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'Iron Man's' Jon Favreau Speaks

Tara DiLullo Bennett tackles the Super Bowl spots once again, this time speaking with Filmworkers Club, Framestore NY, the Mill, ka-chew! and Method.

One of the most popular panels of the weekend took place on Saturday afternoon at 4:00 pm, as director Jon Favreau took the stage to promote Paramount's upcoming Marvel Comics blockbuster Iron Man. The auditorium was filled to near-capacity as thousands gathered for a closer look at one of this summer's most highly anticipated films.

The first clip that Favreau screened featured Robert Downey Jr. in action as industrialist inventor Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, developing the boot jet technology that propels the Iron Man armor. Through trial and error, including a painful mishap or two, Stark perserveres and makes a major breakthrough by scene's end.

Additional clips featured the Iron Man armor in action, and fans received their first look at the armor from Tony Stark's point-of-view, including his on-board computer system, code-named "Jarvis" (a nod to the Iron Man comics, where that was the name of Tony Stark's longtime butler). The presentation wrapped with an extended trailer, which provided fleeting glimpses of many characters and action sequences from the film, and the audience reaction throughout the panel was very enthusiastic.

Following that presentation, a dozen reporters including myself participated in a roundtable interview session with Favreau. After exchanging greetings, he kicked things off by describing the balancing act involved in promoting this sort of film -- that subtle difference between revealing too much of the plot and not giving the audience enough reasons to get excited about the film.

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Jon Favreau: I was posting too much info on my MySpace page, I think, and people were figuring out the whole movie. You've got to be careful with that, when you take the stand. You've got to just "plead the fifth" at this point, then come out with clips like I did today. You have a little bit of radio silence for a while, and then just, "BANG!" [snaps fingers]

There are too many movies out there right now that don't have to prove anything. Dark Knight, because of the last [Batman] film... they've got nothing to prove. People are going to come see that movie. Indiana Jones... you show the picture of him putting his hat on, I'm going. [laughter] And they work it right, you're putting it out there when you give the audience something to go on. Nobody knew what Iron Man was when I came on board, and now everybody knows who he is, thanks to Comic-Con and the footage we brought.

People sit through so much caginess when they come to these panels, and there are four thousand, five thousand people out there, sometimes the sound is terrible... It really shows a dedication. When I come onstage, I want to show them more than they expect, as long as the studio is cool with it, which they were with this. I like to do that, and I haven't been punished for it yet.

Question: I didn't think you were going to show as much as you did.

JF: I didn't think so, either. At Comic-Con, last summer, nobody expected that much stuff.

Question: I thought we'd just get another trailer.

JF: Yeah, that's what people thought. I managed to show a lot because there are a lot of cuts, so you can show a lot without giving away the whole story. It definitely gets the fans going, and it tests high with marketing, and I don't question any of that. But for these fans, they want to know, "What's the personality of the film?" And hopefully, they'll like it. Maybe I'll get stoned for it, and I won't do it as much.

Question: How much production research did you have to do on the suit itself?

JF: That was fun. A lot of that's from the great artists we have working on the movie. Hopefully by the time the DVD comes out, we can put out a "making of," with all the artwork, and you can see the progression of it. I'm reading a Making of Star Wars art book now, and it's fantastic.

Question: Which one is that?

JF: The new one, with [George] Lucas and [Mark] Hamill on the cover. What a great book that is. It's got great interviews, before the movie was a hit. And you realize how arbitrary some of it is, and how seat-of-the-pants, and just what this poor guy went through. And then he made a fantastic finished product, just groundbreaking.

So there's a lot of cool stuff, seeing how the artwork developed into the stuff [seen onscreen]. I just want to make sure people like the movie first, because I hate when all the materials come out and nobody cares about the movie.

Question: Speaking of materials, we just saw the shot of Tony Stark with some supermodels in bikinis... what's the rating on this movie?

JF: PG-13.

Question: How strong a PG-13 is it?

JF: It's not too hard... In fact, that shot's not in the movie right now.

Question: Oh no!

JF: It was cut more for time, but it might make it onto the DVD, with the additional stuff. We're making the best version of the movie that we can. It's a new phenomenon... it used to be in your contract for PG-13, that there were a whole set of descriptors in there, and they're very picky about which descriptors you have, and there's a whole negotiation about that. If people think that it's not appropriate for their kids, this movie can't make enough money to be able to justify that, it's a real balancing act. Especially for the first one, where the tone is established. In the second one and third one... I mean, look at what happened in Revenge of the Sith. That was a very graphic film. But I have no problem bringing my kids to it, because I know it's Star Wars.

But the first movie out... like, Van Helsing comes out, and I don't want my kids seeing that thing. With this, I made a movie that I'd be comfortable with my kids seeing it. So, the language... with PG-13, you can, in theory, drop the F-Bomb once -- not in a Marvel movie. So the movie's not "hard," but it's intense. We want it to be intense, which people don't seem to mind. It's just language and sexuality, you've got to be careful how you present it.

I think tonally, though, you don't want to go too far into those areas, anyway. So I wouldn't say that there are any compromises made, but the movie was definitely informed by what its personality was supposed to be.

Question: You're known for your comedy. What did you draw on in your turn as an action director?

JF: There were two things that I drew on. One was the incredible collaborative resources I had around me, like [Stan] Winston, and the people at Marvel -- Avi Arad, the producer, and the preproduction process.

And there are the incredibly talented storyboard artists, pre-visualization people, and the people at ILM, and all the vendors... it's an incredibly big collaboration. And you must rely on those people. Even filmmakers who are action directors, like [Michael] Bay, or [Sam] Raimi... they rely heavily on their teams, as well. They have a vision for things, but you need hundreds of people to see that vision through.

And so I was very open to collaborating on that. So much of it... I'm just seeing these sequences now, after two years. I have a tremendous amount of respect for those action directors now.

The other thing I drew from was my sense of what I don't like to see, which is action that undermines the story of the film, undermines the reality. Marvel films have always had a tongue-in-cheek, irreverent quality, but never when it came to the action. It was always very serious about the stakes of winning and losing. You can joke around with [Tony Stark], and things happening in a humorous way to him, but when that suit's working, the stakes of the conflict had better not be made light of.

The action's a set piece, and it has to propel the story. If it were a musical, the songs would have to progress the story. If it were a boxing movie, each match would have to represent something. In this case, it's action, and it has to do something metaphorically.

Because there's so much CG, I didn't want to just have virtual cameras flying around, so we found a great, practical air-to-air film, like Top Gun, and we said, "This was all real. This was before CGI. How did they film it? What did they have to do?" They used long lenses. We looked at the "making of." It looks different than Stealth. In Stealth, the camera does this, it does this, here's the short lens... it frames everything perfectly, and it goes for a different aesthetic, it goes for being spectacular. In Top Gun, they try to line the two planes up, and it's so hard to keep them both in frame. Sometimes it buzzes...

You know who does it good? Battlestar Galactica, the TV series. They do it very well. It's very charming, what they do. They zoom, they miss, they rack... it's almost becoming a motif, like the camera angles on NYPD Blue, but it's there. And I'm like, "Look at this. Why is this cool?" When something blows up, you miss it, you zoom in to get it, and it looks like a YouTube video. And you need to set rules.

When I was in Rudy, the director asked, "How do we make the football look real?" I was just a fly on the wall, being an actor, but the NFL film guy, he said, "The way you can make it look real, but you won't do it... "

We said, "Why not? Why won't we do it?"

He said, "Don't put any cameras on the field. We never have a camera on the field." If you see a close-up, it's a long lens. Most people, laymen, can't tell if it's a long lens or a short lens, but there's a quality to the background, and the depth of field, and you'll notice that it looks real. If you look at Rudy, you'll notice that there's never a camera on the field. The action is all from the sidelines, and it gives you an authentic feeling. That's why, when he sacks that guy, the quarterback, you really feel something. It feels real. And the more real the action is, the more you feel emotionally. The more tension you feel, the more you laugh. It makes for a more visceral experience.

When you look at all the flying stuff, we sometimes break the rules, but we always try to make it -- Where's this camera? What lens would it be on? What would be in front of that lens? There would be some mist, there'd be some imperfections on the lensing.

We shot real planes. We didn't just take a camera and do this, we flew planes, and followed the planes with other planes, then we'd paint something out and paint in the other thing that was supposed to be flying, so you'd have a certain sloppiness to it. I don't know if people know that, but people responded really well to the F-22 stuff, even the old stuff. And that's because it was shot with real lenses, real planes, and those were the rules. Let's pretend we really have these things that we're shooting.

It might not be as dynamic as other movies, where you can put the camera anywhere, but I think it adds to the overall storytelling.

Question: Which comic book version are you bringing to the screen? Is it from the Ultimate Iron Man comic series, or the classic series, or...

JF: Ours is the more classic version. I really like Warren Ellis and Adi Granov's version of the origin story. We borrowed from that a lot, the "Extremis" storyline. There was a flashback... it was very consistent [with the original version], but they expanded on it, and I like that a lot.

There are other things that the books don't discuss, like how you build a suit. He made a missile. On Robot Chicken, they're making fun of it. "What's he doing in there?" [laughter] We really went out of our way to try and make it at least plausible. It's still a comic book movie, at its core. There are certain leaps that you have to make that might be nothing but silly, but at least try to make it make sense.

The tone is, kind of like the classic guy, but you take that early'60s, mid-'60s cad today, and he's a bit of an anachronism. He comes off as an asshole. How will people react? What is Pepper Potts now? A secretary that gets all excited that the boss is talking to her, with thought balloons about how she'd like to get married to him? [laughter] I think she's more like today's professional woman. When you have an assistant, they take your life over, and you rely on them heavily. When people invest that much in their career, a man and a woman, a weird de facto marriage develops, with these two people who are living completely unbalanced lives. How do you explore that? That's a dynamic I'm very proud of. That's probably what I'm most proud of in the whole film, is that relationship. It's really cool. It's Gwyneth [Paltrow] in a way that I've never seen her in movies, but there's just a really appealing quality she has as a friend, and as a person.

Question: What voice is Iron Man going to have?

JF: We still have to discover that. In the comic books, it's very easy, because you just draw a jagged line on the word balloon, and that's Iron Man. [laughter] It's a balancing act. If you lose too much of the personality, it's just too weird. You lose part of Robert [Downey Jr.]. That's something we tried to show in the footage today, that virtual "suit" that he's in, that heads-up display, that implies a sort of binocular vision that would give him a 3D environment and operating system in the suit that would allow you to explain things, and it doesn't have to be a camera right here, implying what he's seeing in a virtual space. You can see Tony [Stark] and what he's processing and dealing with. You can cut into Tony, when that's appropriate, and then there's the Iron Man side of the suit, and that voice... and that's why we've got Skywalker working on this. Right here. I'm hopping in the RV, driving up to the [Skywalker] Ranch and working on this on Monday.

Question: How much of the movie is dedicated to Stark building the armor?

JF: Well, a lot of it is. You got a taste of that in the trailer. You've got him building the Mark I armor, which is the old stuff. Mark II is the flying prototype, the sort of "Howard Hughes" discovery part of the film, and then there's the Mark III, which he ultimately weaponizes and is able to do combat in, the battle armor.

Question: Are we going to see a lot of action in that suit?

JF: Oh yeah. [laughs] Yes, you will.

Question: How far into the movie does the Mark III armor show up?

JF: I don't think it breaks down into... it's an origin story, so a lot of time is spent on developing that first suit, figuring out who he is, and integrating that in a way that's hopefully a bit more organic than most origin stories, which tend to feel like, um... bonus scenes. [laughter] You know what I mean?

Question: Can you talk a little bit about Jeff Bridges' character?

JF: He's Obadiah Stane. Fans, I think, know what they come to expect from that character. And yes, we have a big robot. I guess I can call him "Iron-Monger," since Hasbro has no problem putting that on their packaging. [laughter] Yes, it's Iron-Monger. I think the fans can connect the dots. We don't present it the way they did in the comic books. And it might play differently to people who don't know what to expect.

I just saw Michael Clayton, and the Sydney Pollack character in there seemed pretty similar in many ways, definitely an avuncular character to Tony, which isn't in the books. We just gave him a more complex origin. He's a great actor, and there are certain expectations of a film with Jeff Bridges, which are in some way supported, and you also have to play against some of those expectations, as you do with the source material.

Whether it's casting, or it's what the books had, or it's canon, or Marvel's canon... If we break from it, it's not arbitrarily. It's because we want to play with people's expectations. And if we go with it, that's for a reason, too. It's a bit of a cat and mouse game to play. But it's never because the studio executives say, "Who gives a shit?" [laughter] It's always because we said, "What would be cool to do here? Is this a cool way to go? Do you go with Ultimate Iron Man, or do you go with the traditional Iron Man?" Is it an attaché case that the armor pops out of, or is it the floating "Extremis" armor? We figure it out, and we define our own Iron Man. We hope it's consistent, and that people don't eat their livers out while they're watching the movie, feeling that their childhood has been raped. [laughter]

Question: You had mentioned wanting to do a western with Vince Vaughn?

JF: Yeah, yeah. No, that's not happening. I don't think so... I just worked with him on Four Christmases, so we're definitely collaborating, but he's making a lot of hay while the sun's shining, with his career as a comedic leading man. That's what's happening there, and I'm doing a lot of work on these franchises, and hopefully this becomes a full-time day job for me as well.

Question: Was it fun adding characters like [ Hulk supporting character] Thunderbolt Ross into the film?

JF: Interesting question. Was it fun to... This goes back to my logic class. I can't answer that.

Question: What appeals to you about Iron Man as a character?

JF: I like that he's not a teenager. [laughter] He could have been. He could have been a twentysomething. Especially when you look at these films, the studio's nervous to have someone my age playing Iron Man, because if it's a success, all of a sudden you knock out a few of these, and he's graying at the temples. [laughter]

Question: Did you really consider making him a teenager?

JF: Definitely. I was not being just subtly pushed in that direction. The studio wanted to have someone... look at what's been the key to success for the Marvel franchises. Your superhero is your star, you pay a certain amount of money to design the suit, or the CGI, and that's your star. That's who opens your movie. And then you cast people who are good actors, but generally, this is the defining role of their career. Tobey Maguire's a nice guy, and he's got a nice body of work, but he was Peter Parker once he became Peter Parker.

Fantastic Four was not a cast-contingent project. They cast the people that they felt suited the roles and cost the right amount of money at the time, and they built that franchise that way. Thanks to Pirates of the Caribbean and Johnny Depp, you can pick the right actor and open a movie to a whole new audience other than just those who, for example, wanted to see a Disney ride movie. When I heard "Johnny Depp," it really opened me up. And the way that Chris Nolan cast his films, also, and even the [Tim] Burton Batman. There was a coolness to the whole cast that added a dimension.

Robert really lobbied hard for the role, and there were enough people who really shared that vision, who helped fight for it, to get over the understandable misgivings in casting a guy that is not a young, new fresh face, but instead somebody who has a body of work and a history that really added to the role and gave it a credibility. It took a weight off my shoulders when we got to cast the guy. I knew the Tony Stark shit would be cool, and it would be fun, and it would be interesting to watch. And it wasn't like you were sitting through Tony Stark to get to Iron Man. I think it's been a really balanced project, and he's been a really wonderful partner, and I think as soon as it was announced, anyone who had any misgivings about the movie got on board, and everyone will tell you that they wouldn't have had it any other way.

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