"I wanted to have different imagery because you change the attitude, you’re doing 'Dark Knight.' That’s the brooding gothic version of the billionaire industrialist. Bruce Wayne when he gets depressed, he listens to his music on his headphones and he locks himself up in his study. Tony Stark, when he gets depressed, he gets bombed and wraps his car around a telephone pole. It’s a different type of character, and so we really wanted to play up those differences."
Most people know Jon Favreau for the work he's done on his indie successes,"Swingers" and "Made," but ten years ago, few would have pictured Favreau directing a big budget picture, much less a superhero summer blockbuster. Favreau took to the helm of Sony's space epic "Zathura" and while that film didn't reach the hype that many expected it would, "Iron Man" will add a whole new dimension to Favreau's directorial portfolio.
Favreau assembles an all-star cast comprising of Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeff Bridges, Terrence Howard and Leslie Bibb in the Paramount Pictures feature "Iron Man," opening in theaters this weekend. Based on the comic book series created by Stan Lee, "Iron Man" tells of billionaire industrialist Tony Stark who has a change of heart - both literally and emotionally - after a harrowing kidnapping and vows revenge against those who uses the weapons of Stark Industries for evil.
We talked to Jon about bringing to life the character of Tony Stark.
Q: There are rumors on the Net about all of these cameos that you filmed for the movie but we didn't see them...
JON: You didn’t see the movie?
Q: We did but is the theatrical version going to be different from what the press saw?
JON: Ah, interesting. I love the echo chamber of the Internet, because that’s where things become reality. Let’s put it this way: I think the challenge has been first people getting to know who "Iron Man" was, and I think that the online fans and the fanbase did a tremendous service to me and the film by bringing it to everybody’s attention, because this is the big water cooler. When they saw the footage at Comic-Con and saw all the online leaks, either the ones we sent out there with releases or ones that found their way through spies. People started to get "Iron Man" and anticipate it, and the word started to spread, and it worked its way into the mainstream and now everybody wants to see the movie.
The problem is that for two years, we’ve been in dialogue, and there weren’t a lot of surprises left, so I guess my job is still to try to figure out how to make it feel like people have been waiting for this movie and watching all the stuff online and all the minutes and minutes and hours of material that seem to be on there, to have it still be a fresh experience when they see it. My job is to still entertain the people who have been following along everything. When something doesn’t seem like a surprise and everybody expects it, it sort of makes it not fun, so I just want to try to still remember the fans that have been watching diligently and have enough there that makes it exciting for them as well.
Q: So will these cameo surprises and secrets be inserted into the movie this weekend?
JON: You guys have been filling in the blanks for the last two years. I don’t expect it to stop now, but I never lied to any of the fans, and I just try to be ambiguous. I think that they’d prefer in the long run if I don’t answer the questions.
Q: When doing this film after seeing superhero films from other studios, did you think about what you needed to add, so new fans could enjoy it as well as old fans of the comic book series?
JON: Yeah, I think the comic book fans from the studio standpoint - if this were a big studio movie - would be completely irrelevant. Time and time again, it’s been proven that the studios care about making money. It’s their job. They want to take the source material and use it to make it as appealing as possible to the broadest possible audience, while costing the least to make, and making the most profits. That’s their job.
When Marvel sets out to make a movie, their priority’s a little bit different. They’re servicing a fanbase. They’re protecting the source material. They are the keepers of this pantheon of characters that have made the corporation profitable over the last whatever it is, 40 years, and they’ve built it to this merchandising empire.
I think there’s an added responsibility that they have that when they hire me, I definitely feel as a fan, there’s a responsibility to stay true to the expectations of the fans. That doesn’t always mean doing what’s in the source material, but it means considering it and making decisions not because of you arbitrarily wanting to change something, but because you think it services the material the best. There was that responsibility, but nobody knew who Iron Man was outside the core fans, and so we had to educated everybody out there as to who Iron Man is and what he can do.
Although you can’t ignore the fanbase, your fanbase is not the people who are ultimately going to be dictating the success or failure of the movie commercially. You have to make a movie that’s accessible to people who don’t know anything about Iron Man, and that’s the fine line I had to walk was to sort of put enough Easter eggs in the movie for the fans, stay true in the casting and the way I present the visual FX and tell the story and choose the heroes and villains and technology. But also present it so that somebody could just plunk down their 10 bucks, sit down and go for a ride and take their mind off the election for two hours.
Q: What made you think of Robert Downey Jr. and was it a challenge to sell him to the studio as Iron Man?
JON: The lightbulb just went off over my head, and I realized this was the guy that could bring me home. This is the #1 draft pick that’s going to take me to the Super Bowl. I got how to make the movie, how we were not going to just be a poor man’s Spider-Man if I could get this guy.
The problem of course was far too interesting of a choice for the studio and there was an unequivocal resounding “no” when I presented him. There were people who were fans of his, and many people said, “Look, it’s clearly the best choice creatively. It’s just the first movie, it’s too much money. Nobody knows Iron Man, so now you’re going to be defining Iron Man by Robert because people know Robert more than they know Iron Man.”
That was never the case with the Hulk and Eric Bana, it’s not the case with Spider-Man and Tobey or with Batman and Christian Bale, so I understood their misgivings. He’s ten years older than they would have liked me to hire somebody if they’re starting a franchise, too. Hopefully, if this movie works well, they’re going to make a lot of them. That’s many years, and he’s already in his 40s, so I got it, but as we went round and round, we realized that this guy brings dimension, this is like hiring Johnny Depp to do “Pirates.” People are ready for this guy to play this role. It’s not him starring in “Elf”, it’s him as Tony Stark. That’s Tony Stark. People want Tony Stark to be Tony Stark. That’s why people make rap songs about him.
He captures that bad boy attitude and makes this movie not be Batman. This is a 40-year-old rip-off of Batman. When Iron Man was first invented, they were copying each other, DC and Marvel, and Batman came first, and now we have an incredibly compelling franchise and if “Dark Knight” is halfway as good as it looks online, that thing is going to be a monster. I can’t be making Batman, I gotta make my own thing, so I gotta play up the subversive attitude that Marvel had when it established itself as a reaction to DC. You had Superman who could do no wrong living in Metropolis in this fantasy land, and then you had Stan Lee brings his personality to Marvel, it was subversive. It wasn’t epic. They were living in New York. They were having trouble paying their rent, they were getting into trouble. They were running into each other in the neighborhood. They had problems, they had flaws, and it was that subversive humor that defined Marvel, not an epic big quality, so we had to find the attitude and that’s why we paid through the nose for heavy metal music that you’ve never seen in another superhero movie. That’s why we open with “[AC/DC's] Back in Black”, that’s why it’s Robert Downey Jr. This had to have attitude and be rock ‘n’ roll and in your face. That’s why it’s on the West Coast and that’s why it’s Howard Hughes and the history of flight. I wanted to have different imagery because you change the attitude, you’re doing “Dark Knight.” That’s the brooding gothic version of the billionaire industrialist. Bruce Wayne when he gets depressed, he listens to his music on his headphones and he locks himself up in his study. Tony Stark, when he gets depressed, he gets bombed and wraps his car around a telephone pole. It’s a different type of character, and so we really wanted to play up those differences, so it didn’t compete with the movie that I know is going to be great and thankfully, we’re a month apart. We’re not competing directly.
Q: When do you decide to insert yourself into a film that you direct?
JON: As an actor, you mean? As an actor, I’m in there because it’s probably me being selfish and wanting to be an actor in it, and know that Happy Hogan has more to do later. (laughter) And I get to have a few scenes with Gwyneth later, but she doesn’t know that.
Q: She's definitely up for making out with you later...
JON: She does? I’m definitely doing a sequel. Even if I’m not directing, I’m there, because I’m in love with her. I just fell in love with those heels walking around the set, everybody on set would just get quiet. But Happy Hogan was also a tip or a nod to the audience saying, “By me putting myself in, that’s not just an extra driving the car, that’s Happy Hogan.” If you read the books, he’s going to be going to be in the sequel.. we don’t have room for him here, but he’s in there. I’m considering you guys, and then the reason for the male-female thing, that’s my wheelhouse, that’s what I’m most comfortable with.
I love those meet cute scenes, I love romantic comedies. You look at “Swingers”, I can write that dialogue for days, and to have Gwyneth and him, and there was a real affection between the two of them, and a lot of that was two-camera set-ups or me writing a scene the night before and bringing it in or us improvising or trying three different versions of the scene before the press conference. I love those scenes. So much of my personality gets infused into this movie because of the spontaneous nature of how we shot it that if I dig it, I think it comes across.
Q: Can you talk about what villains we might be seeing in the second and third films?
JON: I think Mandarin for sure, I think War Machine for sure. I think you gotta go with War Machine, you gotta give Terrence more to do. He really had to be patient in this one, and he could have been Tony Stark, know what I mean? If we wanted to go against the grain of what was in the books. He characterizes that, and once you break him out of the role that he was relegated to in this one, I think he could go toe-to-toe with Robert, and it could be a cool buddy set-up. Then you need some big bad guys, and I think the bad guys are going to be tech-based for the most part, seeing what’s worked about this film.
Q: Why did you go with Obadiah Stane for this movie being that he’s not the most well-known Iron Man villain?
JON: No, it worked well, and we wanted a big suit and with Jeff Bridges and he was up for it, and in casting Jeff, that role really grew, and we went away from the Mandarin, because we really didn’t know what to do with him and it seemed too ambitious in the first one. Obadiah seemed like the right guy to do, and it just worked well with the suit.
"Iron Man" opens in theaters May 2nd.