Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Digital Booklet

I met Antonio Sanchez 10 years ago at a sublime Pat Metheney concert in Los Angeles. Like me, Antonio is a Chilango. Unlike me, Antonio is one of the best drummers in the world. I became a fan and luckily a friend. At that concert, Antonio, like a human octopus, played a solo that made me wonder how just four extensions of a human body could propel so many beats, emotions, sounds, ideas and extraordinary rhythms.

I attempted Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) to be experienced in one continuous and uninterrupted shot. Very much as we live our lives. But not having the possibility to fragment time and space, it is almost a contradiction to the nature of cinema itself.

DRUUUMMMMMSSS! Eureka.

I thought the drums would help me to find the internal rhythm of the film and the audience will flow with it.

One week before I started the shoot in NY, Antonio Sanchez recorded, with majestic graciousness and imagination, dozens of eclectic beats based on my terrible attempts right there to explain to him with mouth rhythms (like "KA KA UG UG PA PASH'...he was generous enough to not laugh at me) the emotions of the characters and needs of each scene. Antonio provided and improvised an amazing amount of possible rhythms; each one was better than the other. It was a real joy… Those beats became a kind of metronome inside Riggan's head.

The classical music? What else can be said of such composers and music marvels? They all belong to my personal favorite music geniuses but most importantly, each of these pieces were selected by our character Riggan Thomson to be played not as a score, but right there, at the center of his Carver-adapted theater play.

We all are just playing a role in it.