Robert Downey Jr: "I Have Zero Regard for What's Printed in a Script"

Since working with Jon Favreau on the first Iron Man, I have practically zero regard for what is physically printed on the pages when I go to work. And sometimes the better it is, the more annoying it is, because the more likely I am to not innovate within it. So it's a problem. It's gotten to the point where Todd Phillips, by the time we were done shooting Due Date, said, I figured it out, you hate paper. Now I think some of that is my own hubris and my own ego and that I come from a family of writers, and so my process, you know. I keep the attention on the issue at hand. The issue is bringing the best me to set I can bring every day. What we're doing, you can just pick anything from the Chinese menu and anything's really fine as long as I'm in good shape and it feels good and the blocking doesn't feel like we're doing a teleplay. That's funny, because I think as you get older, that really is true. Get enough sleep, have the energy, and you've gotten to the end of the day successfully so many times that you just come to trust that. The worst part of any day sometimes, I think, can be when you show up there, things get dialed in, and they go, all right, we'll be ready in a minute. And you go, oh, crap, it's only 9 a.m. So what is this part of me that wants something to be over, even something I enjoy, even something that I'm responsible to put my best foot forward in? It just feels like school. I love a rain day, I love it when we're shooting, and all of a sudden there's thunder and lightning and they gotta shut down the generators. And it's not because I'm in an avoidance pattern. I don't wanna actually have to earn a living. I don't wanna have to do what I'm supposed to do. I just, I know that most everybody still operates on the assumption that, hey, at some point today, they have to let us go home. And I think also as I've gotten older and I realize a lot of the people I'm working with are of a younger generation, I like to spend a fair amount of my energy just trying to behaviorally model something that has some sort of dignity for the way one can react when things don't go either particularly well or particularly kindly or smoothly or whatever, or it's just really hard and it's almost impossible to get it right even one time. But so what? We only have to do it right once.