Robert Downey Jr. and his co-stars talk about everything but 'The Judge'

TORONTO - Before Robert Downey Jr. was Iron Man, his being Iron Man would have been inconceivable.

Before "Iron Man" in 2008, Downey had been acting in movies for 25 years and had never top-lined a major hit. His biggest box-office movie was "Back to School," starring Rodney Dangerfield. His second biggest hit: "Bowfinger," starring Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy. No. 3? "The Shaggy Dog," starring Tim Allen.

Downey had always been an actor of great range and promise, but he was best-known for his drug habit, and he was hardly a movie star.

Then he married movie producer Susan Levin, in 2005. Marvel had the foresight to cast him as "Iron Man," which started production soon thereafter, and now this nearly 50-year-old, 30-year-veteran is one of the biggest stars in the world and nearly as rich as Tony Stark.

But man, especially a man as fidgety as Downey, does not live by blockbusters alone, so he and his wife formed Team Downey with the goal of producing character-driven movies for adults. The kind that Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and Hal Ashby made in the 1970s. The kind that the studios used to support before CGI gave everyone the power to build cities to destroy and superheroes to fight aliens. Movies in which rehearsal time is actually built into the production process.

Their first effort is "The Judge," opening Friday from Warner Bros. (a studio that has grossed nearly $500 million off Downey's "Sherlock Holmes" films and his 2010 buddy pic, with Zach Galifianakis, "Due Date").

In "Judge," Downey plays a slick, big-city lawyer who returns to his sleepy hometown to defend the father he doesn't like (Robert Duvall) on a murder charge.

Nothing blows up.

Team Downey and the cast, also including Vera Farmiga, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dax Shepard, Jeremy Strong and director David Dobkin, held court at the TIFF Lightbox last month at the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss "The Judge." As is usual in these group gropes, the questions - from journalists all over the world, on topics all over the map - best showed off the camaraderie of the filmmakers and how much respect they have for each other.

D'Onofrio said that he came from the same generation of actors as Downey and remembered seeing him in "Chaplin" in 1992. "If this mother-so-and-so can do this," he recalled thinking, "I ought to quit."

Susan Downey called her husband her "favorite person to work with."

Farmiga said the "symbiosis" between the Downeys reminded her of her own happy marriage. She said that Dobkin was "the most thorough director she worked with since Scorsese."

Dobkin, best known for "Wedding Crashers," praised the Downeys for giving a comedy director a chance to work with such different material and added, "I think your company is going to be amazing."

Downey, ever the quipster, shot back that Team Downey's work with Dobkin was "very much a threesome in the most platonic way possible . . . so far."

The group even heaped praise on the small Massachusetts town that served as the setting for the film.

"There were no hotels in that town," Shepard said. "So me, Duvall and Strong stayed in the same B&B."

At one point, Shepard said, he mused to himself, "I just had pillow talk with Robert Duvall in a weird gingerbread house."

As for Downey, he was asked how much ad-libbing he brought to the film (yes, some people even asked about the film):

"I'd like to think that everything great in the movie is my idea," he replied with a grin.

Would Downey the lawyer like to have had the young, troubled Downey as a client?

"I'd love to defend that guy," Downey said. "I'd open up another branch of the law firm just to defend him."