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Sci-Fi Wire wrote:Favreau Talks More Iron 2
Jon Favreau, who had been best known for his role in Swingers and for helming films such as Elf and Zathura, finally hit the big leagues this year with his megahit Iron Man.
With a second installment now set for April 30, 2010, SCI FI Wire had the chance to speak with Favs at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel in Hollywood on Sept. 11, where he was promoting the release of Iron Man on DVD and Blu-ray Sept. 30.
Casual and open as always, Favreau entered the room full of press in appropriately high spirits. After all, things are going pretty well for him these days. After posing for a few photos, he sat at a large table with some dessert and joined press for a lengthy lunchtime conversation.
The conversation covered a wide variety of Iron Man topics, especially in terms of his plans for the sequel. He discussed his thoughts on where the characters will go, what familiar faces from the comics might pop up (including War Machine and possibly even the Mandarin) and even revealed his hopes to shoot portions of Iron Man 2 in the IMAX big-screen format and, budget permitting, in 3-D!
Below is an edited version of the conversation with Favreau.
Iron Man hit much bigger than expected. Were you surprised?
Favreau: I was surprised by everything. I was surprised that the reviews were so strong, then I was surprised that it made so much money. And then I was surprised that Dark Knight had better reviews and [that] it made so much more money [laughs].
How have the crossovers--such as Tony Stark's (Robert Downey Jr.) appearance in this summer's The Incredible Hulk--affected your plans for the next film?
Favreau: It's tough, because it first starts off as "Hey, wouldn't it be fun if we stuck a Captain America shield in the background? Wouldn't it be fun if we had Sam Jackson play Nick Fury, like in The Ultimate Avengers?" Now, between Captain America, S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury and the after-the-credit scene that then in the 11th hour became the final scene of The [Incredible] Hulk, that one was a big one for me. You're going to that guy, and you're forming a team. That's clearly not the day after Iron Man ended. Where does that fit in the continuum?
I don't want to just ignore it. I guess you could do what Marvel does and say it's an alternate universe [laughs]. They've gotten away with it for a couple of decades. But how do you make it all work within that world? Because I think it is fun, and I think Hulk was successful in keeping in a tone that did not seem inconsistent with our film.
For [the upcoming] Avengers [movie], you're not just dealing with tech; you're dealing with inter-dimensional portals and all the s--t that makes you jump the shark if you don't handle it right. We were very restrained with how we used our superhero-ism in our movie, and we did that by keeping it all tech-based. You get into [Captain America] and [it's a] guy frozen [for decades]. ... OK, I could maybe buy that with the super soldier thing. And then you get into Thor and it's like, "OK ... " You know? How do you make that all feel of the same world that our movie does? And that's going to be the challenge moving forward.
You've run across that issue yourself with Mandarin.
Favreau: The Mandarin is such a tricky character for us, because every way you turn, it's a minefield. OK, so you get into the mystical Asian dark arts and inter-dimensional travel and all the rings that do the different things and psychic abilities and stuff. That could be cool. Maybe it's cool, maybe if we really make it authentic. ... And then we see the trailer for the Mummy movie [The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor]. It's, like, they've got the Mandarin and Fing Fang Fu, and they shot it in China, as authentic as you're ever going to get. So I don't know if that fits our film. It's great for The Mummy, but ... where do you go with it?
People get desperate, and that's when you start breaking your own rules, and the movies start to lose their identity.
Would you bring Mandarin in for the third film?
Favreau: The Mandarin's still the main guy. But we always remind ourselves, nobody likes the Emperor compared to Darth Vader in Star Wars. And he's got the same lightning bolts. When the Emperor was just this figure that you saw obliquely, it was like, "S--t, Darth Vader's bowing to someone? That guy must be really cool." But then as he talked more, it's like, "All right, enough." And now, in The Clone Wars, he's like a sidekick.
It's really all how you treat the person, and that's what informs what it is. And so the Mandarin, to have that kind of weight to him, it's really a matter of using all the narrative tricks to do it. But a dude running around in robes shooting these beams and rays that have powers, ... if you take them literally, [that] would throw off the balance of the whole universe… How do you do it and keep the whole thing together and yet fulfill the expectations from the book?
So we do have him, and I think it's something that, a little bit goes a long way. There are a lot of other characters and a lot of other countries that have become very interesting lately and fit very well into our universe.
How is the writing coming along?
Favreau: The writing's really coming along well. We've got Justin Theroux working on it, who Downey knows, [and] he echoes Downey's taste a lot. They worked together on Tropic Thunder. He's an actor. So I come at writing the same way he does, and he brings a real sense of fun. He's never worked in this genre before, and so he has that great newcomer's enthusiasm that I think we both share.
So it's about "OK, here are the books. Here's what we've got." So we're breaking story, and pages are coming out, but it's really more of a conversation than actual writing. The pages come, but the pages are never really what they are going to be in the movie until the day you're shooting.
[We're looking at] the Matt Fraction stuff. I haven't talked to him yet, but we want to get him out here [and] get some of the real defining minds from the books. The Fraction series seems to be informed as much by our movie as it is with what happened with Iron Man before. It's a very curious combination. ...
The first movie ends with a pretty major brawl. Are you looking to go even bigger in the sequel?
Favreau: I am. A lot of that came from the fact that we were being very ambitious as far as to what we were going to accomplish and the amount of money we had. So we went forward with the plan of "Let's shoot as much practically as we can," which I'm on board for, because I like that, and with the Stan Winston suit and the way it was designed. It was like, "Let's see what we can accomplish with it."
The Mark 1 [suit] we got a lot accomplished with. I'd say 90 percent of what you see in there is the suit. By the time you got into the Mark 2, we were doing a lot of flying, and we handed it off even more. The suit that they built was great reference for [Industrial Light & Magic, which did the film's visual effects].
When we got into the stuff with him fighting, with the real suit, it just looked terrible. It looked like Power Rangers.
It's a bummer, because we would have liked to have more of the flying. We did add one sequence where they went up to space, but it didn't really sing as much as it could have, had we planned originally to have it that way.
The good news is that it was successful and people liked it. It left us a lot of room for improvement the next time around. And that's another challenge. How do you outdo yourself? ...
In terms of an Avengers film, are you logistically concerned with the idea of trying to get all these huge stars into one film in terms of cost?
Favreau: That's sort of the danger, isn't it? Forget about creatively, but just from a perspective of finances. But somehow they make Ocean's Eleven, so there [are] clearly business models. I think it has more to do with if people are enthusiastic and feel that they're going to be in a movie that they're going to be proud of. --Jeff Otto
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- PeZook