Even Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. and his wife, producer Susan Downey, need a break from the tentpole movie business.
“Sometimes it’s nice to have stakes that are not just defending the world,” Susan Downey told a Toronto Film Festival press conference Friday for The Judge, a co-production between Warner Bros.-based Team Downey and Big Kid Pictures that opened the festival Thursday night.
“This isn’t in the tentpole world that Robert and I have lived in,” she added about the Warner Bros. dramedy directed by David Dobkin.
The Judge stars Downey as a successful attorney who returns to his hometown for his mother’s funeral to discover that his estranged father (who’s also town’s judge), played by Robert Duvall, is suspected of murder.
Downey said the film is a throwback to 1970s and 1980s character-driven movies that Hollywood directors loved to make and the major studios readily supported.
“We all come from places that are different than what we’re necessarily associated with,” the Hollywood action hero star insisted.
“It’s not like we’re trying to do this. This is getting back to where we’ve come from,” said Downey, who starred in earlier movies like Chaplin and Restoration before starring in Hollywood tentpoles.
The father-son drama also also stars Vera Farmiga, Ken Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Billy Bob Thornton and Dax Shepard.
The Judge is the first producing project out of Team Downey, which has David Gambino as president of production.
“Having a big-budget movie, we love those too. But when this script came in, it really fit the bill for us,” Gambino told the presser.
The Toronto Film Festival runs through Sept. 14.
