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Downey Jr. on Making One Last Film with His Dad in ‘Sr.’

Robert Downey Jr. set out to make an objective portrait, a tribute to his father, the underground filmmaking maverick Robert Downey Sr. His dad had other plans.

“The key point in this is when he goes, ‘OK, I think we should split into two camps: The (expletive) movie and the one I’m gonna make,’” recalls Downey Jr., laughing. “I just go, ’Man, hats off to you, Pops.”

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“Sr.,” directed by Chris Smith, is a work of father-son harmony more than might be suggested by Downey Sr.’s typically brusque assertion of filmmaking independence. It’s a kind of home movie, mostly made by Downey Jr. but with his father’s own insertions peppered throughout. It’s a son’s loving reckoning with his iconoclast father, a freewheeling cult filmmaker whose experimental films gave Downey Jr. his entry into moviemaking and whose outsized personality did much to inform his son, for better and worse. As Downey Jr. puts it, “My dad and I are pretty flawed dudes.”

“It was a way to put something between us in our own relationship and closure. I didn’t know that it would be the quickest way to the heart of things,” Downey Jr. said in a recent interview by phone from Los Angeles alongside his wife and producing partner Susan Downey. “It’s like a little string you pull at, you know. And it winds up pulling you into a rabbit hole that I kind of needed to go down in order to process and ingest the totality of our relationship.”

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