Michael Keaton heads into the awards season home stretch with an NPR Fresh Air interview. I perhaps loved Birdman too much. All of the principal actors (Keaton, Edward Norton, Emma Stone) gave Oscar-worthy performances. No joke, and no snark. All three of them delivered. Naomi Watts (who is usually bland) was surprisingly good too. There’s one scene in particular — where Keaton dashes through Times Square in his tighty whities — that resonates about the celebrity experience. It’s not a flattering scene at all, but he works it, and I’ve got a screencap as my current Twitter background image. In this interview, Keaton talks about that scene.

He talks about how he randomly swapped out his real name (Michael Douglas) for this well-known stage name: “I sort of resent it.” The whole interview is full of good stuff. He’s one of nine children, grew up in a tiny Western Pennsylvania farmhouse, and so on. It’s NPR, so the interview is humongous. Here are a few excerpts:

His underwear scene in Times Square was with real spectators: “Real people because you couldn’t …. not just this scene, the entire movie – it was, for Riggan Thomson, one indignity after another. Yes, just horrible, just getting worse and worse and worse. Just so sad and pathetic, and him trying to hold his dignity up somehow. There are certain things you just can’t know definitively how to shoot, so that always happened and you had to rewrite or refigure, sit down, or have a meeting. And one of them was, OK, we’ll get extras for a while, and then they’re probably going to disappear and get bored.”

He almost “swam” through the crowd in his undies: “I’m a runner, you know, so and a jogger and a hiker and a walker, etc., so I still – my wind’s pretty good, my legs are pretty strong, and I can move. I can still go, you know, for a guy, you know, my age, I can – but you can’t really because camera can only go so fast. So you start to invent things, and one of the things I thought was just hold yourself upright kind of and do a – just a strut that’ll work for camera but also look like kind of stupid – not stupid, but kind of, you know, kind of like – not silly, because you can’t go silly, but in a way, like, kind of hold up his dignity.”

Wearing the Batman suit: “Simultaneously ridiculous to the point where you had overcome it and risky. And I guess kind of cool. I’m claustrophobic so I had to work through that. It ended up working really perfectly for the character. It made me feel real isolated inside there – couldn’t really hear and – but – so that really was a – ended up being a bonus – plus for me. But once again, you think, oh, boy. This is one of those things – this could really go down. This could just be a huge mistake. So you commit to it, and you say OK, you know, I’m in. Let’s make this thing work. And plus I had the advantage also – the imagery was so strong and powerful. And once I saw that, I went, oh, I’m going to work this thing, man. I’m going to work the angles of the suit, the shadows of the suit, the frighten-ness of it, the sexiness of it. I’m going to the work the [expletive] out of that.”

[From NPR – Fresh Air]

There are theories about the magical realism aspects of Birdman that I’d love to discuss but don’t want to spoil the film. A lot of people didn’t like the ending, but (with my whacked out theory) it made sense to me. There was an alternate script that included a Johnny Depp ending, which would have been cool five years ago. Nowadays, Depp’s presence turns everything into a joke, so it’s a good thing Johnny turned down the appearance.

Keaton says he’s still the “same dimensions” as when he wore the Batman suit in the late 1980s. Do you believe him? I do. I also want to ascribe more shade to his remarks. Can I do that? Why not. “Michael Keaton to DC & Marvel superheroes of today: I don’t need your stinkin’ diet and workout plan.” There, done.

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet & WENN