Herbie: Fully Loaded - Michael Keaton interview

MICHAEL Keaton talks about some of the appeal and challenges of making Herbie: Fully Loaded and what he is like as a driver in real life. He also reflects on his career, including key roles in Batman and Beetlejuice, as well as staying versatile. He was speaking at a London press conference...

Q. In Herbie: Fully Loaded you get to play a typical dad, but also make him multi-layered. Was that part of the appeal?
Michael Keaton: It started off as just a fun role in a Disney movie. I always kinda ask a lot of questions and get things clear with the director before I do anything. Sometimes that’s a long process, sometimes it’s a shorter process.

I thought ‘Okay now, if I’m going to do this I need to think on this a little bit without putting the father character and the Herbie movie under too much analysis'. You still have to do that basic work, you know? After Angela and I talked about it she was looking at me and probably thought ‘Wow, he’s thinking about this way too much!’ But what I had to do was go all through it, then throw it away and just show up and go to work.

So, that’s basically what I did. I think the character has great merit, actually, because he carries this burden of family and business, and also has to raise a family without the aid of a partner. He didn’t seem to me to be a whiner or a complainer but didn’t exactly wear his heart on his sleeve either until the end, which I love. The two great scenes that I’m in – I think they’re the only scenes I’m in, actually – are the junkyard scene, which I thought was pretty cute, and the scene in the hospital where under normal circumstances he would never tell her that or expose that much until maybe she was older.

Q. You also play a motor racing legend. Are you a sound driver in real life?
Michael Keaton: I’m a sound driver; I’m just a very fast driver. Occasionally with my kid I’ve started wearing my seatbelt because he was always telling me to wear my seatbelt, and he was correct. It took me that long – like a dope – to wear my seatbelt, which was really stupid. He’s the one, although he’s only a little kid, who would really batter me if I didn’t. I also don’t drive quite as fast as I used to. But I was never really a big racing fan; I just wasn’t exposed to it much.

In Europe, car racing is not like it was in the States. I was a three, four, five sport person. I’m interested in everything so I found the racing aspects of this movie relatively interesting. I had two bugs – two Beetles – that I loved. Loved.

I bought the first one with my own money. He wanted $500 but I didn’t give it to him. Sound businessman that I am, I talked him down to four ninety-five! It’s true. Five bucks! And the guy actually thought about it! “Oh gee, I don’t know…”

Q. You have been quoted as talking about the business reasons for doing this film. Have you shifted away from doing art and more towards commercial films?
Michael Keaton: It wasn’t always for [business reasons]. In fact, I would say that I was very much the opposite, and I still am the opposite in about equal measure, I would say. If you have to put them in two categories, art and commerce, I’d say [commerce] came around later on. One thing that hastened it is the fact that the business changed. The business has changed enormously, so if you’re not looking at it like that you’re really quite foolish.

You’re a business inside a business and if you don’t realise that, it can slow you down. I think I’ve been around enough now to say there’s that [the commercial sector] but then I gotta go be what I am as an artist – as seldom as I actually am an artist. I hope I am all the time but I don’t think I am, honestly. People throw that word around too much for me as a creative person.

Q. You have quite a lot of stuff coming up, though, so it would appear the Herbie decision has been a good one...
Michael Keaton: Yeah, I do. White Noise did quite a nice bit of business and this will do good business, too. I‘ve come off a small – very small, ridiculously small – film just before Herbie that I just had to say yes to.

The writing was just too good. The cast was extraordinary. My friend produced it. It’s written by one of the best novelists in America. It’s called Game Six [and it] will probably never, ever play in England. It’s so American. It's a little art movie. Maybe I’m wrong, but I probably figure it might play 12 theatres in America or something.

So, I’ve come off of that and I think I actually lost money on that and came onto a big studio movie. Then I’m starting a film in nine days which is a dark comedy. Then I’ve developed one that I hope is ready by the holidays which I like an awful lot. It’s a comedy. The guys who did White Noise are interested in doing it.

Q. Apparently, you had never seen a Herbie movie?
Michael Keaton: I’ve been thinking about that and I thought ‘Did I have a stroke?’ I vaguely remember a Bug with flowers on it, and Dean Jones. That’s it. I missed it, I don’t know what happened. I know they existed as part of the culture but I didn’t know they were this big. Jesus… I can remember where I was at the moon landings or when Kennedy got shot, but I don’t remember where I was when Herbie came out.

Q. You have made a career out of playing both heroes and villains. Do you have a preference?
Michael Keaton: It all depends on the writing. Someone asked me that and I said ‘No more bad guys. Maybe somewhere down the road’ and then I said ‘What if someone walks in tomorrow and hands me a role and it’s so brilliantly written? Then I would probably do it.’ So you never really know. I never really know. I have ideas about what I [like]. Now I don’t know if anyone has that leverage because of the nature of the business. Even in the Eighties they were making 700 movies a year; they made 200 last year. That’s less than a third of what they used to make.

It’s just all different. It’s unfortunate but that’s how it is. If you sit around whining about it you’re just wasting time. It’s just what it is. I always thought my job was to do something different. I didn’t know that there was any other way, really. I thought that that was what I was supposed to do. I also set it up early on so that I could have a wide range of places to go, a lot of options. I consciously did it then but not so much now.

Q. Has your versatility hurt you?
Michael Keaton: I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder. It helped in a lot of ways. I certainly appreciate all the things people say about that. Because of the business the world has become a mall – you have your main store, then you have your less main stores, then somewhere way down there you have a shoemaker who’s been in business for a while. That used to be Miramax but that’s bullshit now.

Q. Working with a car must be difficult. How do you react to it?
Michael Keaton: I thought when I read the script it was a nicely written film. I really think this is a very nice film. I really do. I really like it. When I saw it on the screen, I really admired what Angela had done. I thought she positioned the movie real nicely so that for the next hour-and-a-half you were on board, as it were.

I thought they created a natural character out of the car. It was very charming. Lyndsey is also really good in this movie. I don’t think people realise what it takes sometimes to actually [make it convincing].

It’s assumed that the star isn’t going to be that great in movies like [Herbie] and that’s not necessarily the case. I’ve never worked as hard [as I did] to find how to do Bruce Wayne in Batman. I knew that if I didn’t do it correctly, it was way off. It’s like shooting a rifle. If you shoot a shotgun, you’re gonna hit something but if you shoot a rifle, then between here and a hundred yards that much – he opens his fingers an inch – is gonna have an impact. I don’t remember talking to a car myself. I just liked finding that really weird place where you play with reality.

Having said that, I just did Cars, this Pixar film. It was fantastic to do. It was the total opposite to Herbie because you could make the car do anything. I am a NASCAR type car that’s almost unidentifiable. There’s no brand.

Q. Why have we seen so little of you in recent years? Were you doing theatre?
Michael Keaton: No, I haven’t. I was talking about wanting to [do theatre work]. It was a combination of things. I kept reading things that I didn’t [like]. I reached a point where I didn’t think I was that great. I’m not being humble. I was looking at things and thinking ‘Hmm, you’re really not that good in that’. I think I was becoming boring, as well as bored. It was nobody’s fault except mine, probably. So it’s been like that. I was getting scripts and I’d think ‘What’s the point of this?’ So I turned an awful lot of films down.

The truth is – and this sounds very elitist - that 70 per cent of the stuff I turned down, you would turn down because it just wasn’t very good. It didn’t do anything, there was no real reason to do it, it doesn’t make any sense to be in it, or it doesn’t work out for my life at that time. And the other thing is that I wasn’t getting really, really great stuff. So it was a combination of wanting to really go back to work again and very quietly and slowly and methodically start to plot a course where I would start to get what I wanted.

Q. Is it true that you said you didn’t want to do sequels to your work, except perhaps for Beetlejuice?
Michael Keaton: I don’t necessarily say ‘I don’t do sequels’. I did a sequel once and I wouldn’t necessarily not do a sequel. I tend to think that the idea doesn’t thrill me but I would do a sequel if it was the right thing.

But Beetlejuice is very, very special. The only way I would do it is if this could be done in that ball park – in the same zone of creativity as the first one creatively, otherwise I’d want to leave that alone, I think. But I just enjoyed it so much because it’s the only thing I’ve ever done – except maybe Much Ado About Nothing - that comes closest to purely original authentically art on the screen that I’ve done. That’s a rush, when you get that, and you wanna do it again, you know, but you don’t wanna screw up.

Q. So, what’s your abiding experience of making Herbie?
Michael Keaton: I like the fact that I’m in a good family movie. I thought Jack Frost was a good family movie. It is classically ‘Disney’ and yet is very contemporary – it’s retro and contemporary. Angela has done a very good job of sewing those two things together but when you look at it, it still looks like a Disney movie. That has longevity.

I’ve been really fortunate how I’ve gotten to make a living and I’m in this great culture of filmmaking. That stuff has legs and it kinda becomes part of film culture. It’s classically Disney, like Warner Bros cartoons are: classic.