VENICE, (Reuters) – Former “Batman” star Michael Keaton gave a soaring start to the 71st Venice Film Festival on Wednesday as a crestfallen superhero in “Birdman”, a film its Mexican director Alexandro Inarritu called an experiment that could have failed miserably.
The film brings starpower that Venice, the world’s oldest film festival, needs to keep itself from being sidelined by the celebrity magnet of Cannes in May and industry powerfest the Toronto Film Festival, which opens next week.
Noted for his arthouse movies “Babel” and “21 Grams”, Inarritu switches gears in this Fox Searchlight production, also starring Emma Stone as Keaton’s daughter, who is just out of drug rehab, Naomi Watts as an actress desperate to make it on Broadway and Edward Norton as the foil to Keaton’s character, Riggan Thomson.
“Michael was a pioneer of those superhero roles and having some time and perspective I thought his knowledge about it, his experience about it, will get something very powerful for this film,” Inarritu said at a post-screening press conference.
“Michael was crucial to make this film, without him I think this film couldn’t be made.”
“Birdman”, Inarritu’s fifth feature film, is set mostly at a Broadway theatre where the Keaton character hopes to make a comeback in his own theatrical adaptation of a short story by the late American writer Raymond Carver, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”.
Inarritu, who filmed the movie in a faux single-take style so it looks like the camera never stops, said “Birdman” had been an experimental project.
To make this point to the cast, he even sent them photographs of the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit making his famous unauthorised tightrope walk between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center in 1974.
“That was the image and the ambition of this film, or at least the execution of this film was very much like this,” he said. “We were kind of crossing without a net with the possibility to fail absolutely and miserably and be laughable.”
The film shows touches of Latin American magical realism, spectacular car crashes and a colossal, computer-generated monster – but the effects are pretty much an afterthought to the imposing, theatre-like production.
