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 In the film by Mexican director and Academy Award-nominee
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu ("21 Grams," "Babel"), which opens
in U.S. theaters on Friday, Keaton plays actor Riggan Thomson,
who like himself found fame playing the superhero in an action
franchise he left years ago.
But Riggan is haunted by his Birdman super ego and a sense of
failure and mediocrity, and makes a desperate attempt to regain
his professional credibility and sense of self by mounting a
play on Broadway based on the Raymond Carver short story, "What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
"He's a really complicated character, which always makes the job
harder, but more interesting, too," Keaton, 63, said in an
interview.
"Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)," is a film
about a play that Iñarritu ingeniously shot at Broadway's famed
St. James Theater in what seems like one long, seamless,
continuous take.
It was new territory for both the director and his cast. Each
scene flows into the next as the camera follows Riggan down
narrow theater hallways, into a dressing room, onto the stage
and out of the theater into a bustling Times Square with drum
rhythms setting a pounding pace.
Keaton said he had never seen a movie like it and admitted there
were times when he wondered why they were doing it that way,
which required plenty of rehearsals, no room for mistakes and
total commitment from the actors.
"The truth is, it doesn't work if you don't make it like this
because you don't go on the trip. You couldn't get as deep
inside," Keaton explained.
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 "There is a point early on where you are watching this movie
and quietly you hear the door close behind you, and you are not
getting out now. You're in. Then you go into the guy's head."
Keaton delves deep into Riggan in a performance that has won
stellar reviews, and which Variety called "the comeback of the
century."
"Michael Keaton bursts into Oscar race with 'Birdman'," the
Hollywood trade magazine proclaimed in a headline.
Keaton said one of the smartest things Iñarritu did was to present
the cast with a photo of the French high-wire artist Philippe Petit,
who famously walked between the World Trade Center's twin towers in
1974.
The meaning was not lost on Keaton and the cast, including Riggan's
combative co-star Edward Norton, his leading lady Naomi Watts and
Emma Stone, his daughter and assistant, recently released from
rehab.
"You feel like you could fall," Keaton said, adding the film
distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures was choreographed down to
the inch at times.
"But I like that. It keeps you on your toes. There is no time to get
lazy."
(Editing by G Crosse)
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