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.

Chris Rock and I were talking about this.

The great thing about standup that I miss

is weaponry.

You know, to go...

You know when it's working

and then you gain power.

In the set, you go, "Oh man, I haven't even gotten,

I know what I have coming.

They don't know what I have coming," you know?

And I go, this is working and working and working.

And I'm gonna set this thing up

just so when I pull this thing outta my hip pocket,

this thing that I know works,

'cause I've done it a thousand times,

this is gonna blow the fucking roof off.

There's nothing even close to that.

I loved doing "Multiplicity".

[upbeat music] "Spider-Man: Homecoming".

- How many times have I told you

not to fire them out in the open?

- You said move the merchandise.

- Under the radar.

Under the radar. That's how we survive.

If you bring Damage Control

or the Avengers down here, we are through.

- Those movies are kind of, in some ways,

I think easier and not easier.

So you go, okay, it's kind of play time really.

You know, it's kind of like we're playing.

You know, there's so many people who've done,

like, you watch Willem Defoe,

who's also in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice".

This cast is insane.

When you watch him in Spider-Man,

he's unbelievably good.

I mean, he's unbelievably good.

I was like the first one in, I was the guy first in, right?

You would play Batman, you'd wear a big rubber suit.

Nobody's done this kind of...

And you would think that

it'd kind of all fall apart and go bad.

They didn't. They're good, you know?

And the actors, everything's,

the quality's really, really good.

But what I liked about him when he talked to me about this,

great thing about Batman and Bruce Wayne

was he had no superpowers.

He'd go, "How am I gonna do this?"

That's the situation with that guy as well, right?

There's something about it that's contemporary.

Because basically what he's saying is, "Where's mine?

What about me?

Which is out there and what is out there

and still is out there?

So I said, ah, that's what this guy is.

He goes, you know, he didn't pick this,

but he said, "Okay, really? Fuck you."

- Eight years. Not a word from the feds.

Nothing from those Halloween costume-wearing bozos

up there in Stark Tower.

And then all of a sudden,

this little bastard in red tight shows up.

He thinks he can tear down everything I built.

- I loved my gang, those guys, those actors.

It was so fun to show up. And they're my boys, you know,

and I berated them.

And, you know, I took one out, had some laughs with those.

I love that whole, that whole and all that stuff, you know?

[upbeat music] "Much Ado About Nothing".

- Forget not that I am an ass.

- I said, "I can't do it.

I don't know how to do this."

And he said, "No, you know how to do it", Branagh.

And I go, "Nah, I don't know how to do it.

I don't wanna do it. Thank you, I'm really honored."

'Cause I so loved Henry V when I saw it.

It was, I mean,

I see Shakespeare whole different way when he does it.

He's just so brilliant. And he said, "No, you can do it."

And I said, "No, because you know, I'm gonna look foolish.

First of all, Americans doing it kind of sound dumb."

He said, "No, no, no. Forget all that.

Denzel's not gonna do that. Nobody's gonna do any of that."

I said, "Well, I'll make something up."

We're in Tuscany, which was stunningly beautiful.

And I'm going, I'm a movie star in Tuscany making movies.

How much better does this get?

And it was really hot.

Really, really hot. Like brutally hot.

And so, of course my,

I'm in really hot, warm stuff with a shitty beard.

- The offender, did call me ass.

I beseech you let it be remembered in his punishment.

- Somebody told me,

and it might have been Branagh that told me,

that there's a Celtic influence in a lot of Shakespeare,

apparently, according to him or someone, not me.

And so there's like this little bit of a Irish thing,

sound to it a little bit.

And I just decided to make this guy up

because frankly Dogberry, when people go, oh the great...

You know, you read a Shakespeare,

and it's, of course the comedic.

And I never found them funny for a minute.

You know, I'd look at it and go, I ain't laughing, you know,

I'd go see a play and I'd go, yeah, I'm supposed to laugh

'cause it's Shakespeare.

It's not funny. It just doesn't make me laugh.

So I thought, well, I've gotta do what I gotta do.

He loved it.

And he had this wonderful Shakespeare scholar,

sweet little guy.

He used to wear a really beautiful, like white linen shirts.

And he had this beautiful straw hat,

he was kind of a small guy,

really, you know, British with very pale,

very sweet little gentleman.

I could watch his face,

fucking, like sweat would drip off his face

and his little hands would shake, thinking,

"What the fuck is this guy doing?" [chuckles]

And Branagh would be like, calming him down, going like,

rubbing his arms, it's gonna be fine.

And he loved it. He thought, oh, this is great.

Which to me, A, made me laugh. But also I felt badly.

I thought, oh man, this poor guy, geez, you know,

the poor man is a scholar

and I'm some schmuck from, you know, Pittsburgh

who thought it was funny,

and it is funny,

to pretend like I ride in on a horse.

[feet galloping]

I just thought, I don't know,

he rides in on a horse in his head.

Otherwise Dogberry doesn't make me laugh.

You know?

This poor fucking guy.

[upbeat music] "Birdman".

I was just thinking about that subtitle.

- I have a lot riding on this fucking play.

- Oh, is that right?

- Yeah. People know who I am.

- Bullshit. They they don't know you, your work, man.

They know the guy from the bird suit who goes

and tells coy, slightly vomitous stories on Letterman.

- Probably people don't believe it.

But there's zero connection except that you go, oh yeah,

I'm in an industry and I am that guy

and I'm not playing that guy.

So obviously that's something.

So I have some experience with that.

But that, I mean, all you do is watch the movie,

that's so far removed from what the movie is.

You know, and this was before.

We were talking about meta then

and now you hear a lot about it.

But I never ran away and go, no, I don't, I can't.

You know, the obvious was the obvious.

However, that's not really what that movie is at all.

In a lot of ways,

that guy is about as far away from me.

I mean, like a lot of us be a little nuts.

I'm not that nuts. I'm like, I'm a human being

so I know what it's like to get worried and sweat things

and feel, you know, a little insecure

from time to time to time.

But I never give into desperation.

And this poor guy, you know,

he was living in despair a lot.

He, you know, desperation owned him.

- What's wrong with me?

Why do I beg people to love me?

- ["Terri"] Eddie, please, just please just give me the gun.

- I just wanted to be what you wanted.

- You know, when you're talking about Alejandro, he's,

there's no one like Alejandro

and there's not gonna be anyone like him.

You know, he's just really special, and bold, man.

The guy's so bold.

- You should be careful. - Sorry, I can't talk.

I'm late.

Music. - Well, weirdly,

it was a really pleasant experience

'cause because of how difficult it was.

I mean usually I think people talk in terms of,

"Well it's really difficult, it was really hard."

But most of the time, hard is really exhilarating or fun,

especially if you pull it off.

So much was missed in the whole one shot thing.

That was extraordinary and is extraordinary.

Actually a couple of people have done it,

but they don't pay attention to the story.

This was, you know,

the difficulty in this was a lot of things, right?

First of all, you gotta care and you gotta buy in.

And it's so crazy. And there are so many levels to it.

And it had to be meticulous in its execution,

down to the choreography.

Every day was one shot.

Every day was one shot the entire day.

In "Knox Goes Away", the movie I just directed,

I would do pages.

I'd knock off scenes in a day.

And I didn't even think of ways to go, "You know what?

If I'm smart, we can actually do this and run over

and grab that other thing that I'm gonna need.

And then we don't have to shoot it on Thursday.

We can go shoot that other thing on Thursday."

I'm pretty good at that actually.

But there was none of that. You can't do that.

It's like more like a series of rehearsals

and doing a play every day

and then accomplishing one scene.

That's it. And then you shoot all this stuff

and run through it and run through it.

Because you know, if I walked through that door

and you're coming down the hallway, right?

And we have to be word perfect

because it's coordinated such that

I have to meet you in the hallway when we go down

and have that scene at a certain spot

because we have to hit a certain spot and turn the corner

and get down steps.

And if somebody screws it up,

you have to do it all over again.

Anybody, you know, crew, actors, him, anybody,

or something goes wrong.

You know, you can't control everything.

You know, a bird flies through or something.

You know, at the end of the day,

sometimes people just would applaud.

You know, like, people feel like,

"Yes, we did it. We did it again."

Especially him. He'd be so excited