High-priced, workaholic lawyer Hank Palmer is unquestionably the man every high-class criminal wants by his side in the courtroom. Checking his scruples at the door, he is a master manipulator of the law, and his services are available to the highest bidder; the innocent, he coolly professes, can’t afford him.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Hank Palmer in Warner Bros. Pictures' moving drama “The Judge.” Directed by David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), the film revolves around a big-city lawyer who returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town’s judge, is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.

Dobkin remembers asking Downey early on, “‘Does your character know he’s in crisis, or does he just feel he’s in crisis?’ His answer was, ‘He knows it, but he doesn’t feel it.’ Hank is aware, on an intellectual level, that he’s unable to have an emotional truth. He’s stuck at a dead end in his life even though he’s at the top of what he set out to achieve.”

“Hank is comfortable where he’s comfortable: at home in Chicago with his marriage that’s falling apart and this billion-dollar case that he knows how to cheat and win,” Downey says. “All of the things that make him comfortable are the things that make most people uncomfortable.”

Hank rarely lets his guard down, carefully navigating the prickly relationships he has surrounded himself with, keeping those close to him at arm’s length and allowing in only a few—his mother and his daughter. He has created a strong protective wall around his emotional self, choosing instead to deflect even the slightest opportunity for self-reflection with sarcastic humor and intellectual superiority. Maintaining distance from the source of his earliest wounds keeps any cracks in the wall from spreading…until he is forced to go home again by the loss of his first and greatest source of comfort, his mom.

“One of the nice things about playing Hank is that I get to explore that part of me—of everybody—that just wants to jump out of their seat and run,” Downey shares. “The minute he gets back to his hometown, he’s just looking for a trapdoor to fall through and wind up anywhere else but where he is.

“He’s a pretty shut-down guy,” the actor continues. “He is in his life mentally and physically, but not emotionally; he’s in complete flight from the ramifications of the way he’s behaved emotionally. He is also very accustomed to winning, and a lot of his identity is tied up in that, in his profession, but that doesn’t matter to anyone else. And of course the fact that his father is a judge and Hank’s a big time defense attorney says a lot about him.”

Dobkin admired Downey’s freedom in the role. “It’s a very complex tightrope to walk, to start a movie with a character as broken as Hank is, and to be honest about it,” he says. “Robert is completely unafraid of any kind of scene, or to be disliked the way Hank is early on, because he can play him with enough charm for people to stay with him, to go through the journey he’s on. He’s a beautiful meeting of both comedy and drama, and he has incredible control over the tone of his work. He showed up every day hungry and curious and wanting to make something great.”

“This was an opportunity for me to return to the classic acting of my roots, to see if I could still hit that place of deep emotional resonance like you do in the theater,” Downey says. “Hank is under tremendous pressure, and he just keeps being handed more and more weight and becomes less and less confident, which is not a place he’s used to being, not a feeling he likes at all. When he is certain he’s right, no one will listen; when he’s not so sure, everyone is looking to him for answers. Every day he has to jump through some sort of flaming hoop. I’d never really played a part that had so much to do with salvation and redemption, and that was one of the greatest challenges and joys of playing Hank.”

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Oscar-nominee Vera Farmiga (“Up in the Air,” “The Conjuring”) and popular actress Leighton Meester (TV's “Gossip Girl”) play headstrong, independent-minded women in Warner Bros. Pictures' new inspiring drama, “The Judge.”

In the film, when Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Hank, arrives back in his hometown for his mom’s funeral, he expects to find his father and brothers there, but what he doesn’t anticipate is running into his high school sweetheart, Samantha Powell, played by Vera Farmiga.

Director David Dobkin describes Sam as “that reminder of what could’ve been, that one who got away who, when we look back, makes us think, ‘A little more maturity, a different place and time, a couple of different decisions and maybe, just maybe…’”

Vera Farmiga, who had worked with “The Judge” producer Susan Downey previously, was eager to do so again. In addition, she was very touched by the script. “It told a very moving, brutally honest and emotional story with such intimate detail,” she remarks. “Quite honestly, I’ve never known a father and son who weren’t, consciously or unconsciously, trying to break some cycle of strife. This is just a beautiful story about forgiveness in which not only the father and sons but every character, on some level, is learning to forgive or to be forgiven.”

Farmiga liked the fact that Sam isn’t at all shy about calling Hank out on his past bad behavior. “He left her high and dry without any warning or apology. Fast-forward more than 20 years later and here he is, her first love. I was absolutely smitten with the idea of exploring that through this woman, Sam, who has grace, sass, wit and confidence. She gave me a real playground to work in; she’s so powerful in her vulnerability, so comfortable in her own skin and with the choices she’s made. She’s not someone who has to prove herself to anybody, which is the complete opposite of Hank, who in a way has to keep proving himself over and over.”

“In some ways I feel like Sam is the heart of the movie,” Robert Downey Jr. says. “She is the girl he left behind, probably the best thing that ever happened to him, and he still resists that. He doesn’t want to embrace what’s right in front of him, this badass, down-home, crazy, evolved, feminine personality, which Vera captured completely.

“She just blew everyone’s mind,” he goes on. “Sometimes you’re on camera with someone who is just dead honest and looking right through you, challenging you, and that was every day with Vera. She was amazing.”

Farmiga felt equally entranced. “Robert is that guy who, when you’re with him, you feel like you’ve known him a lifetime in just two minutes. We had an immediate kind of kinetic friendship. He has so much energy and is so gracious, so open-hearted, so playful and giving of himself.”

Early in the story, after his mother’s services, Hank’s father bids him farewell—summarily dismissing him without even a handshake. His need to get out of the house before he can actually head back to Chicago sends Hank and his brothers to the local tavern, where Hank enjoys a beer…and the company of the lovely young bartender, Carla, played by Leighton Meester.

“Hank is a smooth talker,” Meester notes, “but Carla is pretty sassy. She’s got a mouth on her and she’s not afraid to use it.”

The actress laughs as she relates a call she received from Downey upon learning she had the role. “He called to welcome me—at about 7:30 in the morning,” she says. “I don’t even know why I was up and out that early, but he said, ‘Hey, Leighton Meester? Robert Downey Jr. I called you an hour ago but you didn’t pick up.’ So of course I said, ‘That was, like,six o’clock in the morning.’ But that didn’t seem to faze him. Even in a friendly call first thing in the morning, he was all about the work.”

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

If the sins of the father are said to be visited upon the son, what of the sins of the son? That's the enigma Warner Bros. Pictures' new drama “The Judge” tries to address.

Slick Chicago lawyer Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr.) is set to pluck his latest white collar client from the State of Illinois’ prosecutorial clutches when he receives a message that his mother has just passed away. Hank has no contact with his dad, and his mom is the one person in his family—in his entire hometown—with whom he had remained in touch for the past 20 or so years. She is the only one, her death the only event, that can draw him home. What waits for him in idyllic Carlinville, Indiana, however, is much more than a memorial service, and far from a warm welcome. And before he can make his escape, Hank is called back to defend his own estranged father, the town’s venerable judge of 42 years, who suddenly finds himself on the wrong side of the bench.

“No matter how old we are, within five minutes of walking back into our childhood home, we are exactly who we were when we left there,” says director and producer of “The Judge,” David Dobkin. “We fall back into those routines; we’re subject to the same behavior and communication patterns of our youth, the same unspoken misunderstandings and unresolved issues, however great or small, which wind up driving us for the rest of our lives.”

Pairing acting heavyweights Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall for the first time, the film seeks to explore the role reversal we all face, whether through emotion or circumstance, of having to parent our aging parents and come to terms with our own personal history. How we, as adults, suddenly find ourselves in unfamiliar familial territory, and how even the best intentions don’t always lead us to take the best course of action or, ultimately, generate the best results.

The primary relationship Dobkin wanted to explore was one between a strong patriarchal father and the son who had left home years ago and who, due to an ongoing, seemingly irreparable rift between them, had never returned to face all the skeletons in his boyhood closet.

Robert Duvall, who plays the tough-as-nails judge Joseph Palmer, says he readily signed on because “it was a smart script, very well written with wonderful characters—definitely an actors’ film. On top of that, I felt the people involved would be great to work with. David really brought his own passion and commitment to it in a very positive way, so it was an enticing project for me.”

“Joseph Palmer is a man who represents the old world, the old guard,” Dobkin says. “He’s about honor; he believes that how a man walks through life has everything to do with where he ends up and how he is remembered. His legacy, that he helped people, that he protected an ideal, is important to him. Hank, on the other hand, believes you do whatever you need to do to get to the top, and once you’re there and as long as it was legal, it’s okay, even if it was manipulative. As long as the court tells him he wins, he doesn’t care if his client actually did terrible things, or whether he has to do terrible things to help his client. The law decides whether he’s right or wrong. His father views this not as something to be proud of, but as just more bad behavior from the rebellious teen Hank was growing up.”

Robert Duvall acknowledges, “The Judge would rather go to prison than lose his honor, definitely. And that complicates things for his sons, especially for Hank, who subconsciously thinks he’ll win his dad’s approval by winning the case.”

Duvall enjoyed exploring such a complex character. “He has many contradictions, like we all do in life. He’s a family-oriented guy, and he loves his sons, but he always left the showing of affection to his wife, and now she’s gone. So he’s very deficient when it comes to relating to them on his own, particularly Hank. They’ve had no contact for years; everything went through Hank’s mother, so they don’t have a way of interacting. And the Judge has never really forgiven Hank for something that happened in the past—or if he has, he can’t admit it, not even to himself, I’d suspect. So he gave me a lot of interesting things to work with, to find within myself.”

Downey praises his co-star, “I learned a lot from watching him just be so still and yet so commanding. I’m completely the opposite, we have very different styles. We all did, really. I got to see all these different ways of working come together and really gel, and I came away with an even deeper respect for the work thanks to this experience.”

Duvall admired the younger actor as well, citing, “He’s very, very talented, and he was relaxed and in control of both his performance and his off-camera work as a producer, so it was a pleasure for me.”

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures have just unveiled the main trailer of their upcoming inspiring drama “The Judge” which may be viewed at http://youtu.be/HYplDXNG_8s.

Directed by David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), “The Judge” stars Robert Downey, Jr. as big city lawyer Hank Palmer, who returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town’s judge (Robert Duvall), is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.

Starring alongside Downey, Duvall are Vera Farmiga, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Dax Shephard, and Oscar® winner Billy Bob Thornton. The film also stars Oscar® winner Melissa Leo, Leighton Meester, Ken Howard, Emma Tremblay, Balthazar Getty, David Krumholtz, Sarah Lancaster, Grace Zabriskie and Denis O’Hare.

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

In Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures' “The Judge,” Robert Downey, Jr. stars as big city lawyer Hank Palmer, who returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town’s judge (Robert Duvall), is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.

The seeds of the film’s story sprung from director David Dobkin’s experience with his own parents—a powerful attorney father and emotionally volatile mother—when he found himself in the difficult position of seeing his mother through the final stages of a terminal illness after his father passed.

Dobkin says he’s long harbored a desire to explore on film the complicated emotions inherent in an experience many adults find themselves thrown into. “Like me, I think a lot of people don’t realize that having to ‘parent a parent’ is a part of life—until it happens to them,” Dobkin reflects. “And when you’re unprepared for an experience like that, you make mistakes and have moments that you regret. But, as an artist, you get to go back and recreate those moments into what you wished they had been.”

Dobkin developed the story for “The Judge” with screenwriter Nick Schenk, which ultimately yielded a screenplay by Schenk and Bill Dubuque. Along the way, the director—who has become known for a string of blockbuster comedies like “Wedding Crashers”—found a passionate partner for this deeply personal project in Susan Downey, who produced the film with him and David Gambino.

Though “The Judge” is a studio movie, populated by a master class of actors, they always saw the project as a labor of love. “We faced a lot of challenges that we had to overcome, but we also had two really good things in our pocket,” Downey relates. “We had Robert Downey Jr. wanting to do it, which is a very helpful thing. But the reason Robert wanted to do it was because we had an amazing script.”

Susan Downey explains that the Team Downey production shingle was formed to seek out and support projects exactly like “The Judge.” Her partner at Team Downey and the film’s star, Robert Downey Jr. even tweeted about it. “He said it’s the kind of movie he’s wanted to make his whole life,” she smiles. “It has roots in the films we grew up loving—intelligent, character-driven stories told with humor and wit, and real emotion. It just had all the elements we were looking for when we first formed Team Downey. We decided that the best piece of material that came in would be the movie we would do first, and we were very fortunate that it happened to be The Judge.”

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures have just revealed the main poster art of “The Judge,” starring Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall and Vera Farmiga.

Directed by David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), “The Judge” stars Downey as big city lawyer Hank Palmer, who returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town’s judge (Duvall), is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.

Starring alongside Downey, Duvall and Farmiga are Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Dax Shephard, and Oscar® winner Billy Bob Thornton. The film also stars Oscar® winner Melissa Leo, Leighton Meester, Ken Howard, Emma Tremblay, Balthazar Getty, David Krumholtz, Sarah Lancaster, Grace Zabriskie and Denis O’Hare.

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.

From Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures comes “The Judge,” starring Oscar® nominee Robert Downey Jr., Oscar® winner Robert Duvall and Oscar® nominee Vera Farmiga. Take your first look at the film's main poster and teaser trailer which has just been released by the studios at http://youtu.be/o3AkVYmiirs.

Directed by David Dobkin (“Wedding Crashers”), “The Judge” stars Downey as big city lawyer Hank Palmer, who returns to his childhood home where his estranged father, the town’s judge (Duvall), is suspected of murder. He sets out to discover the truth and along the way reconnects with the family he walked away from years before.

Starring alongside Downey, Duvall and Farmiga are Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Dax Shephard, and Oscar® winner Billy Bob Thornton. The film also stars Oscar® winner Melissa Leo, Leighton Meester, Ken Howard, Emma Tremblay, Balthazar Getty, David Krumholtz, Sarah Lancaster, Grace Zabriskie and Denis O’Hare.

“The Judge” is being produced by Susan Downey (the “Sherlock Holmes” films), David Dobkin, and David Gambino (“The Brave One”), with Herbert W. Gains, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Kleeman and Bruce Berman serving as executive producers. The screenplay is by Nick Schenk (“Gran Torino”) and Bill Dubuque, story by Dobkin & Schenk.

Dobkin’s behind the scenes creative team includes Oscar®-winning director of photography Janusz Kaminski (“Lincoln”), production designer Mark Ricker (“The Way Way Back”), editor Mark Livolsi (“The Blind Side”) and costume designer Marlene Stewart (“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters”). The music is by 12-time Oscar® nominee Thomas Newman (“Saving Mr. Banks”).

Opening across the Philippines on Oct. 22, 2014, “The Judge” is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.