Michael Keaton is flying high once more in Inarritu’s Birdman

WHAT comeback? Birdman star Michael Keaton says he never went away.

THERE is a narrative indelibly etched on to the hubbub surrounding the new film Birdman: its star Michael Keaton has been AWOL. So much so, Barack Obama asked him why the actor didn’t make more movies when they recently met on Keaton’s victory lap promoting the stunning film.

Surely Keaton had to wonder about his work rate and profile after the US President raised it personally? “No, I questioned why he was worrying about that and not some other things,” Keaton tells Review with a chuckle.

He can afford to roll with such punches. The man who lit up 1980s cinema to such an extent that he could walk away from a reported $US15 million payday on the third Batman when director Tim Burton pulled out over creative differences, is back and Hollywood is happy.

Keaton is likely to win his first Academy Award nomination, having already picked up Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s thrilling, dark comedy about a washed-up superhero movie star mounting a fraught comeback in a vanity production on Broadway.

Indeed, Keaton should win the Oscar even if voters feel the actor resurrection theme isn’t too fresh, after Matthew McConaughey’s win in the lead actor category last year.

To be fair, through his career Keaton has shown greater dramatic chops than McConaughey. We remember Keaton for his daffy comedic performances in Night Shift, Beetlejuice and Mr Mom, although he displayed some of his range in the Batman series, in which he defied expectations, and in The Paper, Pacific Heights and Jackie Brown.

Even so, his performance in Birdman, at different moments crazed and fragile, appears to have surprised many observers. “The good thing about it is, to the people who know me or have followed me, they’re not surprised,” Keaton says. “That’s the nicest thing.”

BIRDMAN REVIEW: David Stratton’s verdict

I can sense the 63-year-old — whose reputation for a temper precedes him despite being, at least in this interview, affable — is losing patience with the “comeback’’ cliche now riveted on to this film. “Look, you do the job at hand. It’s a little shocking to me that people don’t understand how this works, frankly,” he says.

He muses about what the reaction would have been if this role had come two years ago, or 15 years ago. Well, he would have done the job at hand, he reiterates. “And the job at hand was what I did. That’s what I was supposed to do. And you want to be good at it.” This role, like any other, was “just an opportunity, so if you’re surprised, that’s OK with me”.

The problem was, 15 years ago, the projects coming Keaton’s way weren’t of this calibre. On paper, a sports drama opposite Robert Duvall (A Shot at Glory) or an HBO telemovie about the Gulf war with Helena Bonham Carter (Live from Baghdad) may have looked good, but the results were not flattering for Keaton’s profile.

In the days after we spoke, the actor ran out of patience with the comeback narrative. “That’s lazy and a cliche,” he told one reporter.

Keaton tells me he feels most for “the believers” who “feel satisfied and vindicated’’. “That’s very flattering and I like that a lot of people are finally slamming their hands on the table and saying, ‘I told you so!’ That makes me feel good. That’s embarrassingly flattering.”

Keaton clearly delivers in Birdman, a lighter but no less impressive film from the director of Babel, Biutiful and 21 Grams.

Despite the film’s unwieldy full title — Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) — it is a kinetic movie full of narrative turns. The lightness may relate in part to Inarritu’s split with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, his collaborator on the constricting dramas Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel. The director co-wrote Birdman with three people, two of whom (Nicolas Giacobone and Armando Bo) also worked on his 2010 drama Biutiful. (The fourth Birdman screenwriter is Alexander Dinelaris).

But the lightness also comes because Birdman explores the director’s concerns. Keaton’s Riggan Thompson is attempting to stage, as writer, director and star, an adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as a means of moving on from the burden of his ignoble movie star career as the superhero Birdman. One can understand Keaton’s unease with the repeated references to a Batman playing Birdman, although he notes Inarritu “will tell you [the film’s] more about him than anybody else’’.

Keaton says the duo didn’t talk about the narrative much before production, beyond how the director wanted to make it — a revelatory and captivating use of what seems like a tracking shot in one take, looping in and out of the dressing rooms and innards of a Broadway theatre. “He discussed a great deal about his own personal life and why he wanted to tell this story,” Keaton recalls. “One thing I’ve read and he told me afterwards was he needed someone who could play the nuances of comedy drama and hit all the colours and hit all the notes.

“And he said, ‘You’re the only one I felt could really pull this off. I can’t think of anybody [else]’, which is very flattering.”

Keaton pauses. “I’m glad we didn’t discuss it too much at the beginning because I probably would have felt the pressure!” he says.

Of course, Keaton has felt pressure before. Back in 1989, he was the surprise choice as Batman in two movies directed by Burton.

The pressure on Riggan, who made his own killing playing Birdman, a feathered franchise star, comes at the other end of the career, that lonely place where status is replaced by melancholy or, worse, bitterness and dread.

Riggan is haunted by Birdman, not helped by the character’s visage staring back at him over his beak from a poster hanging in the actor’s dressing room. Birdman’s deep voice also delivers platitudes and banal exhortations, further threatening and confusing the actor.

Keaton, obviously, is not so threatened and, frankly, it would be insulting to assume this about any actor. He says all actors are different. He likes them and has been “fortunate to work with some of the best actors breathing”, he adds, enthusing about his most recent ensemble on the set of Spotlight, including Mark Ruffalo, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci and Rachel McAdams in a drama about the Catholic Church’s cover-up of pedophilia in Boston.

And the cast around Keaton in Birdman is certainly noteworthy. Ed Norton delivers a glorious, self-effacing performance as the Broadway wunderkind flying in to save the day and Zach Galifianakis and Emma Stone are wonderful as Riggan’s manager and daughter.

“I suppose there are similarities in actors but these are all different personalities and different people,” Keaton continues. “They’re all fathers and mothers and sisters and some play tennis, some don’t, some play cards, some are fat, some are skinny, you know? Acting is an odd way to make a living,” he muses. “It’s a silly way to make a living, frankly.”

Keaton demurs when I question him about Riggan’s self-loathing. For his part, he hasn’t encountered the “giant egos of actors”, or at least he doesn’t “pay much attention to it one way or another”. Watching Birdman, it becomes clear Keaton couldn’t have had much time to spare on the set for any shenanigans. His Riggan is central to every scene.

Keaton doesn’t believe he’s worked harder in a film. “No, I can’t imagine,” he says. “Not only the nature of how it was made but what was required of me.” Inarritu implored his lead before principal photography that he would have to go deeper than he had ever gone before as an actor.

He recalls dismissing his entreaties, yet Inarritu was insistent. “I knew and I did know but I probably couldn’t know it [truly] until you do it,” he says, sighing at the recollection. “How long you have to sustain that work mode and [work] ethic and go deep.

“It was a marathon, man.”

And for much of the film, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (an Academy Award winner for Gravity) has his camera right in Riggan’s face, reeling backwards as the agitated actor paces backstage.

“Yeah, the camera goes into your head because you kind of go inside his head for a lot of this movie,” Keaton says.

The one-shot conceit of the film accelerates the narrative’s thrilling anxiety attack. It appears almost organic in its construction. One of the more striking scenes, in which Riggan is locked out of his theatre while in his Y-fronts and has to hotfoot it through Times Square, looks typically improvised.

“No,” Keaton reveals. “The shocking thing it was quite staged, actually. Everything in this movie is precise. It’s good to hear it doesn’t appear like that. Trust me when I tell you it came down to inches at some times.”

Keaton had to repeat the underpants gallop through New York’s busiest open space a number of times. “It’s ridiculously silly and crazy, but the truth is once you get going it’s kind of like everything else, you’re just kind of in the scene,” he says. “And that’s not to say you don’t have flashes of ‘Holy shit, I’m out here in my underwear!’ Mostly after you drop your trousers and they yell ‘action’, you’re really just at work.

“What kind of crazy job do I have where I can say that?” he says, laughing again. “My job is really strange.”

Keaton appears, at least in this professional encounter, exactly as we are likely to have imagined him from his public life: happy-go-lucky. And he is perfectly at ease with his strange profession and the choices he has made, despite the doubts of outsiders.

He once said his only consistency lay in having no consistency. Is that a handy trait to possess? “I guess it is,” he says with a laugh. “It seems to throw people off. It doesn’t throw me off. Yeah. I’d say that’s pretty true.”

As, he agrees, is Obama’s notion he hasn’t been working enough.

“That’s partly true,” he concedes. “I understand why some people say that. People aren’t waking up in the morning thinking: ‘I wonder what Mike’s doing today?’

“So they’re not aware of all the things I do but to some degree they’re right. There are a lot of things I didn’t do or don’t do,” he adds. Some of them are more famous than others, including refusing the Matthew Fox lead role on the TV series Lost (understandable) and turning down lead roles in the film Splash and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (not so understandable).

But then, all actors have tales of the one that got away.

Keaton points me to a recent magazine interview in which comedian Dave Chappelle, who notoriously walked away from a $US50 million TV contract with Comedy Central in 2005 before his slow return to comedy, is “trying to be nice about it, saying: ‘I think you’re all making more of this than you need to make of it.’ ”

Keaton says he felt for Chappelle when he said, “Sure, I kind of quit and I kind of didn’t quit; I dunno, I was just doing what I do.”

“It doesn’t kind of matter, frankly,” Keaton says. “None of it really matters. To some degree I walked away (and) I didn’t walk away.

“I lived my life, and sometimes your life is what it is at the time.”

If Birdman is typical, we can only be thankful Michael Keaton has walked back to the screen, in his underwear or not.

Birdman opens on January 15.