from... family's all pretty,

my family kind of married young,

but I still look like I'm 10.

And I said, you have three kids.

So we had to kind of justify that and rationalize all that.

And then we had to, you know, kind of work with the director

and kind of guide certain things.

Saying, no, I think we gotta,

you know, change the direction of that,

it's not really funny because it looked

old-fashioned or whatever.

But he had a great ability visually.

And he made it almost look

Norman Rockwellian, in a way.

[kids yelling] - Forget the paper.

[dryer whining] There we go.

There we go. That's it.

[kids yelling]

Would you forget the paper?

- He put the campaign together, the ad campaign,

like that great, great idea,

of that shot of me holding up the baby to the air blower.

Really solid, nice hit, bigger hit as the years went on.

Here's the reason I like to talk about "Mr. Mom".

Totally before its time.

People go, "Yeah, just, you know,

a little funny, nice, lighthearted movie."

Yeah, it was, except that at the time

the economy wasn't doing very well.

No one was really talking about a man,

a woman going into the workplace and a man staying home.

But that now you could probably go back and find,

in fact, there's a great Gary Cooper movie,

I forget the name of it.

He had to kind of take care of a baby or something.

But nobody was really talking about that inequality,

opportunities for women, women going into the workforce

and what they come up against.

Guy having to do

what were traditionally woman's roles, you know,

and doing it comedically, right?

I'm extremely proud of that movie.

That movie was ahead of its time.

And funny and really good natured

and a John Hughes script.

[upbeat music] "Multiplicity".

- We didn't destroy your life, slick. You did.

As a matter of fact, we were trying to save it for you.

We were doing pretty good too. We just had one bad day

- "Multiplicity", to make today,

we could do it in about 17 minutes.

It's '96, right? You don't have all the toys.

But it was Harold Ramis, the great Harold Ramis.

He approaches me about this idea.

And I immediately liked the general idea.

Didn't know how we were gonna do it,

but what I didn't wanna do was go,

"Well, when he does this one, we'll put on a fat suit."

You know, he did this makeup,.

You know, that, to me, was,

it's not cheating but I thought,

because what if you cloned yourself, you'd still have you,

but what is the thing that's not you in that,

that was the premise.

You know, what's the little thing?

And so we saw very, versions of me.

- You can't just go out and meet some strangers

and bring them up here.

- Hey, where are we supposed to live?

Like a couple of monks.

- I think two was like the testosterone-driven version,

you know, the testosterone level got a little off.

And the second one they adjust.

It was an adjustment, I guess.

And just really sensitive.

- We gotta sit down and have, you know,

a wrap session or something

'cause you're both feeling a lot of anger here.

And I'm just afraid, you know,

you're like two lions or something.

- Shut up. - Shut up.

- Nicest man. Do we decide, is he gay?

You know?

And Harold wisely said, "I don't know."

I said, "No, it'll help me as an actor

'cause I'm good with it.

You know, when he'd say, "I don't know."

And I went, "That's right. That's exactly right.

What does it matter?

He goes, "He's just really sensitive."

One of my favorite characters of all time by the way.

The other guy was a risk,

'cause I said, okay, let's really go,

let's steal from Jerry Lewis.

Let's be honest. Let's just steal right from Jerry Lewis.

- Sorry Steve. [saw wobbles]

That leg's gonna have to come off.

- A lot of times it was a stand, like this,

a light stand with a golf ball, a ping pong ball on it.

So I had something to focus on,

but you always had to know where your eye line was

and you'd be in the scene.

And then he wisely brought on a couple of guys

who were a great help to me.

Actors who would come in and then play.

I could play off of them. Sometimes that was really helpful.

Sometimes it was a distraction

because it would be like, you'd go,

okay, we start the scene with Four, who is the most extreme,

but he's talking to Two

and then you gotta go back to Four.

But then later in the afternoon, we're going to One.

Like a good day would've been,

hate to see Harold say to me,

"Wow, you get to be One almost all day today.

And I thought, oh, great.

There was a lot of improvising.

'cause Harold comes from a real improv background.

So that was another thing.

Say, well, if we're gonna improvise,

you can't improvise too much

because it could throw everything off.

So I'd be doing a scene, you know, with one of the guys,

one of my guy, one of me.

I'd go, "Oh, you know, when I come around,

I know what I have to say.

I know what the scene is and I gotta say this to him.

So sometimes what was great is I get an idea.

So I'd set myself up.

'Cause I knew when I was coming around to the other guy,

I did the other half of the joke.

Sometimes worked, sometimes didn't.

Sometimes I had tell the guy if it was an actor, I'd say,

"When we do that, you know, just gimme that,

you know, so that I..."

All day long, every day,

which is exhausting, but tremendous fun actually.

And really, really, really hard.

Ben Stiller was walking across the set one day

and we'd never met him.

He'd go, "Hey, what's going on?"

And we were walking, he was going to work on set.

And he asked me what I was doing.

I told him, I said, "Here, I'll show you."

And I pulled him in the trailer

and I had a chart on the wall, like this, pasted up.

"If this guy goes here, then it's Four is here.

And then he goes back to One, then I'll go back to Four.

Then I go to Three.

And then, you know, and in a day..."

And he kind of looked like this

and didn't say anything

and just walked out and walked away.

And I've never talked to him since.

And I have no fucking idea if he went,

"Oh fuck, I don't even wanna know about that.

- I forgot to shut the windows on the Volvo.

It's gonna be soaked. Do you mind?

- No problem. I-I'll get it.

- [Michael] Just making Annie McDowell laugh.

- Sorry about yelling at the kids and everything, honey.

- Shh! - She said "One day,

I literally peed my pants".

And I wanted to see if I could pull that off,

to influence a person's bladder.

It's such a sense of power.