1. Q: Highlight the arc of Tony Stark over the course of these films and where we find him now in Marvel’s “Iron Man 3.”
A: The journey of Iron Man, and frankly the journey of the entire Marvel cinematic universe, started with the journey of Tony Stark. The exciting thing about “Iron Man 3” is, yes, it’s the culmination from “Iron Man 1” and “Iron Man 2,” but it’s also a follow up to “Marvel’s The Avengers.” So it’s one of the first situations I can think of where you have a movie that is the sequel to two movies and in a way that liberates it to be more unique than anything that has come before, which is what we’re most excited about.
Tony is a guy who is all about his journey; he’s all about the arc. When we met him in “Iron Man 1,” he was a pompous fellow building weapons and almost immediately suffered a life- changing, dramatic accident by being blown up by one of his own missiles in Afghanistan. He galvanized himself into building this Iron Man suit, giving up the weapons game and dedicating himself. As he tells Pepper, “I finally know what I have to do. I know what’s right.” “Iron Man 2” tested that and he had some health problems. In “The Avengers” he was faced with something world-changing, again.
Not only did he encounter all of those crazy characters with hammers and capes and shields and gamma-radiated strength, but a portal to another world opened above his head. Tony Stark is a very scientifically minded guy, who thought he was at the cutting edge of science and suddenly learned in those brief moments at the end of “The Avengers,” that there is an infinite amount that he doesn’t know.
I think that made him feel small in a certain way and I think even encountering those other Super Heroes in “The Avengers” made him feel like he was not the most powerful person in the world, which I think Tony likes to feel like he is. He may be the smartest person in the world, but not necessarily the most powerful. So when we meet him at the beginning of “Iron Man 3,” he’s using the suit as a shell almost. It is a shell to shield himself from all of this new information, this new influx of reality that is crashing around him. At the same time, as tends to happen in good movies, another villain arises. And suddenly, when he’s sort of at a state where he’d much rather stay in his lab and work on his suits, something happens that forces him to get out of his house, to get out of his lab and even in some cases, get out of the suit, to confront this new evil.
2. Q: How has Robert Downey Jr.’s performance over the years surprised you?
A: The reason we cast Robert [Downey Jr.] in “Iron Man 1” is because he’s a spectacular actor and since then, he’s obviously become the biggest movie star in the world and has shown us each time why that is. He’s not resting on his laurels. He doesn’t come in and say, “I’m the biggest star in the world.” He comes in and shows you why he’s the biggest star in the world.
And the way he does that is by giving this unbelievable performance that can be, of course, snarky and, of course, funny, which Tony Stark is all the time and Robert can do in his sleep, but it’s the more touching moments too. There are scenes with Pepper in “Iron Man 3” that are really emotional and really loving. In a fun way, not in a dour, sort of movie-of-the-week way, but in a fun way and in a way that you don’t usually see between men and women in these kinds of action movies.
It was important to us that the relationship between Tony and Pepper carry through all four movies including “Marvel’s The Avengers” and certainly into “Iron Man 3” and it sort of reaches its pinnacle in “Iron Man 3” in a very nice way. He also encounters along his surprising journey in “Iron Man 3” a little boy, named Harley. We’ve never seen Tony interact with children necessarily. Iron Man saves a few occasionally along the way, but we’ve never seen him interact with a child and I don’t think it’s something Tony does very often.
So it’s fun to see Robert’s performance as he’s a little standoffish at first about this kid and sort of treats this kid like an adult, but also clearly embracing a little bit of the fatherly overtones that this kid wants to get out of Tony Stark. And again, it’s a surprising thing to see from Robert. That it’s not just the snark; it’s not just the humor; it’s not just romance that he can do with Gwyneth so well, but these very sort of touching moments with this little kid.
3. Q: What would you say is going to be different about his character in this film?
A: Our favorite moments in the saga that is Iron Man really go back to the first act of “Iron Man 1,” where Tony Stark, who you meet in the back of that humvee with those soldiers, is clearly on top of the world. He’s a very famous guy; he’s a rich guy; he’s a successful guy and he is ignorant. Sort of happily ignorant to the ramifications to what his work is doing to the world. Then that comes crashing down around him when that convoy is attacked. He’s thrown into a cave, a bag over his head, tied to a chair—the very first image we see before the “Iron Man” title appears in “Iron Man 1.” We thrust him into literally a cave with a box of scraps and we need to see him get out of that situation.
We like painting Tony into a corner and taking away all of his toys and all of the immense wealth and assets and leave him with just his mind and see how he can get out of that situation. You’ve seen in the trailers that there’s an attack on Tony’s house. So by the end of the first act of “Iron Man 3,” his house is gone. His technology is gone. All he has is a barely functioning, prototype suit that, soon after he escapes from the house that’s destroyed, is not functioning at all. So Tony finds himself in the middle of the United States of America, in Rose Hill, Tennessee, completely out of his element. A guy who lives in Malibu and goes to Monaco and gallivants in Manhattan in the middle of Rose Hill, Tennessee, with a suit not working, doing an investigation about the villain known as the Mandarin, to try to figure out where he is. Tony believes there are clues here that are going to lead him to find where the Mandarin is, so he drags the broken suit into a shed that he finds and takes an axe and opens it up. It turns out that he is in the little workshop of this young boy named Harley.
It is a lot of fun to see Tony out of his element, without any of his toys, with just his mind, to see how he can overcome and there are villains that come and attack him in this sequence, with no suit at all to grab. I won’t give away whether he is successful or not, but you can probably guess and it’s that ingenuity that’s fun. How is he going to get out of that cave with a box of scraps again? And that’s something that we really didn’t see in “Iron Man 2.” We didn’t see it in “The Avengers” either and it is something that is wholly unique to “Iron Man 3.”
4. Q: Why was it important to set the tone to have Tony get back to basics?
A: Early on in the development of the first “Iron Man” movie, we did talk about back to basics for Tony because we wanted to see him just use his brain. We wanted to see what he could do when the odds are against him and he doesn’t have anything. You wonder how he is going to get out of this one and it also allows you to be with Tony while he’s figuring it out.
But how do you take a billionaire, industrialist, playboy and make him relatable and make him into somebody that you can root for? One way is to have Robert [Downey Jr.] play Tony, who is a very likeable hero. The other way is take away everything he has and make you root for the guy. How do you make the biggest Super Hero in the world into an underdog in a small town in the middle of the United States? Take away everything he has. And that’s really what we wanted to see there—how he then fights to build and get it back.
5. Q: How did screenwriter Drew Pearce come onto the film?
A: We had developed a film with Drew Pearce and we didn’t end up making that film. As we were starting to film “Marvel’s The Avengers” and were finishing up post production on “Thor” and “Captain America,” I was in London and I asked to meet with Drew, who had just been told and was disappointed understandably that we weren’t going to be moving forward with this movie that he’d written, but I asked him about “Iron Man 3.”
Of his own accord he wrote about a 25-page treatment and outline, sort of an essay of ideas, about where he saw the character going. While we didn’t go with everything he had in that initial document, there was so much there and so much passion, that we decided we wanted him to come on board and team him up with the writer/director we were hiring, Shane Black.
After some initial hesitancy on both Drew and Shane’s part, within a matter of weeks they became great friends and most importantly great partners in this screenplay and Drew has stayed with us throughout the entire process and done a tremendous job.
6. Q: You tend to have your writers on set while shooting. Why is it important to have such access to the writers?
A: I love having the main writers with us throughout as much of production as possible, in case there’s a good idea that pops up or a better idea that comes up or if there is a concern on set. You put a scene on its feet, the actor starts saying the lines and there’s a little concern about a word here or there and, while Robert famously loves to adlib, you always want to make sure that those adlibs are still servicing the plot.
If something’s not working, how can we build something that does work for the scene, but still bridges properly from the prior scene into the next scene? Having a writer there is a tremendous asset.
7. Q: What was it about Shane that made you know right away that he was the man to bring in for the job?
A: We’ve talked a lot about it and Robert [Downey Jr.] has talked a lot about it and it’s true, that Shane [Black] has sort of been in the shadows of the Iron Man world since “Iron Man 1.” Robert had worked with him on a great movie called “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” which Shane wrote and directed, and frankly, that was one of the movies that Jon Favreau and I looked at when we initially started considering the idea of casting Robert for “Iron Man.”
Robert would take scenes on “Iron Man 1” and go over to Shane’s house and just ask Shane about them and Shane would give some great input to it and the one that I remember most clearly was the scene at the beginning of act two in “Iron Man 1.” Tony’s returned from Afghanistan, he’s broken out in the Mark 1, Rhodey has picked him up, Pepper has met him outside the C-17 there at Edwards Air Force Base and the first thing he says is that he wants to do a press conference.
He ends up coming in eating a hamburger and tells everybody to sit down. He talks about his father a little bit, in the ramp up to announcing that he is no longer making weapons and much of that scene was written and inspired by the conversations with Shane Black. So he was always sort of there helping and guiding in the background, particularly for Robert, for his character. So when it came time to find a new filmmaker for “Iron Man 3,” I won’t say he was the first person we thought of because you always start with a list and you go through a lot of names.
Frankly, we had no idea if Shane would be interested or not and when it became clear that Shane was interested and we began taking meetings with him, it became clear that we had to do this. There was a manifest destiny from “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” through casting Robert and now to Shane doing it and bringing that Shane Black energy to the franchise. There are examples out there of very good part threes and there are examples out there of disappointingly, mediocre part threes. It’s our goal to make this one of the better and more exciting part threes and the only way we really feel we can do that is by taking chances and by not just sticking quote unquote to the formula, and by going outside the box. And frankly, “Iron Man 3,” under the direction of Shane Black, is almost another genre. It is a technological thriller as Shane calls it. It’s a throwback to action movies from the ’80s and ’90s and just sort of has a balls-to-the-wall nature to it.
It delves into Tony Stark’s character in a great, quirky, unexpected way and one of the signatures of a Shane Black film, which “Iron Man 3” has in spades, is that when you think the movie is going to go left, it suddenly goes right. That was fun to do. It’s scary sometimes but fun to do. You can probably only do it on a part three, where the audience has expectations. The audience thinks they know the way you’re going to go with something and then you totally turn it on its head and spin it. It was exciting and it was a way to not fall into the “threequelitis” trap.
8. Q: Where do we find Pepper Potts at the beginning of this film?
A: Pepper Potts, at the beginning of “Iron Man 3,” is running Stark Industries; she’s the CEO of Stark Industries as she was in “Iron Man 2” and she’s sort of accepting this notion that Stark Industries is something that Tony’s no longer a part of. He’s really focusing on the suits; he’s focusing on being a Super Hero and she is this incredibly powerful woman that has taken this position of power within the company. She’s moved in with Tony; they are certainly a couple now and there are no secrets about that, as you saw in their relationship in “The Avengers.”
Clearly it had progressed past the kiss at the end of “Iron Man 2.” So they are living together and they are in a committed relationship, which again is somewhat unique to the superhero genre. That is one of the reasons we really wanted to do it. But when you live with Tony Stark there are always issues and there are always concerns and one of the concerns at the beginning of this film is the fact that he is not sleeping. He’s spending all of his time tinkering and building suits. And Tony’s been doing nothing but building suits and suits and suits and suits. It’s an obsession and, as Pepper calls it, his distraction. It’s clearly affecting their relationship.
9. Q: Jon Favreau is reprising his role of Happy Hogan. What was it like having him back but not in the director’s chair this time around?
A: Having Jon Favreau on the movie, not just playing Happy Hogan in as big a role that Happy Hogan’s ever had in the “Iron Man” movies, but also as executive producer behind-the-scenes, is a tremendous asset in regards to the script. Jon was very, very gracious in the way that he helped Shane [Black]. Shane would ask him a question about either working with Robert [Downey Jr.] or setting up the character, or getting the best out of any of the cast that had been in the prior movies and even technical things.
Jon is an A-list director now, who’s done a tremendous amount of visual effects work and prides himself on being extremely knowledgeable about that. Jon’s graciously shared that knowledge with Shane.
It was really a very special thing to have Jon on set and his part in this movie is in a way what activates Tony into his adventure in this movie. The heart at the core of this movie is not only Pepper, it is not only the little boy Harley, but it is Happy Hogan. Jon steals, I think, almost every scene he’s in “Iron Man 3.” It’s hilarious and he really gave his all.
10. Q: Talk about Don Cheadle coming back as Rhodey and where we find him at the beginning of this film.
A: When last we saw Jim Rhodes, played by Don Cheadle, he was flying away from Tony at the end of “Iron Man 2” wearing the Mark 2 suit that he had taken from Tony’s house. What we learn in the beginning of “Iron Man 3” is that they’ve made an arrangement. Tony has let Rhodey have this suit; he’s using it in conjunction with the US Government. So, at the beginning of “Iron Man 3,” we see that the President has asked Rhodey as War Machine to get a new paint job and take on the new moniker of the Iron Patriot in order to do American business and be the American hero as opposed to The Avengers or Iron Man himself, who is sort of a separate entity. Rhodey, being a Military man, does step into that, proudly. But he’s still best friends with Tony, so he’s always giving information to Tony behind-the-scenes and I think has been doing that since he got the suit in “Iron Man 2.”
That relationship between Rhodes and Tony is core to the franchise and the comic books. In the “Iron Man” movies up to now, Jim Rhodes has always been sort of Tony’s conscience. He has been the person who has warned Tony, “Are you sure you should be doing this?” “Are you going that way?” “Why are you doing this?” In this movie, we’re embracing more of their friendship and you see why they’re best friends in this movie.
In a way it becomes a buddy action film, in the third act, where they team up. Neither of them have a suit at a certain point in the movie and they really team up in a great, sort of old- fashioned action movie way and Don and Robert have such an amazing rapport. Don can keep up with all of Robert’s adlibs in a way that almost always ends up in the movie in the perfect fashion. So, seeing Don back is a huge pleasure and he brings a level of authority to that part; you just believe everything he says and in keeping up with Tony, it gives us that great Shane Black banter.
11. Q: Was the plan always to bring the Mandarin character into the Marvel’s “Iron Man” storyline?
A: The Mandarin is unquestionably Tony Stark’s greatest foe. The reason for that, frankly, is not because he’s appeared in a lot of great stories, but he’s just appeared in a lot of stories, going back to the early ’60s. So, if you asked the question, “Who is Iron Man’s greatest foe?” Odds are, people would say the Mandarin and because of that, he’s always been at the top of every list for each movie. In fact he was a part of every draft of “Iron Man 1” until about three months before we started filming.
Each time we came to another film, we talked about the Mandarin but just didn’t have a great idea of how to do it. His appearances in the comics are very dated in a lot of them. They are not appropriate anymore and he’s been updated in many ways. But not in a way that we ever found would work for the movie.
Then Shane Black had an idea of making him somebody whose background is unknown; we don’t know where he’s from at first, but he seems to be some kind of military officer that has gone off the reservation. He is starting to pull all of this iconography and symbolism from other cultures to his own ends to use them as symbols to pervert the symbol of the United States. He utilizes the moniker of the Mandarin and robes with dragons on them and uses South American sort of guerilla tactics to create this aura of fear of his terror organization. The Mandarin is sort of a very frightening, modern-day terrorist who has taken terror motifs from all over the world to use to his own ends. It was a very cool and relevant and scary idea. And the best thing about the Mandarin, always in the comics, has been how relentless he was against Tony.
When you see this film, something has happened in act one and the Mandarin is deemed responsible. On national television, Tony says, “I’m gonna come after you, Mandarin. I’m gonna find you.” And within a day, the Mandarin has decimated Tony’s house. Obadiah Stane didn’t do that, Whiplash didn’t do that, Loki didn’t do that. The Mandarin does it in the first act of “Iron Man 3.” That is very, very serious and very big.
When we were casting the part, we wanted somebody whose ethnicity was not specific and we wanted somebody who was a spectacular actor. Sir Ben Kingsley was interested and it all fell into place.
There are many different incarnations of the Mandarin; he’s sort of pulled from all the comic books to create this very unique and very iconic villain. When you first hear his voice in the trailer, it is unexpected. That came about because we needed Sir Ben to record some dialogue for a Comic-Con piece that we’d done. He said that he had been working on the Mandarin’s voice, so we let him try it. We all didn’t know what to think at first until we started laying it into the picture and said, “My God, it’s brilliant.” It’s fascinating and you can’t out your finger on what it is or where it’s coming from, which is exactly what the Mandarin is in this movie. So having Sir Ben Kingsley on board is amazing and I think he’s going to surprise a lot of people with his performance.
12. Talk about the character Killian and bringing in Guy Pearce.
A: We’ve been fans of Guy Pearce for years and have wanted to cast him in almost every movie we’ve done and this was the one where the timing worked out perfectly. Aldrich Killian, the character he plays, is somebody who is from the comics; it was a kernel of a character in the comics that we have expanded in a very big way in this movie. We always want, with the Tony Stark films, to have a character that represents a certain angle of his persona and Killian is somebody who wants to be a mover and a shaker; he wants to be a leader in industry.
Killian heads a brain-trust organization called AIM that is developing Extremis, which is something that taps into human DNA and is able to reprogram it and regenerate limbs and enhance strength and cure wounds. But it also could change the whole world, which is what Killian intends to do with it.
When you have Guy Pearce in scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow, in scenes with Robert Downey Jr., the level of acting is times three. He’s such an amazing actor and such a dedicated actor across the board. Killian is a character that will surprise people in seeing what Guy has brought to this part.
13. Q: Extremis is based in bio-tech, correct?
A: Yes. When we were developing “Iron Man 1,” a comic book came out called Extremis. It was written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Adi Granov and from the cover of the first issue, we realized it was the next level of Iron Man and it worked perfectly and the timing was perfect. We felt it was tonally something we could use to build the movie off of. We actually ended up hiring Adi Granov to come on board and help in the initial designs of the Iron Man armor for the film.
The tone of the relationship between Yinsen and Tony Stark, the idea of a bigger, bulkier version of the Mark 1, all of that came from that storyline. In that storyline there is Extremis, which is a biological enhancement and sort of a biological weapon that people ingest and are able to do basically superhuman and spectacular things.
With each film, we thought, “Should we do Extremis?” My gut was, it’s a part three. So, as we started developing “Iron Man 3,” we ended up pulling from that greatly.
14. Q: Talk about casting Rebecca Hall to play Maya Hansen.
A: We saw Rebecca Hall in a Woody Allen movie; then we saw her in “The Town.” She’s an amazing actress; she’s one of the best actresses working today. It is a tough thing casting these movies cause we have to find great actors that can fit into the ensemble of great actors that we already have in our cast. Rebecca, thankfully, was very interested in joining us and has done an amazing job. She and Tony Stark have a past and there’s a scene early in the film that has some romantic overtones to it and it’s a lot of fun to then see the triangle between Pepper and Tony and Maya and see how it takes an unexpected turn at Tony’s expense.
Rebecca is just spectacular at those scenes and at showing how torn her character is between knowing she’s invented something that can do such amazing things, but seeing how wrong it’s gone and how dangerous it’s become.
15. Q: Talk about casting James Badge Dale as Savin.
A: James Badge Dale plays a character known as Savin. He works for Guy Pearce’s character, Aldrich Killian. You don’t know a lot about Savin at first but as the movie unfolds you learn more and more that he is a very frightening individual and he’s somebody that has used Maya Hansen’s technology Extremis for his own ends. He’s somebody who can walk around and seemingly be just sort of an average Joe, but who presents himself with such a cocky confidence that you’re not sure where that’s coming from or why he has it and then you see what he can do.
James is an amazing actor, whom we looked at for a number of different films. We saw him for the first time in the miniseries “The Pacific,” where he does a tremendous job. He did a great performance in “The Grey” last year. For this role that is not the lead character or the lead hero or the lead villain, we wanted an actor who can rise above and who can hold his own against this cast and from day one, James came in and proved that he could do that perfectly.
He can be very funny when he wants to be and he can be very scary when he wants to be and he does both in this movie very well.
16. You mentioned the one kid we see in this film, Harley. What was it about Ty Simpkins that you liked so much?
A: In the first draft of the script, Shane [Black] and Drew [Pearce] had written a character named Harley, who spends some time with Tony over the course of the second-half of the film. We haven’t done a lot of films with kids in them and we were nervous. We were nervous about having a kid that was too much like a Hollywood kid or too much like an actor kid, who you could tell was acting cute or who was pretending to be emotional or who was pretending to be “aw shucks, I’m from Tennessee.” We had to audition lots and lots and lots of kids because we wanted to find a kid who could pull it off, or it was not going to work.
The whole idea would fail if we had an actor that you didn’t believe or a little kid who was just too cutesy. Robert [Downey Jr.] was very generous with his time and attended a lot of the auditions with kids. So you had kids that thought they were really cool and tried to be as cool as Robert and that didn’t work, and you had kids that were just in awe of Robert and that didn’t work, and then we found a kid who acted like a kid around Robert and who adlibbed with Robert in a very honest way. Robert is spectacular, as we learned on this film, at getting a truthful and honest performance out of a kid.
And Ty was that kid. Ty did an amazing job in his audition and had us tearing up a little bit, not that there’s a lot of sobby scenes in the movie, but tearing up a little bit as he’s relaying a little story about his own father to Tony Stark. While he didn’t have the biggest resume as some of the other kids we were auditioning, he was clearly the winner.
He’s real, which is what we wanted Tony Stark to encounter in the middle of the country. When we told Robert, he said that it was great news, but he had one request—he wanted to make the call to Ty himself. So, we got Ty’s cell phone number and his phone rang with Robert Downey Jr. calling him saying, “You got the part.” It was great and they really bonded in a fun way from that point, all the way through the rehearsal process and through production.
17. Q: What’s new in terms of Tony Stark’s repulsor technology and armors?
A: I’ve always said the fun thing about this franchise is that Tony is a tinkerer; he’s a mechanic; he fixes things; his technology evolves. At the beginning of the film, Tony is working on a way of getting the suit onto him as quickly as possible. In “Iron Man 1” he has to stand in a gantry and have the suit be built around him. In “Iron Man 2” it’s the same idea; that gantry that takes quite a while, and you need a giant gantry to assemble the suit onto him. In “The Avengers” we see a slight advancement in the technology. If you remember, Loki throws him out the window. He seems to be plummeting to his death when he calls something on his wrists and a big, bulky, piano-sized device comes flying out after him and ends up wrapping around him and that turns out to be the Mark 7. Tony’s taken that idea of a suit that can deploy to him even further at the beginning of this film, and we have what we call the prehensile suit, which allows each individual piece of the suit to fly separately and latch on to him.
It doesn’t quite work perfectly, but it is a great advancement that Tony uses throughout this movie, so that wherever he is, theoretically, he can call it to him and it can arrive. It doesn’t always work, and there’s a great scene in the movie, which we gave a little taste of to fans at Comic-Con this year in a giveaway of an art poster that Ryan Meinerding had done, where the entire suit doesn’t come to him. He just gets one glove and one boot and has to fight off a battalion of bad guys with just the boot and just the glove.
It’s often the limitations of the suit that can provide the most fun—when the suit breaks, when the suit doesn’t quite work—and there’s that in spades. We also, though, hint early on in the film by mentioning that this is not the Mark 8 as you might think because the Mark 7 was the last suit revealed in “The Avengers.” It’s the Mark 42. So there are well over 40 suits that Tony has built in between the time of “The Avengers” and “Iron Man 3” because of his obsession.
By the end of the film, we see each and every one of them, and you realize Tony is a mechanic and he has been tinkering. Any conceivable idea he had about the suit technology he built and stored in his Hall of Armor. Finally, after talking about it for four movies we finally see his Hall of Armor and the giant army of suits that he’s built for himself.
18. Q: Talk about the Iron Patriot and the evolution of War Machine.
A: A few years ago in publishing, they created a suit called the Iron Patriot, which was an advanced Iron Man suit painted red, white and blue with a star on it. In the comics it’s a different character that wears it and utilizes it. But we really loved that image; we thought it was a striking image. And coming off of “The Avengers” where you have Captain America and Captain America is such a symbol for The Avengers, we thought it would be fun if the United States wanted to have their own version of that. Of course, Captain America works for the United States, but as he’s more of an Avengers hero the US Government said, “We want our own,” which is why they take War Machine and rebrand him as the Iron Patriot.
Now over the course of the film we learn that there was a nefarious purpose behind that. It’s a great example of how sometimes you take and stay true to a character as pulled from the comics, and sometimes the comics can be the kernel of an idea that you then flesh out and build into something else. One of the best things about being a part of Marvel Studios is that you have the house of ideas; you have the publishing division that comes out with dozens of books a month and we flip through almost every one of those books every month and just pull things and don’t know where they could be used. But you know, a few years ago we pulled out the Iron Patriot and said, “That’s cool. Wouldn’t that be fun to play with that someday?” And you’ll see it in “Iron Man 3.”
19: Q: How will the Ten Rings play into the story?
A: The Ten Rings is a terrorist organization that we set up in “Iron Man 1,” and it really is something that is only for the eagle-eye fans. Yinsen, in “Iron Man 1,” says they call themselves the Ten Rings, and that was our allusion to the ten rings of the Mandarin. In “Iron Man 2,” in a deleted scene, it is a member of this Ten Rings organization that gives Whiplash the credentials that allow him to infiltrate the Monaco race and come in and cut Tony Stark’s car in half. In this movie again we wanted to explore a little bit more of this terrorist notion of the Ten Rings, which is why you’ll sometimes see the Ten Rings’ flag as seen in “Iron Man 1” behind the Mandarin in a couple of his terrorist videos that he puts out around the world. But it all goes to the ten rings of the Mandarin himself, and you will see the famous ten rings on Sir Ben, and, frankly, fitting Sir Ben with the ten rings as designed by Russell Bobbitt, our prop master, was one of those “Oh my god we’re actually doing this; the comics are coming to life in front of us” moments on “Iron Man 3” and Ben wears them well.
20. Q: Are the reveals still just as exciting for you when you see them?
A: They are exciting and it happened on this movie with the new Mark 42. It also happened when Shane [Black] and I saw the Iron Patriot for the first time and what the guys at Legacy had done with this suit. Each suit gets better and better. The Iron Patriot practical suit that was worn on set is the best practical suit they’ve ever built. Then the moment when the ten rings came in and we watched Sir Ben fitting them for the first time was great too.
21. Q: Talk about the Air Force One stunt and how that was shot and executed.
A: Our writers had a great idea, which played to the theme of putting Tony in a situation that you don’t know how he’s going to get out of. Shane and Drew’s idea was basically to throw 13 people out of an airplane and have Jarvis tell Tony he can only carry four of them. So how in the world, as they’re plummeting to their death, is Iron Man going to be able to save them all?
And they came up with this notion of Barrel of Monkeys, this Hasbro game, where you connect all the monkeys together and see how many of these little plastic monkeys you can latch together by their fingers. And Tony begins to fly down and begins to grab onto people and tells those people to grab onto the next person. And suddenly with this great show of teamwork you have 13 people all latched onto each other with Iron Man blowing his repulsors to stop their fall.
We didn’t know if it was going to work. We did storyboards for it and some pre-vis for it and started to realize this could be really cool. This is going to be great. We wanted to see how he’s going to get out of this. And the discussion was how are we going to film this? Our second unit director Brian Smrz and our stunt team said, “Why don’t we just throw 13 people out of a plane and film it?”
Over 8 days, with 10 jumps a day, that’s exactly what happened. So that sequence, which is one of the showcase sequences of the film, is practical, with the exception of Iron Man, of course, and a few certain shots. This amazing Red Bull stunt team jumped out of a plane, time and time again, day after day, and fell as if they were plummeting to their death, grabbing onto each other.
In our movies, there are certain things that you can do for real and there are certain things that that you do with CG. And while we love CG and we’d never be able to make a movie without it, if there’s something that you can do practically, it’s usually better to attempt to do it that way. This was by far the biggest practical stunt scene we’ve ever done in any of our films, bigger than anything in the previous “Iron Man” films and bigger than anything in “The Avengers.”
22. Q: How will Marvel’s “Iron Man 3” fit into the overall plans for your Phase 2?
A: When we began Marvel Studios and started making our own films, we were tasked with making two films a year. As we decided to link those films together—as had been done with the comics—to create the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I thought it would be fun to not only look at them as individual films and as individual franchises between “Iron Man” and “Thor” and “Captain America,” but also that the first six films from “Iron Man 1” to “The Avengers” equals sort of Phase 1.
As we get now into Phase 2, “Iron Man 3” represents the beginning of what will be Phase 2 and culminate probably in “The Avengers 2.” What was important to us in Phase 1 was acclimating an audience who maybe never read the comics, who didn’t know that Iron Man and Thor and Hulk all inhabited the same Marvel universe in the comics, and start seeding that idea through the films to get them used to the notion that these characters live in the same world; that this is a shared universe, and it’s all leading to “The Avengers.” And that worked and they have embraced “The Avengers” beyond our wildest expectations.
Now with the beginning of Phase 2, the audience knows that. The audience knows there are connective tissues leading to it and will continue so now we have the leeway and the ability to have fun with that, just like they do in the comics. We can have fun and surprises with who connects where. But what was important to us with “Iron Man 3,” the first film in our new Phase 2, is that it stands apart and stands on its own.
Taking Tony Stark from “The Avengers” into such a personal solo individual journey was always the goal. We remind audiences that Tony Stark is an incredibly fascinating character on his own and begin to build from that. He certainly inhabits that Super Hero world and that shared universe, but we wanted to do this individual Tony story to show that as interesting as they are altogether, they’re equally interesting on their solo journeys.
23. Q: What’s been the most gratifying part of this journey for you and for Marvel?
A: The most gratifying part of the journey thus far at Marvel Studios is seeing the worldwide global movie audience respond to these films. It is incredibly gratifying that people have responded to what comic fans have known for decades—that this kind of shared ongoing saga and mythology is of interest. I think people like the notion of going to see a film that fits into a broader mythological framework.
Big Thanks to Disney and Marvel
