Birdman (full name Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a 2014 American black comedy film directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu starring Michael Keaton.
On August 27, 2014, it was presented in the main competition program of the 71st Venice Film Festival. It was released in the United States on October 17, 2014, and in Russia on January 22, 2015. The overwhelming majority of representatives of the film press recognized one of the 10 best pictures of 2014, was awarded many awards, including the Oscar for best film.
Plot
Riggan Thomson is a forgotten American actor who is known for his role as the superhero Birdman in the 1990s film trilogy. He is tormented by Birdman's mocking and critical inner voice, and he often visualizes himself engaged in levitation and telekinesis. Riggan tries to gain recognition as a serious actor, for which he wrote, directed and starred in the Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love".
Jake, Riggan's best friend and lawyer, is producing a play starring Riggan's girlfriend Laura and Broadway debutante Leslie. Riggan's daughter Sam, who has undergone drug rehab with whom he is trying to reunite, works as his assistant. The day before the first preview, a lighting fixture falls on riggan's unfortunate colleague Ralph. At the suggestion of Leslie Riggan, he replaces Ralph with her boyfriend, the brilliant but fickle Stanislavski actor Mike Scheiner. The first screenings are a failure: Mike cannot play, as the gin was replaced by water, during the sex scene tries to rape Leslie and claims that the gun looks like a toy, which interferes with his performance. Riggan is constantly in conflict with Mike, later resulting in a fight after Riggan reads an interview in the New York Times with Mike, in which he stole Riggan's personal reason to play in Raymond Carver's play. Jake persuades Riggan to continue rehearsing. Riggan catches Sam smoking marijuana and scolds her; she tells him that he is not important and that his play is just a vain project. All the while, Birdman's character is talking to Riggan as a voice in his head, judging him and everyone/everything around him.
During the final rehearsal, Riggan accidentally finds himself locked in the street, his robe stuck in the door of the fire exit. He is forced to walk through Times Square in his underpants and enter the hall to play the final scene. A concerned Sam waits in the dressing room after the show. She believes that the performance was very unusual, but interesting. Sam shows him that videos from Times Square are going viral and explains how it actually helps him.
Riggan goes to a bar for a drink and approaches Tabitha Dickinson, a very influential theatre critic. She tells him that she hates ignorant Hollywood celebrities who pretend to be serious actors, and promises to "kill" his play with a condemning review without even watching it. On the way back, Riggan buys a pint of whiskey, drinks it, and loses consciousness. The next day, while going to the theater with a severe hangover, he talks to the now visible Birdman, who tries to convince him to quit the production and make a fourth Birdman film. On the next street, we see a short, illogical sequence of scenes, and Birdman, addressing the audience directly, ridicules the love of spectacle. Riggan visualizes him flying through the streets of Manhattan before arriving at the theater.
On the day of the premiere, the performance goes very well. In his dressing room, the strangely calm Riggan admits to his ex-wife Sylvia that a few years ago he tried to drown himself in the ocean after she caught his affair. He also tells Sylvia about his inner voice to Birdman, but she ignores Riggan's words. After Sylvia wishes him luck and leaves the room, Riggan takes the real weapon, not the props, for the final scene in which his character commits suicide. In the climax, Riggan shoots himself in the head on stage. The production is given a standing ovation, Tabitha gets up and leaves.
The next day, Riggan wakes up in the hospital, his face covered with bandages, and his nose surgically repaired after Riggan shot him in a failed suicide. Sylvia worries about him, but Jake can't contain his excitement that the play will last forever after an enthusiastic review by Tabitha, who called the suicide attempt a new art, "super-realism" and exactly what American theater needs. Sam visits Riggan with flowers he can't smell and takes pictures of him to scare the huge number of followers on the Twitter account she created for him. While Sam leaves the room to find the vase, Riggan goes to the bathroom, removes the bandages, sees a swollen new nose, and obscenely says goodbye to Birdman, who is sitting on the toilet. Fascinated by the flying birds, Riggan opens a window, looks at them, and then climbs out onto a ledge. Sam returns to the empty room and frantically runs to the open window, looking around the ground, then slowly looks up at the sky and smiles.
Filming
The film's budget of $ 18 million did not allow to build the scenery of the central part of New York, as it was done in the picture "The New Spider-Man. High voltage". Therefore, filming, which began in March 2013, took place on the real streets of New York City.
From the very beginning, Iñárritu planned to shoot the film in one plan in order to bring it as close as possible to reality - "We live our life without the ability to edit it." And despite the serious objections of his colleagues, he managed to defend his concept. Part of the filming took place in the scenery of the theater premises, and the facade of the theater, the stage and the auditorium were filmed on location at the St. James's Theater on West 44th Street. Michael Keaton's walk in his underpants in Times Square was also filmed on location in one take. The film uses a modern style of continuous shooting with a mobile camera installed on the Stadium system. However, despite the seeming lack of montage glues, there are at least 100 of them in the film. The desired effect was achieved by accurately organizing the mounting frames and digital image processing, masking gluing. One of the features of the film is the digital "cleaning" of random traces of the crew members: there is not even a reflection of the cameraman and the camera in the mirrors. To shoot the scenes of the flight of the main character, the same technology was used as in the film "Gravity". The entire film was shot with Arri Alexa digital cinema cameras, the data from which was transmitted via Wi-Fi to an external drive, and was immediately available for viewing and editing markings. Thanks to this and preliminary organizational work, the shooting took place in less than a month, and the editing took two weeks.