Michael Keaton's Best Role Was Also One Of His Most Exhausting

Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-winning film "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)" was a pretty ballsy move to make in 2014. The film stars Michael Keaton as actor Riggan Thompson, a once-massive Hollywood action star who has aged out of action roles. Notably, Riggan starred in three crowd-pleasing superhero movies about Birdman, a Batman-like vigilante. Keaton, of course, played Batman in 1989, 1991, and 2023.

Riggan is set to star in a high-profile Broadway production, hoping to prove to himself and the world that he is a pliable and capable actor, not merely a nostalgia-laced superhero figure. There is a lot of dialogue in "Birdman" about how superhero movies are the antithesis of art and that superhero actors are aggressively robbed of their thespian instincts. Good actors, Riggan complains, are ripped from meaningful projects and thrust into commercial FX bonanzas where they are expected to do little beyond pose and wear silly costumes. Jeremy Renner is now an Avenger? "F***," Riggan growls, "they put him in a cape too?"

2014 was the year of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," "Guardians of the Galaxy," "X-Men: Days of Future Past," and the second "Amazing Spider-Man." The genre was riding high and Hollywood was making billions. "Birdman" openly declared that superheroes were the death of art and that Hollywood was inferior to live theater. One has to admire its temerity.

"Birdman" was filmed — by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki — to look like a single, unbroken 119-minute shot. To achieve it, the filmmakers shot about 10 separate takes and used clever SFX to blend them together. This meant Keaton and the other cast members had to stay in character for several elaborately choreographed 10-minute takes. According to a 2014 interview with Variety, Keaton was exhausted by the process. 

The shooting of "Birdman" was a massively complex affair, and Iñárritu carefully choreographed the entire film so that certain actors would come around corners at just the right time, and so the camera shadow wouldn't appear in the scenes. The camera also drifted outside a few times, exploring the busy streets of New York, making lighting particularly tough. Despite the real-time presentation, "Birdman" had to be filmed out-of-order to accommodate the active schedules of the New York theaters it used as set locations. In a 2014 Hitfix article, Lubezki noted that scenes usually didn't fall into place until around take 15. 

Film actors, unlike stage actors, aren't necessarily used to playing single scenes for more than a few minutes. Most scenes are short, filmed from multiple angles, and edited together for maximum clarity and quality. Keaton has spent his entire acting career in front of cameras and his experience on stage was practically nil. Filming "Birdman" was tiring, but exhilarating. Keaton said: 

"But this is how you want to be exhausted. Leaving a lot of movie sets, I've gone home and said, 'How come my hands are clean?' I should finish something and go home with dirt in my fingernails, because then you really feel that you've done something. This was one where I went, 'Whoa man, I worked.'"

Keaton's efforts netted him an Academy Award nomination. He lost, however, to Eddie Redmayne for playing Stephen Hawking in "The Theory of Everything." The loss must have smarted, as Keaton returned to superhero movies tout de suite, defying the anti-blockbuster message of "Birdman." In 2017, he appeared in "Spider-Man: Homecoming" as the Vulture, a role he reprised for "Morbius." He returned to play Batman in the 2023 bomb "The Flash." 

A pity.