But first, Team Downey is on the cover of the new issue of The Hollywood Reporter. It’s a joint interview featuring RDJ and his wife Susan which doesn’t happen too often. But The Judge is a Team Downey production – their first – and they’re doing everything they can right now to make it a major hit so that they can continue to secure studio financing for future projects. Warner Bros agreed to fund The Judge and if that pays off, more deals will come.
They talk about their relationship, their vision, their family. They are accommodating. It’s a textbook sales pitch and, as we’ve seen, RDJ has become great at selling. Or, maybe, he was always great at selling, he just does it a lot better when he’s sober.
Most interesting, at least to me, is that they’re doing it together. Working together. Living together. Even though so many people insist that they can’t work with their partners, that the two have to be separate. Here’s how RDJ see it in his wordy, now famously overly philosophical ways:
"I see it as a part of several different therapeutic interactions that we are constantly engaged in. It's another form of co-parenting. We co-parent our children, our relationship, our business. It's all the same. It's all part of the therapy of life."
Susan explained more simply:
"There have been times at the end of the night, when I'm brushing my teeth, when Robert will have a brainstorm and I'll be like, 'I can't take this right now.' But otherwise it's pretty organic. We don't really divide work from life."
We don’t really divide work from life. All kinds of experts would say that that’s unhealthy. The word “boundaries” comes up a lot. That work and life are supposed to be separate. Me personally, I don’t live that way. Work is life for Jacek and me. And life is work. For us that works, like the Downeys (although on a totally insignificant scale in relation to them and their power). For others, it might not. So it depends on the relationship. My point is that blanket statements about the beneficial superiority of separating the two, in my opinion, should not be taken as standard.
Discuss?
Anyway, it’s a good article. Click here to read. There are more videos too.
And here are the Downeys last night at the premiere of The Judge last night in Beverly Hills. Belly-cupping. A lot of belly-cupping. I can tolerate a lot from RDJ. But not even he can sell me on that. The dude hand-rubbing the foetus that he put in here is gross, I don’t care who it is.
