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About this picture
“I took this photo of Robert Downey Jr. on the back lot at Universal Studios. I don’t know if you’ve ever done the studio tour, but there’s all these different areas of the back lot, and this I think was between Ancient Rome and Cowboy Town. Downy Jr.’s on a bike and he’s riding all over the place without any hands, with one hand. He’s a real, proper old school entertainer, Robert Downey Jr. Hugely, hugely talented man with a extraordinary energy. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Chaplain, but it’s worth watching him just to see, technically, what a sort of physical performer he is. And so we just had a lot of fun where he was just playing different characters. And we had this gun, cause we’d done some shots of him sort of bursting out of sets, doing rolls, doing dives, jumping around. And so this just one particular image, from the whole set, I took it probably over 10 years ago, and to me it very much stands up as the sort of photo that I take today because, as photographers, we all evolve, you know, so there’s photos I took 10, 15 years ago that were probably far more stylized, far more lit, far more retouched, far more professional looking maybe than what I do today. Whereas this photo fits right into where I am now. It’s massively mischievous. There’s this sort of slight incongruity of why has Robert Downey Jr. got a gun down his pants, and there’s a sort of relaxed manner with which he shows the looseness of which he’s riding the bike, that all just add up to a really fun picture.”