Robert Downey Jnr on Netflix portrait of his filmmaker father, and the relationship between two ‘pretty flawed dudes’
- Streaming on Netflix, Sr. is a film by the Iron Man star on the life and career of his maverick auteur father, Robert Downey Snr, filmed shortly before he died
- The Oscar nominee says making the film led him to ‘ingest the totality of our relationship’, and address the pair’s drug issues and finding peace in family life
Robert Downey Jnr set out to make an objective portrait, a tribute to his father, the underground filmmaking maverick Robert Downey Snr. 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 Jnr, laughing. “I just go, ‘Man, hats off to you, pops.’”
Sr., directed by Chris Smith, is a work of father-son harmony more than might be suggested by Downey Snr’s typically brusque assertion of filmmaking independence.
It’s a kind of home movie, mostly made by Downey Jnr 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 Jnr his entry into moviemaking and whose outsize personality did much to inform his son, for better and worse.
As Downey Jnr puts it, “My dad and I are pretty flawed dudes.”