By Christina Radish

 Based on the incredible true story of a disenchanted journalist’s transformative journey through the hidden streets of Los Angeles, the DreamWorks Pictures drama The Soloist follows columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.) as he discovers and builds a most unlikely friendship with a man from those same streets, bonding through the redemptive power of music. With the newspaper business in an uproar and his marriage to a fellow journalist in shambles, Lopez can’t entirely remember what he loved about his job in the first place. Then, one day, on the streets of Skid Row, he sees the bedraggled Nathanial Ayers (Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx), pouring his soul into a two-stringed violin. At first, Lopez approaches Ayers as just another story idea, until he begins to unearth the mystery of how this alternately brilliant and distracted street musician, once a prodigy headed for fame, wound up living in tunnels and doorways. Imagining he can change Ayers’ life, Lopez embarks on a mission to get him off the streets and back to the world of music, and soon realizes that he is the one who is being profoundly changed.

Co-stars Robert Downey, Jr. and Jamie Foxx spoke to MediaBlvd Magazine about transforming into their real-life counterparts.

MediaBlvd Magazine> Jamie, you have the ability to transform yourself into any individual. How does that happen?

Jamie Foxx> All actors want to be the person. I got a change to go down to LAMP and watch Anthony Ayers from a distance without meeting him. A lot of times, when people meet us, they’ll be on their best behavior or they’ll change. I just wanted to see him in his element, and see how he ordered his food and how he talks to people and, within five minutes, I saw four different sides of this guy. He was happy, angry and jubilant, and all these different things. When you’re doing a character, you want to do the nuance. I dropped some weight and got my hair done nicely. And then, I got a chance to meet him and I filmed him on my phone while he was talking, just to capture some of those little nuggets. It was also a little scary to play someone schizophrenic. We’re all artists and we all go different places in our minds. If I were to lose my mind, I would lose everything, so there was a little bit of the fear going into the project. You have to get it and, once you get it, you feel like you’re really that person.

MediaBlvd> Robert, how do you decide how much you want to get to know a person when you are portraying them? Where is that line for you?

Robert Downey Jr.> Steve Lopez would not allow me to interview him, at distance or at close range. We had a cigar together and we talked. He told me that to impersonate him would be to do a disservice to the movie. But, it’s different every time. I knew that the technical prowess and the degree of difficulty was going to fall on Jamie, and that I was to observe and report on that as if I were an audience member. Joe Wright said it was really important that I do next to nothing and listen a lot, which is very counterintuitive to my kind of ectomorphic disposition, so it was an equal challenge for me, in that way. It was incredibly difficult to observe.

MediaBlvd> How important is it to not get so involved in the character that you are indistinguishable from them?

Robert> Job one is aesthetic distance. My theater arts teacher from Santa Monica High School taught me that. This was a journey. I had this idea about likening it to the Northridge earthquake, which is something that every Angeleno can relate to, and that having to do with when my own first marriage ended or things had started to tip up for me, and all the promise of L.A. You don’t want to cross the line, but what you want to do is bring as much of yourself to bear as you can.

MediaBlvd> Jamie, what was it like to sit across from Mr. Ayers and actually exchanging ideas with him?

Jamie> I played the piano and he played the cello. I talked to him like I was his friend, and I would listen, just to grab everything I could, as far as just his mannerisms. But, this was one of those characters where there was a lot of fear in me. And then, when I was sitting with Nathaniel, there was a calm about him. He didn’t want to do the meds or the drugs, or anything like that. He felt as if everything was cool. So, in doing that, I had to play not the guy who was crazy or schizophrenic. He’s a guy who went to New York to go to Juilliard, who happened to play very well, who happened to have schizophrenia, who happened to end up in L.A. homeless, and who happened to run into a beautiful friend, named Steve Lopez.

MediaBlvd> Robert, what was it like to watch Jamie’s performance?

Robert> Jamie essentially created a system of playing cello and violin. It is mind-numbing! We would be at Disney Hall and he would go over, because it had been a particularly difficult day, and he was entertaining the 100 extras we had there while we were night-shooting during the scene that he had to have a melt-down in. He would be out of character, cracking jokes, saying, “I got 20 bucks for anyone who can tell me a Fred Willard movie from 1979.” People were saying, “Is he about to go crazy?” It was like he was throwing a party in Miami for these people. Then, they’d say, “Rolling!,” and he would have this complete psychotic break. The way out is to be yourself.  The way in is to bring as much of yourself to bear as you can. We were always trying to infuse it with a sense of, “How can we still be us, somehow?”

MediaBlvd> Nathaniel Ayers seems transported while he’s playing his music. Jamie, as a musician, actor and artist, have you had moments like that?

 Jamie> I actually thought I was Nathaniel, at one point, and called my manager, late at night, to explain to him why Nathaniel does what he does. From the outside, it looked like this guy was insane. But, music is what calms him. That’s what soothes him because the music takes him completely somewhere else. Most people get nervous in elevators, so there is soft music playing because it calms you without you even knowing it. So, as a musician, of course, I’ll go through things in my life and things are not quite the way I want them to be, and then I’ll hear a song and play some music, and it changes my whole outlook. That’s what I do, and I know that’s what Nathanial does.  

MediaBlvd> Robert, what did you take away from this, for your own life? How did it affect you, once you were done with the character?

Robert> If I had to put it in a principle, there was just a sense of humility and of feeling right-sized when it was done. It’s hard to feel right-sized, if you weren’t somehow out of balance with your own perception when you started. Hopefully, we are self-correcting enough and we have enough support, whether it’s from friends or the peripheral people that help make us okay, and a sense of community or family, or whatever it is we do to be okay. It’s not like I need a movie to help me get my head right, and I would take umbrage at the idea that there was some lesson I had to learn from it. It’s a way of infusing some Hollywood venture with profundity. Because of the process and the way that we did this, and the close proximity we were to each other, and the kind of stuff we wound up talking about, when you’re downtown at 4:30 in the morning and you’re seeing people who are extras, who are literally going to be looking for where to sleep when the sun comes up, when they’re done making whatever pittance they were given for playing extras in this movie or whatever, it was just this sense of how little direct contact I’d had with so many of the things I thought I was sure of. But, what I really took away from it, more than anything else, was that sometimes you make a movie and sometimes the movie makes you, and this was one of those things.

MediaBlvd> What can you say about Iron Man 2?

Robert> We are going to make a kick ass follow-up to the movie that everyone enjoyed!

MediaBlvd> Are you looking forward to the release of Sherlock Holmes on December 25^th?

Robert> I got to see some footage from Sherlock at ShoWest, when they introduced it. It was really well received. I’m really excited about it. It’s going to be something special.