“It was an opportunity to take the audience and put them into his world”: Chris Smith on Netflix documentary Sr

Sr is the moving and original Netflix documentary from director Chris Smith (Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened) about father and son, Robert Downey Junior and Senior. Ostensibly about the famed actor’s father, the black-and-white featured quickly veers into less clear-cut territory, exploring in meandering and patchwork style as it does elements of the past and present of each man, and glimpsing at various times the relationship between them. As Jr points out, Sr is a difficult man to pin down, and there’s an increasing sense the film is a vehicle for his son to try and fully understand him once and for all – an exercise in futility, one begins to think.

But the journey to try and dig for answers becomes a fascinating one in and of itself, mirroring the whimsical nature of the low-budget, absurd and irreverent movies Sr made in his youth, from Putney Swope to Greaser’s Palace. In a hilarious and meta thread, Sr begins to edit a version of the documentary in parallel to it being made, the sense he will resist being the subject to the last becoming increasingly clear. The film also doesn’t shy away from the thornier part of their relationship, notably whether or how Sr’s parenting and lifestyle choices led to Jr’s addiction issues. In perhaps one of the most telling archival excerpts, a younger Sr tells the camera, with an arm around a clearly not fully recovered Jr, that he perhaps made mistakes exposing him to his drug-infused party lifestyle – the closest viewers get to an admission of culpability. 

Where we land, though, is with a portrait of a father-and-son relationship that ultimately is filled with love and mutual affection, the irrepressible humour and creative talent that coursed through the veins of both clear to see. That Sr passed away before production ended feels tragic but also endows the film with the sense of being a time capsule, a tribute and a slice of his world forever immortalised; to be able to enter into that world feels a privilege.

The Upcoming spoke to the director about how he came to make a documentary about the pair, the loose and inventive form of the film that reflects Sr’s own filmmaking style, and how he incorporated interviews with each man, their Zoom calls during the pandemic and extensive archive footage of Sr’s off-the-wall indie movies from the 60s and 70s. We also discussed how the production evolved to become as much about the father-son relationship as about Sr’s body of work, and its powerful underlying message of the importance of connecting with those we love before they pass on.

Sarah Bradbury

Sr is released on Netflix on 2^nd December 2022. Read our review here.

Watch the trailer for Sr here: