Robert Downey Jr. has evolved into one of the most respected actors in Hollywood. He received an Academy Award nomination and won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of Chaplin". This year he was again nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actor category for the action comedy Tropic Thunder, as well as a SAG, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award.

Downey starred in two of last summer's biggest hits, Tropic Thunder with Ben Stiller and Jack Black, and in the title role of the superhero Iron Man alongside Jeff Bridges and Gwyneth Paltrow. He is currently filming the sequel to Iron Man and later this year will star in the title role of Sherlock Holmes opposite Jude Law and Rachel McAdams directed by Guy Ritchie.

Jamie Foxx won an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2005 for his portrayal of the legendary Ray Charles in the Taylor Hackford-directed biopic Ray. He also swept the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild (SAG), BAFTA and NAACP Image Awards, as well as numerous critics' awards for his performance and shared in a SAG Award nomination received by the film's ensemble cast.

An accomplished actress, Catherine Keener continues to be a dominant force on screen. She was most recently seen in the Charlie Kaufman drama Synechdoche, New York opposite an ensemble cast that included Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, Hope Davis and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Later this year she will be seen in Warner Bros' big-screen adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, written and directed by Spike Jonze. She also recently wrapped production on Nicole Holofcener's Please Give opposite Oliver Platt and Rebecca Hall.

Robert Downey Jr., Jamie Foxx, and Catherine Keener are fabulous people and we really appreciated their time. Here's what they had to tell us about their new film, The Soloist.

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

JAMIE FOXX: All of us, you want to be the person. I got a change to go down to LAMP and watch Anthony Ayers from a distance without meeting him. Because, 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, how he ordered his food, how he talks to people and, within five minutes, you would have seen four different sides of this guy; he was happy, we was angry, he was jubilant. He was all these different things and so, by doing that, when you're doing a character you want to do the nuance. I dropped some weight, got my hair done nicely [Laughter] 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 and I don't know how they feel the other actors but I feel this way; if I were to lose my mind, I would lose everything. So, that was a little bit of the fear going into the project. But, that was it. You had to get it. You had to get it and once you get it, you feel it and you feel like it's really that person. Like you'll say it in your mouth, you'll say whatever that person says and you'll hear it in your mind and say "Okay, I am that person."

Robert, Steve Lopez said that you asked to go into his closet to see who he was...

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: Where does it all end? [Laughter]

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? What did you find in his closet?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: Oh, well, you're supposing that he allowed me into his closet. He marvels at the idea that I asked. He never even dignified it with a response nor would he allow me to interview him at distance or at close range. We had a cigar together and we talked. He wanted to tell 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 and 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. I had a couple of ideas, thought maybe my hair should be short. Next thing you know Keener was shaving my head on her first day of rehearsal with this number two scissor blade.

CATHERINE KEENER: Yeah and the studio is knocking on the door, "Wait! What are you doing to his hair?"

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: "We love his hair!" It was this kind of thing though. Next thing you knew we were in rehearsals and we had three weeks, I think, of rehearsals which was unheard of and Joe came on the heels of Atonement and all the buzz of that and I think he went and got his BAFTA in the middle while we were shooting. But, above that, we kind of represented the Hollywood - I don't want to say establishment - but like "Great, and you're really good, and it's cool we're making a movie in L.A. about L.A." But I think he opened our eyes and we opened his eyes and we all wound up becoming this third thing which was centered around what Jamie was literally going through with what he was trying to communicate. So, it really was that thing of when do you just step back so you can hear the sax solo which was what he had to do. So, it was incredibly difficult to observe.

CATHERINE KEENER: I just want to add, because of how you described that experience for you, I remember, in our rehearsal process one woman, Teresa. We were going around the circle talking about meds, taking their medication. She's schizophrenic, one of the characters is the movie was Teresa. The way she put it was that she didn't take her medication because she was afraid of losing her, she said 'creative'. I thought about it a lot because she thought that taking her medication would kill her artistry. She preferred not to do that over feeling, supposedly better I guess.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: And that the voices were her friends and they were her only comfort and that by silencing them, she was going to lose the only sense of community she had.

Ayers seems transported while he's playing his music. As a musician, actor and artist in general, have you had moments like that? Could you relate?

JAMIE FOXX: I actually thought I was Nathaniel at one point and called my manager late at night and was explaining to him why Nathaniel does what he does. He would say [looking at reporters' clothes] red shirt, blue shirt, jeans so that would keep him sane but after he would say it over and over again, if you're looking from the outside, it looked like this guy is insane. But, I believe that music is what calms him. That's what soothes him because the music takes you completely somewhere else. When you get in the elevator, most people get nervous in elevators. The reason there is muzak playing, that soft music, is it sort of calms you without you even knowing it. So, as a musician, of course, man, I'll go through things in my life and things are not quite the way I want them to be and then you go and you hear a song and you play some music and it changes your whole outlook. So, that's what I do and I know that's what Nathanial does.

Jamie, what are your thoughts on shooting in downtown L.A.? Are you passionate about downtown?

JAMIE FOXX: You know what? We were passionate but I wasn't as passionate as Joe Wright was which was a little amazing because here's a guy from England saying "No, this is what it's about." I remember talking to Mr. Downey Jr. about "Is this really what we should be doing?" At first I was like "I don't know if I want to be this close to these people. I don't know if I want to be that person." Then, to see those people and to feel some of their stories, it made you become more passionate about it. It made you look at it completely different. We're in Hollywood behind our gates, doing whatever we're doing and you never think you'd have those types of feelings or revelations any more. But it was really a revelation and it was great. Great, being down there and shooting. It's a great place.

CATHERINE KEENER: Yeah. And I realize that we're all invited. We can all travel around the city anyway, any time we want. I think Joe showed me that. That this is all Los Angeles.

Not to quote from Tropic Thunder out of context, but I can't help but think of Kirk Lazarus's speech about "Don't go full retard." [Laughter]. How important is it not to get so involved in the character that you are indistinguishable from them?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: I think we would all agree that job one is aesthetic distance. Mr. Jellison, my theater arts teacher from Santa Monica High School, it's right there in the first three pages of the book on Theater Arts, you know. But then it's that thing of just because you've read the owner's manual doesn't mean you can use the machine that way. But I think it's really important. I guess the thing here was it was this journey. By the end, and Catherine and I were talking about it, because she was serving several functions different and separate from what they were in the story, we were literally talking about and writing this end scene with us in the house that we used to be married in, about what happened to this and that. I had this idea about likening it to the Northridge Earthquake which is something that I think every Angeleno could relate to and that having to do with when my own first marriage or things had started to tip up for me and what it was and all the promise of L.A. and what it really is so, to answer the question, you don't want to cross the line but what you want to do is bring as much of yourself to bear as you could.

The funny thing is I would see Jamie who essentially created a system of playing cello and violin. I played violin a little bit when I just did Sherlock Holmes. It is mind-numbing! Mind-numbingly insane and I utilized your system just to get a take or two down. We did it day by day by day. And then we would be at Disney Hall and he would go over, because it had been a particularly difficult day, and he was entertaining the hundred extras we had there while we were night-shooting during the scene that he had to have a melt-down in, so he would be out of character, cracking jokes going "I got twenty bucks for anyone who can tell me when Fred Willard was in a movie in 1979." [Laughter]. People were going "Isn't he about to go crazy." It was like he was throwing a party in Miami for these people. Then they'd say "rolling" and you'd go in and you would have this complete psychotic break, literally. But, I think the way out was to be yourself. The way in was to bring as much of yourself to bear as you could. We were always trying to infuse it with a sense of "how can we be us, somehow in this movie?"

Jamie, can you tell me what it was like sitting across from Mr. Ayers and exchanging ideas? Did you play any music for him?

JAMIE FOXX: You know, we played the piano. I played the piano and he played the cello. I talked to him like I was his friend, like his homey, and I would just listen just to grab everything you could as far as just his mannerisms and things. But this was one of those characters where, like I said, there was a lot of fear in me going to talk to the psychiatrist. That's a whole other thing. For African Americans, like I don't know anybody from our home town or anybody in my family who's ever been to a psychiatrist or a therapist because that was like, "Man, that's for crazy people." So, in my mind,….

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: …by which you mean white people.

JAMIE FOXX: [Laughs] You know what I mean? I'll never forget being on the set of a TV show once and the first time I saw black people that went to a therapist. I'm walking off of the Jamie Foxx Show and they all go [low voice], "No, he may not want us to know." And I look over and it was all my cast and I was like, "Man, I don't want to know what?" "Who's your therapist?" "I don't want to do that, man. I talk to the homey…" "Well, you know…" And I made a joke about it and one of the guys, I won't say his name, says "Well I go every day! And it's needed!" And I was like, "Well…" And this was years ago.

So now, when I go see the psychiatrist, all these different things are in my mind but I actually felt better. He said some things that made sense. He gave me some ways to sort of pull out of this thing that I was about to go into and then when I was sitting with Nathaniel, there was a calming thing 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. I had to play the guy that his life happened to be. He's a guy who went to New York 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 of Steve Lopez.

Most people are one circumstance away from a life unimaginable.

JAMIE FOXX: Wow!

And that's good or bad. Can you talk about your experience of being on the brink? And on the lighter side of this question, Jamie, I really appreciated Nathaniel's wardrobe. Did you have anything to do with that?

[They look at each other trying to decide who should go first.]

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: Keener?

CATHERINE KEENER: Oh, I start? [Laughs]

JAMIE FOXX: On the brink.

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: You're the intellectual pillar of this whole place. You tackle that one.

CATHERINE KEENER: I was going to address the wardrobe part of the question. The brink. I agree with you. I think that everyone is just sort of a shot away from it and the discrepancy is just so clear when we're shooting downtown and we have way too big a trailers and we're really nice and we're friends and we're making friends with people and establishing trust. They like us and we like them and it's all just still alarming and horrible and we all live here. It's the same city and it's crazy making. Talking in our rehearsal again what was really surprising for me to hear was how often people would say the reason that they lived on skid row and in other places similar to that was for freedom. So, I don't know. I don't know where that would be in terms of the brink but…

What did you take away from this experience?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: I took some of Jamie's wardrobe. [Laughter] I just remember, honestly, if I had to put it in a principle, there's was just a sense of humility, of feeling kind of right-sized when it was done and it's hard to feel right-sized when you're done if you weren't somehow out of balance with your own perception when you started. And hopefully we are self-correcting enough and we have enough support and we have enough whether it's friends or the peripheral people that help make us okay, a sense of community or family or whatever it is we do to be okay. So, it's not like I need a movie to help me get my head right, you know, and I would take umbrage at the idea that there was some lesson I had to learn from the thing and all that. It's a way of infusing some Hollywood venture with profundity.

But, I do know that 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 and when you're downtown at 4:30 in the morning and you're seeing people who are extras and you're seeing people 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 really what I took away from it more than anything else was my God, sometimes you make a movie and sometimes the movie makes you and this was one of those type things.

Do you feel that way as well, Jamie?

JAMIE FOXX: Me, yeah. I mean, he's said it all. You really do. I went to the bathroom and broke down, talking to my manager about it. I've always had a childhood fear about losing my mind. So I had to lose my mind every day on set, and sometimes you didn't have enough time to get your mind back by the weekend, and the next thing you know you're back on set, so it was really real. I remember calling my manager saying "I know what it is. I know why he's crazy." And my manager said, "Are you OK?" I said, "He does that because of this and he does that because of this, and I'm going to go crazy, and I'm going to lose everything, I'm going to be homeless, and I'm going to be able to play the piano great." He said, "Foxx, I'm on my way over."

So he comes over with my agent, and they say, "Are you cool?" And I said (doubtfully) "Yeah, I think I'm cool." They said, "The psychiatrist you met... there's another guy we want you to talk to just so you have a way to get out of it." I saw Steven Spielberg at a function, and I'm going through this stuff, and I'm at the function like this [makes manic motions]. And he goes, "How are you holding up?" Because that's a tough thing-dealing with schizophrenia. I said, "I'm good." He said, "If you need anything, let me know." And I had no idea [about mental illness]. I was always the guy [who's attitude toward treatment] was, "That's cockamamie." You know, the therapy thing. And I had no idea that the mind could be that fragile.

Robert, can you give us anything on Iron Man or Sherlock Holmes?

ROBERT DOWNEY JR.: [points to his lunch box which he brought to the press conference] That's my Iron Man lunch box. [Laughs] It's a long story. We start Iron Man 2 Monday. We are going to make a kick ass follow-up to the movie that you all enjoyed. I got to see some footage from Sherlock at ShoWest when they were introducing it. It was really well received. We're really excited about it. I can't wait to come back and sell you some soap on Sherlock Holmes before Christmas time. I think that's going to be something special too.