Does it ever get frustrating wearing the chest piece?
“Look, wearing a watch can be frustrating if you’re not in the right head space. There was this time a couple of days ago where they said, ‘You’ve been through a lot, and this has been a really grueling shoot, it’s also been a really magical shoot,’ Because I s**t you not, every day we’ve come in – and it reminds me of reading about Chaplin in the early days, where he’d go in without an idea in his head. It’s not like we don’t have a script and one that we approve of, but we’d go in and say, ‘How do we raise this to a level of something we want to see, or something that addresses all the different elements of these kind of films?' I'm actually starting to think that they're a really, really, really high order of art because there are so many things that you have to professionally have gone through and understood and experienced to be able to not be overwhelmed by the fact that, 'Now, in this scene, you're going through something but actually the boot is out and you're welding and the phone rings and all this other stuff, and you have a relationship with your shop…'
And why I'm so glad, I'm actually really comforted being here right now is we, you ever feel that that summer in that place or in that apartment creatively, we did every single thing we could, or wrote my best, I was the most honest, I was the most disciplined and we had those, back when you used to say, 'I'm not just going to go out and eat again. I'm going to look at this new menu from this cookbook I've had for five years and actually try to make a pasta that doesn't suck.' We really came in and on this set in particular, because this is where so much of his work happens and creation of the Mark II suit and then the armor. What was the question?”
The chest piece?
“Oh yeah. No, it's fine.”
What has your training process been like for this film?
“The funny thing is there’s some museum in Miami and I got this little key chain and it looked like Iron Man. This was like six months before I even knew this thing. For the last five years I’ve been doing martial arts and then when I got the part, they said, 'So, do you want to put on some size?' I’m not 28 or some guy like Daniel Craig who’s already got meat packed on his shoulders and they just swelled them up for that. You’ve seen me in all the movies. I’m not like Mr. Buff guy, and now I'm in the over 40 crew so it has literally been this excruciating process of working out so hard, and so often just to not look like a little pot bellied pig.
There's a couple scenes where we finally got together and I'm banging on the thing and I go, 'Matty, dude, do you got any?' And goes, 'Dude, I know what to do. I've done this before.' And they light it right and I'm like ugh, and rubber band sand and we do all this stuff. I was like, 'Wow, that looked great, you're really in shape.' And 20 minutes later, errr. Yoga and eating right and all the supplements and sleeping right and all the obvious stuff that is probably more important than working out. You just got to keep your head right. It’s so easy to get spun out, and you see people who have no challenges outside of their Hollywood problems come in and they regularly have meltdowns on sets, or they turn into a bitch, or they say and do things because they’re under pressure, or because they think they’re something they’re not.
It’s really a trip to be number one on the call sheet and getting a movie like this, and it’s always kind of an inside game, and I forget that occasionally. But they keep writing the s**t and the toggle switch, it's that thing. Like, life is 85% maintenance and you realize at the end of your day that you spent most of the day just making sure that all that other people's energy and all your own mindtalk wasn't ruining what had started off… Like the day plans to be good and then you come in like [crash, crash, crash] trying to [vroom vroom vroom]. ‘Can I just dot something in your eye? Can I just blow some sand in your eye right before the take? Why? I don't know. I'm the head of the blow sand in your eye department.’ ‘Uh, Jon?’ Then there's a whole thing.
We did a photo shoot in here the other day and it wound up going great, but you see this picture of Tony Stark, kind of looks like Tom Cruise except more handsome and more buff. The suit and his hair's blowing in the wind and it's curly and you go, 'Can we do a shot like that?' And the hair lady's like, 'I can try.' And I'm like, 'Let's not go Something About Mary here. This [pointing to his hair], I've got this.' So it's been a lot of that just outside issues. Like, 'Hey, look, man, the suit.' Or it's like I'm not particularly tall and I'm surrounded by giants and I was like, 'It's a kind of weird…' I'm not walking around like Don Adams on boards or anything, but all these elements of what when I see this movie, I want to be able to believe that this guy is the guy.”
