Paramount Pictures opened up the set of one of 2008's most anticipated movies, Iron Man, for a brief visit by the press late last year. Director Jon Favreau, who sounds like a fanboy when he talks about the film, chatted up Marvel Studios’ first feature film while sitting in Tony Stark’s workshop. “This is below his house,” explained Favreau about the location of this special interview. “We built a house that sits on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific up in Malibu, Point View, and we have another set that we’re shooting in today which sits above this, an architectural high-tech home, and this is his sub-basement.
So out those windows you would see the Pacific Ocean. We suggest that all the innovations and inventions that come out of Stark’s mind usually start alone here, as opposed to his office at Stark Industries. But this is where most of his work happens at 4 in the morning.”
Jon Favreau Interview
The movie’s going to be PG-13. Is that the rating you wanted?
“You want to be entertaining for everybody. You want it to be appropriate for kids but not geared towards kids, and I think PG-13 is that good balance where you can have violence, you can have real life and death stakes, but yet it’s something I’d be comfortable bringing a 13 year old kid to. It’s tough. These type of movies you want to be good for the whole audience, for everybody, and if you skew too young you sometimes disappoint adults. And if you make it too dark and too violent or too much explicit language or sexuality to it, there are a lot of kids out there who want see this. I have a six year old who’s dying to see the movie. I don’t want anything in there that’s going to make me – as a responsible parent I’m comfortable that he’s going to be seeing something that’s not going to freak him out too much.”
Are you using the alcoholism story in the first one?
“Honestly, I’m trying to be dictated by the story of the books, the demon in the bottle happened in the ‘80s, it was much later. [The franchise] started off in the ‘60s, so what you really grasp for it seems in success, if you’re lucky enough to make more than one of these movies, is what happens to the character, how does it change so that it doesn’t just feel like a serialized hero that just goes through different types of bad guys? How does he progress through the story? The good part about an origin story is you have a whole Joseph Campbell journey that the guy goes through in becoming a hero. The problem is, you have so much story to tell that its starts to get clogged up with too much stuff, and then you end up rushing through ‘beat your villain’. The problems with the second and third ones are you’ve got great villains, everybody knows who the guy is, but how is he different from the beginning to the end of the movie? And for me, as a filmmaker and a storyteller, I really look for that whole progression in character, what’s the mythology of this movie, what’s the myth that you’re telling, and that’s what makes it entertaining.”
What are the fights going to be like with that big iron suit? How does that change how you shoot a fight?
“As far as the technology that you use, we really have all the options. We have ILM, and after seeing the last Pirates movie I really feel quite comfortable that they can make it look good. And then you have the Stan Winston suit to help make it feel real and connect things, and think you’ve got to do a little bit of a shell game with the audience, of showing real for one shot, fake another shot, and not let them know where one shot becomes real and digital until their left brain is so locked up worrying about it that their right brain can enjoy the movie. I think you always have to look for fancy things to do; I think you have to be innovative in the action. There are a lot of movie’s I’ve seen and enjoyed where I couldn’t follow the story, and didn’t give a damn about the story, because the action was so innovative it entertained me and I was excited by it. And honestly, these types of films, you’re working on the action long before you’re working on the dialogue. You’re working with storyboard artists, with writers, with actors, producers, studios.”
Iron Man creates himself in a way. What is this story about for you?
“The story for me is about a guy who’s got everything. But in every movie there’s always something rotten in Denmark, you’ve got to start off with something out of balance in the world. And I think in Marvel movies especially, you look at the personal life of the character in the microcosm, and then you look at the macrocosm of the climate of the world. There’s a super villain doing something, there’s a problem in the world that has to be fixed, otherwise life as we know it will not exist. But then also in the character’s personal life, there is that sort of thing that happens too. And what’s nice about Tony Stark is he’s a guy that you sort of have all the flash and glamour of Tony Stark millionaire, inventor, genius and playboy, and then you get to play the fun of that. But then you also get to explore what that might leave to be desired. How is he flawed? How does he grow and change through his captivity? And when he comes back, how does he become Iron Man? What are those steps in that journey that gets us to a point where we understand who he is, what he stand for and how he’s changed?”