Jon Favreau, Kevin Feige, and Justin Theroux Iron Man 2 Q&A
Can you talk about the pressure you did or did nor feel making a sequel after the success of the first film?Jon Favreau: "I’ve never done a sequel before, unless you count me being a under-five on Batman Forever as a sequel as an actor. But it was, for me, there wasn’t the same pressures that you’re used to feeling, especially coming up with smaller movies where you’re throwing a party and you don’t know if people are going to show up. Here, we knew people were going to show up. We just wanted to make sure everybody who showed up had a good time, and this was going to be as or more fun than the last party. So different kind of pressure."
Can you talk a little bit about the timeline for this film? How does it fit in with Thor, Captain America and The Avengers?
Kevin Feige: "I think Jon has already revealed on his Twitter that Iron Man 2 takes place after or slightly concurrently with The Incredible Hulk."
Jon Favreau: "No, before."
Kevin Feige: "What did I say?"
Jon Favreau: "After."
Kevin Feige: "No, it’s definitely before."
Jon Favreau: "Okay, are you getting the picture?"
Kevin Feige: "It takes place before, and if you pay attention towards the end of the film, you’ll see a little clue that tells you that it happened before The Incredible Hulk."
There’s a snippet in the trailer where Pepper is on a plane with Tony, but it’s not in the film. Was that meant to be part of the Stark Expo scene?
Jon Favreau: "Yes. We had different versions of things that we tried. That was something that was a great image that we love in a scene that’s going to be in the DVD. But we had two different versions of it, and because of the pacing and the way we reveal Tony Stark, it felt really good to flow into the drop-down and reveal him for the first time on the stage. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, this doesn’t make any sense. But oftentimes in the editing room, we figure out what combinations of scenes work."
Jon, on the first film you made a lot of discoveries on set. Was the process of discovery similar this time, and Justin, how much of your script are we seeing on the screen versus the group coming together to find something that works?
Justin Theroux: "It’s a heavily improvisational set and everyone gets to sort of chime in, so my job I think as the writer was to really just stay on the dance shoes of Robert and Jon and Gwyneth and everybody, and just sort of try and rewrite things on the fly. So we did have an extensive development process, obviously, where we had a script, and then that ball just keeps rolling into production. And once we’re on set, it gets very frenetic very fast."
Jon Favreau: "The story is very well fleshed-out. The story, but the actual, what has to happen in each scene, we understand. We leave a lot of room within those scenes and try to do multiple cameras sometimes, or stay up and rewrite. Justin, he was doing multiple passes, sometimes double-digit passes on scenes, because we learned things from each scene that we shoot. We tried to shoot pretty much in order, and what’s nice about having the actors you see up here is they’re all very good stewards of their characters emotionally, and they’re used to being in films where you don’t have the safety net of all of the high technology and the explosions. So if they have an issue with something we’re asking the character to do for the story, we discuss it and we figure out a way so that it can work for them as a performer and also for the movie."
Can you talk about the choice of the villains and the casting process for those characters?
Jon Favreau: "Well, I met with Mickey [Rourke] at this hotel. [...]And I brought him some artwork and we thought Whiplash in the comic book is a guy wearing tights with a big plume, big purple feather coming out of the top of his head, and that wasn’t what we wanted. But, what’s the tech version of that? So we were thinking of, we were concocting a version of a Russian, thinking of Viggo [Mortensen] in Eastern Promises and the tattoos, and that could be a cool in. So it was going to be a Russian, and then where like Marv and The Wrestler, between those two, between the fan boys and the independent film community, he was back with a vengeance. It was like, 'My God, there’s a lot of people. We’re not going to have a tremendous amount of screen time. Who’s going to be able to be there, make an impression, you feel like this guy [Downey]’s in trouble...'"
"So Mickey brought a lot of intensity to both of those roles. We did some artwork and I met with him, sat down with him, and we talked about everything. It was before all of the awards things started to happen, we had a nice little connection. I talked to people who worked with him, and they said great things about him, his talent is undeniable, and so that started – that conversation ended. And then Robert was on the road with him doing the tour, because he was on the Tropic Thunder awards tour, and he, I think, was lobbying every time they sat together to get him to join the movie."
