FILM 1292: BIRDMAN
TRIVIA: The movie was largely shot
inside Broadway's St. James Theatre - Michael Keaton and the
rest of the cast had to adapt to Alejandro
González Iñárritu's rigorous shooting style, which required them to
perform up to 15 pages of dialogue at a time while hitting precisely
choreographed marks.
There are only sixteen visible cuts
in the entire film.
During the press conference in
Riggan's dressing room, he says that he hasn't played Birdman since 1992.
That's the same year Batman
Returns (1992), the last Batman movie starring Michael Keaton, was
released.
Martin Scorsese can be
seen in the audience when Michael Keaton is walking to the stage in his
underwear after he walks through Times Square.
According to Alejandro González Iñárritu,
he had dinner with director Mike Nichols
in New York two weeks before he began shooting the movie. Iñarritu told Nichols
of his plan for how he was going to shoot the movie as one long take. Nichols
predicted it would be a disaster because not having the ability to use cuts in
editing would inhibit the opportunities for comedy. Inarritu said the meeting
didn't deter him, but was instead helpful in raising his awareness level of the
difficulty of what he was about to do.
The carpet visible within a number
of back stage corridor scenes is the same iconic, hexagonal carpet used in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980).
