While Marvel and Disney have been trying to keep the buzz on Iron Man 3 on a low hum, that's all about to change. With the film's release date fast approaching (May 3), the studios have started unveiling the merchandise and they also recently held a long lead press day where they showed selected members of the press about 15 minutes of the movie. In addition, right after watching the awesome-looking footage, we got to interview Robert Downey Jr. as well as Iron Man 3 director Shane Black and Kevin Feige (President of Production at Marvel Studios).During the interview with Black and Feige, the two talked about creating the film's iteration of The Mandarin, how the film's plot came together, the connective tissue between The Avengers and Iron Man 3, how Downey, Black and Drew Pearce worked together on the dialogue on set, the way Iron Patriot plays a role in the sequel, the stunt-heavy filming of the Air Force One attack sequence, and so much more. If you're looking forward to Iron Man 3, I promise you'll love this interview. Hit the jump to either read or listen to what they had to say.Note: This interview took place the day before the Super Bowl and it was after Marvel showed us about 15 minutes of Iron Man 3. If you'd like to know what I thought of the footage, here's my spoiler free recap.In addition, Marvel has just released a new trailer for Iron Man 3, so you might want to watch that first before reading the interview.And since I know some of you like to read the highlights, here's a few of them from this interview. Just know (slight) spoilers are discussed.
- When Shane Black first came in to meet on the project, they had the basics of the filmâs plot outlined: a Tony Stark-centric story, they wanted to blow up his life and see how he deals with a nemesis without his suits working, and get him back metaphorically to the cave with a box of scraps like the first film.
- When crafting The Mandarin, Black wanted to interpret the comics character in a more realistic way for the movies thatâs still recognizable, like The Joker in The Dark Knight.
- This iteration of The Mandarin is a modern day terrorist whoâs savvy; he knows how to use the media and the intelligence world to his benefit.
- The only connective tissue between The Avengers and Iron Man 3 is the effect of the events from the Avengers on Tonyâs psyche.
- The story is one of Tony learning to become Tony Stark again outside the armor, vulnerable to these massive new threats.
- Robert, Shane, and Drew Pearce would try to improve lines in the script on the day of shooting by gathering together and thinking about how to âplusâ the scene with different dialogue.
- The Iron Patriot armor is created as a response to the events of The Avengers, in that the US Government felt embarrassed that the United States was saved by a group of superheroes and not the government.
- They filmed an Air Force One attack sequence using the Redbull skydiving team and digitally erasing their backpacks. They did 8 to 10 jumps a day for a week.
- Initially, Shane Black wasnât happy with the idea of working with a co-writer, but after a few meetings he and Drew Pearce became good friends and collaborators on the script.
Click here to listen to the audio, otherwise the full transcript is below.  Iron Man 3 opens May 3.
Question: So watching the footage today itâs kind of interesting that they called his glove "The Gauntlet," is there anything going on with that? Because thereâs a Marvel thing thatâs called The Infinity Gauntlet.
Kevin Feige: Whoa.
Shane Black: Wow, we just dived right in.
That was just one thing I picked out of that footage that I thought was really great.
Feige: I think [we] always have sort of called that a gauntlet. The Iron Man gauntlet, not Infinity.
Black: The giant rabbit was fun; we had enormous fun coming to work every day to see that big thing.
Just to clarify something Robert Downey Jr. said in his session, he said that Jon Favreau and he had reached out to you a couple of times so you have been involved in the Iron Man projects before this one.
Black: Only in so far as I knew Robert from a previous movie and Jon and he would come over kind of grumpy, sort of groping for ways to fix the script and they asked me a couple questions. I donât think that I contributed anything too terribly important, although Robertâs been kind enough to cite it as having been helpful. I donât remember that very well, frankly. I just remember they came over, we ate some food and I think one of the things Jonâs done since then, however, has been very helpful to me on this one. As an actor coming in he had every opportunity to be kind of weird or resentful, like âI did these pictures for four years and now youâre doing them?â But instead he was the nicest guy in the world and was extremely beneficial in helping like, âWhat would you do here, Jon?â and that kind of thing.  Heâs great.
Iâm curious how the project came together in terms of story. How early on did you know this was the exact story you guys were going to make and how much did it change along the way?
Feige: Well we first started meeting with Shane in spring of 2011 maybe because you came in on the mix day, I think we were mixing Captain America at Fox and we were having meetings with him there. We knew a few of the elements that have remained. We had pillars of we want it to be: a Tony Stark-centric story, we want to blow up his life and see how he deals with a nemesis without his suits working, get him back metaphorically to the cave with a box of scraps, like the first movie. That has remained and carried on through, and it was one of the reasons we connected with Shane. Because if we wanted to do a big âIt connects to The Avengers and then Nick Fury comes in and stuff,â I donât think Shane would have been interested in that and I donât I donât think he would have been the right guy for it. But to take a Tony Stark journey and explore his character deeper than we had since the first act of the first film, he was the man. It evolved over the next 8 or 9 months after that into basically what it is now.
Of course during that you also have to sprinkle some things in for the fans, you have to make it part of that bigger world. Â Can you both talk about finding the balance in your jobs?
Black: I consider the fan base to basically be Marvelâs job. Mine is to be a fan and I am one and I have been from a young age, of Iron Man, so for me, I just please me and I hope that pleases the rest of the fans. It should. For instance, one of the joys for me has always been seeing how you take a villain from the comic book and realize him in a slightly more realistic way for the movie, render him for movies in a way thatâs recognizable, but different. And thatâs fun. Like the Joker in The Dark Knight is not the Joker from the comic book, but thereâs just enough of him that you recognize him and go, âWow, what a creative way of interpreting the Joker for motion pictures.â So that was our task here too. The fans love this character The Mandarin and we just said, âWell, what we donât want is this potentially racist, stereotype of a Fu Manchu villain just waving his fist.â But we found a way, I think, to get an iteration of The Mandarin that we like. We got very excited about bout having cracked this story when we found out that we could include The Mandarin and give him a character that would be a perfect match, the ultimate Iron Man villain, but without relying too heavily on what the comic book stereotype was.
From what we saw today, I thought what was really compelling about even just that brief glimpse of him was how stage managed he was. To see the set that they had set up for him to deliver his address and see how very savvy the media set up is, and yet the character heâs playing is more archetypal and I think more arch than that. Itâs a really interesting idea, a media terrorist, or a media-age terrorist and certainly something that we canât help but be aware of right now, how those things get used.  Was that part of what attracted you to this notion of him?
Black: From the very beginning we were all about that, yeah, the idea of just a real world interpretation of this guy who, I hate to break it to you, but heâs not from space in this. The rings are rings. Theyâre showmanship. Theyâre accoutrements. Theyâre paraphernalia of warfare that he sort of drapes himself with. He studies Sun Tzu. He studies insurgency tactics.  He surrounds himself with dragons and symbols of warlords and Chinese iconography because he wants to represent this sort of prototypical terrorist who - we use as the example Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now - this guy who may have been an American, may have been a British National, someone who is out there doing field work, supervising atrocities for the intelligence community who went nuts in the field and became this sort of devotee of war tactics, and now has surrounded himself with a group of people over which he presides, and the only thing that unifies them is this hatred of America. So heâs the ultimate terrorist, but heâs also savvy. Heâs been in the intelligence world. He knows how to use the media. And taking it to a real world level like that was a lot fun for us.Â
Itâs interesting because obviously when Iron Man started part of what was so appealing about Jonâs approach was how grounded it was, how real world it was, and now over the course of the rest of the Marvel movies, youâve introduced a god from Asgard, space aliens, Loki, and all these truly fantastic elements and yet you still have to have Tony grounded in something recognizable. Has that been a balancing act in this film? Is there some sense that the fantastic has changed him and then changed how he deals with this world that he lives in?
Feige: Yes, and it sort of answers your other question, which is that the only real connective tissue we wanted from Avengers in this movie was Avengers' effect on Tonyâs psyche. This man who comes from this grounded universe - I always say itâs grounded enough although he builds an iron suit and flies around - the notion that Tony Stark, who is the shit and always thought of himself as top dog, now has been to outer space, nearly got killed by freaking aliens, has encountered a god that can smash him across the forest with a hammer, has encountered a guy that his father used to talk about from 1945. Itâs no mistake that we meet Tony at the beginning of this movie and heâs just building suits, putting himself in the suit, and heâs much more comfortable when heâs in the suit. And a lot of this movie is about Tony learning to become Tony Stark again outside the armor, and he has a little help in that his house is completely destroyed.
Black: Heâs in a world where all of the sudden, without this armor, thereâs elements with which he cannot hope to compete. So his comfort in his own skin has diminished at the start of this movie by the fact that he feels like, unless he can build the perfect man, heâs going to be outdone and outshone by these people who are literally gods. So how he can then have those suits taken away from him until heâs just a man and he canât possibly compete, that was the impetus for this movie, rip everything off him and say, âYes, youâre alone with these incredible forces aligned against you, and you donât even have your armor.â
Feige: And in all of our films, particularly this one with what Shane and Drew Pearce have done, you can have heightened elements.  Look at Avengers, you can have these crazy otherworldly things as long as the way the characters are responding to those things...the emotional response of the characters, thatâs where grounding it in reality is most important. Even in the comics, by the way, thatâs the difference between caring about a comic book character and not, is if their emotional response is believable and is appropriate. Certainly what Tony is going through based on the events of Avengers is very real and, is not quite as dire as this, but is a form of post-traumatic stress. He is actually dealing with it in a way you donât see superheroes deal with it much.
Black: Itâs almost like a sub-genre in a way of taking a comic book movie and then imposing on it what would happen in the real world if this happened. And people have done that with âDamage Controlâ or whatever, so this is just more about trying to maintain the sense of reality form the first Iron Man given that thereâs a god from space. Because if in the middle of Iron Man, when he was in the cave with Yinsen and Thor came in you would say, âWhat the hell is this movie? That doesnât make any sense.â But now, Thor is there so what does that mean for our character?
When in the process did you come in to it? How much had Marvel and Marvel Film Division mapped out what Iron Man 3 was going to be? And at any stage in the process did you guys go, âWell we better take it down because we canât go bigger than Avengers right after Avengers?â
Black: They said that to me upfront and I agree. That was the touchstone of the first meeting was that we canât go bigger than weâve just gone.
Feige: Well it would be a foolâs errand to do that. Thereâs no reason to do that. Shane was in early days. Again we wanted to get Tony, we were sort of internally talking about, back to basics, metaphorically blow him up on a convoy, put him back in a cave and see what he can do with a box of scraps. That was about as far as we had - and it was not an Avengers-centric story outside of just the effect that all of it has had on him. So no Nick Fury, no Black Widow; those were really the only parameters. And we did want him to have a mystery to uncover and solve that he would [be] on his own for. That was about it and then Shane and Drew brought it to life. And we certainly are looking over their shoulders and giving them input every step along the way, but it was a collaboration form that point.
We talked a little bit with Robert earlier about how in the first two films he would come up with lines on the spot or change things and Iâm curious about his collaboration with you on this one. How much was he sticking to the script? How much were you guys fiddling with the dialogue on the day of?
Black: Well, he was sticking to the script, but the script wasnât necessarily being written far in advance [laughs]. The script would be written sometimes a day or two in advance, but weâd have an outline for a scene. Often what it was was we would have all the jokes lined up, or all the dialogue, or all the points and beats lined up, but we would play the game of plus-ing. Which was we would say âOkay Robert, hereâs your line,â and he would go, âEh, okay, I can say that but I think we can beat it,â and Iâd go, âOkay weâre shooting soon, letâs plus it, what do you want?â And then we would sit and we would talk, we would try to come to something that had that shape, but that was plus-ed. Sometimes it would Drew Pearce chiming in and weâd go, âOkay thatâs a plus,â then Robert would say something. We tried to keep all the good stuff. Every once and a while someone would have an idea that we didnât like and weâd say, âNo, no thatâs a minus.â It was an evolving process, but the script was always there, there was always a fallback, that was great. We could always get one that was the script and then we could say, âTry to plus.â It was like when I worked with Bruce Willis back then when Bruce used to do a lot of improving. Get one thatâs the script, then talk to Bruce and play. And weâll always have the base line, then if you can plus it, terrific. The experience with me was that most of the time Robert could plus what was there, or the collaboration of Robert, Drew, and myself in a room for 20 minutes prior to shooting would enhance what was there and it was usually better than when we walked into that trailer.
In these Iron Man movies it seems like in every other scene heâs got a new suit. In this one weâve seen the Mark 47 and Iron Patriot.  Can you talk a little bit about those, how they came into the script, and what theyâre bringing to it?
Feige: Yeah, you know weâve seen, through Avengers, 7 or 8 suits and we wanted to progress that in this one. Itâs part of, again, the effect Avengers had on him is that heâs tinkering even more than he did before and heâs building much more than he ever did before. The Iron Patriot is also kind of a response to Avengers. Itâs a government rebrand of War Machine, frankly because the US government felt that they were slightly embarrassed by the events of Avengers. These crazy heroes known as "The Avengers" were the ones that saved the day, saved New York City, saved United States; not the government. The government felt they needed a hero of their own, they have a military officer that has one of these suits, and they paint it red, white, and blue. They pose it next to the president and Tony sort of rolls his eyes, you saw a little bit of that today. They want a hero of their own. And Tonyâs like, âWhat do you mean, Iâm a hero?â And they say âWell youâve been spending a lot of time in your workshop. We want somebody we can rely on.â So thatâs sort of how the Iron Patriot came about. And, again, itâs a thing from the comics, we just thought the Iron Patriot suit looked equal parts cool and slightly goofy in the comics.  Itâs not Norman Osborne or any of that stuff obviously, but it gave us a place to go with Rhodey. We wanted to take Rhodey and his sort of split loyalties between his friend and his duty and keep carrying that storyline through.
I have to ask, just to add on to that, the toy images that were leaked of the deep space suit, can you comment on what that is?
Feige: Well I would say that Iâve owned a number of âJungle Attackâ Batmans in my time and I donât remember any jungle attack batman sequences, so.
The sequence with Air Force One, which we saw today and is going to be in the full trailers, can you talk about where that came from and filming that sequence?
Black: Well the filming of it was interesting. We decided early on, Drew and I, that I wanted to [...] hijack stuff and I wanted to have people in the sky, just falling, and Iron Man is confronted with that image and heâs got to get them out of it somehow. The challenge was on the days we said, âWell weâd really love to do this, but we donât want to do just green screen, can we just toss people out of a plane?â and they said, âWell that would probably be unethical.â But we found the Redbull skydiving team that was willing to jump out of a plane and have their backpacks erased digitally. Itâs kind of compelling, the first images you see of people falling in clothes, because people are always in jumpsuits, orange or yellow jumpsuits, and when you just see some girl in a skirt and a guy in a business suit falling itâs pretty scary.
Feige: Over the course of almost a week, we did 8 to 10 jumps a day, for a week. It was amazing, amazing footage.
Moonraker did a sequence where it was a 3 week shoot for something that ended up being 8 minutes, 9 minutes.
Feige: And frankly we talked about Moonraker a lot because that sequence is actually pretty impressive, except for the fact that you can see the parachutes, until they cut in to the inserts, which it then doesnât work at all. We wanted to be like that without doing that. And we have an Iron Man suit which is an advantage over Roger Moore.
[To Shane Black] So you came up with the idea for this sequence?
Black: Basically.
Feige: It was he and Drew; it definitely came out of their script conversations.
Black: No it was just me, Drew was...
Feige: It was definitely just Shane.
Black: He was getting the coffee.
Feige: What we loved about it was, how is Tony going to do that? If you remember he says âJarvis, how many people are in the air?â  â13â  âHow many can I carry?â  â4â  So what are you going to do?
The moment you hear that line, itâs a great hook for a commercial because immediately you need to see the rest of that set piece.
Feige: Oh, good.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 2
One of the signatures of the Marvel films starting with Iron Man, and I understand it was part function but also it became something that was fun for you guys to play with, was the notion of the after credits teaser, using that as a sting and using that to kind of point direction to the next thing. I understand on Phase One thereâs almost a necessity.
Feige: Yes.
You guys were using that as a building thing.
Feige: Yes.
Do you feel obligated now in Phase 2 as you move towards Phase 3, do you have to do that on every film? Is that something that has become part of how you think about these movies or is it case by case if we have something thatâs appropriate youâll use?
Feige: Itâs sort of case by case. I donât want to be in that theater for the first time when even 2 people stay behind and nothing happens, frankly. I like that weâve trained at least some people to stay behind and get a little reward, but youâre absolutely right it served a different purpose. It was a part of the, âHey surprise, these are connected. Weâre building towards something here.â Shawarma, which everyone knows famously was an idea we came up with much, much later and shot after the premiere just because we thought it would be fun. There was not going to be a tag until that point. So itâs a little faster and looser now because people know, and frankly the whole purpose of Iron Man 3 is to say that these characters can exist just as successfully on their own again. But, as I said I donât want to be there when nothing happens after people sit through 8 minutes of credits.Â
Can you talk about Drew Pearceâs involvement? Is he your writing partner or did you bring him on specifically for this?
Feige: We hired Drew before we hired Shane. We didnât have a director yet. Drew Pearce had done an amazing draft of a script called Runaways for us, which is a movie we ended up not making.
Black:Â It sounds amazing.
Feige: Itâs so amazing we didnât make it, but we hired him to do Iron Man 3 because we were meeting with various directors and most of them were not writer-directors. When we were meeting with Shane we realized he was the best guy for the job and knew obviously he was also a writer. We didnât want to just toss Drew aside; we didnât think that was fair.
Black: I kind of did.
Feige: He did. We said, âShane this is great, why donât you have the job? By the way we have a writer.â âWhat do you mean?â He thought all these things; he was political enough not to say them. I think he grumbled a lot and to his credit and to Drewâs credit they now seem to be two peas in a pod.
Black: Yeah, we got together and I said, âOkay, basically, I donât know why youâre here.â And he said, âI guess weâre supposed to write together,â and this is not usually how great teams start [laughs]. But we said, âAlright, letâs see.â And pretty soon I realized very quickly that this guy had an affinity for this and he and I became friends and rode back and forth to work every day talking about it.Â
Feige: About four weeks into it we were in a meeting and they, together, were kind of pitching us some ideas and directions and Shane kind of kicked it off and said, âYou know, I initially thought that Drew Pearce was the devil, the demon that you hired, and now I think heâs great. I really do.â And Drew was not in the room when he said that, which is how I knew it was true.
Black: But Drew and I, weâll finish each otherâs sentences and things like that. We trade clothes.Â
After cell phones came out ,horror directors had to come up with elaborate ways to explain why people wouldnât call someone on a cell phone for help. Now that all The Avengers know each other do you have to come up with excuses for why Tony Stark wouldnât reach out when he needs a hand?
Feige: Itâs a good question, and itâs sort of half and half. I am betting that like the comics you donât have to keep...if you are reading a standalone Iron Man comic, they donât spend every page explaining where every other Marvel hero is. The audience kind of accepts that there are times when theyâre on their own and there are times when they are together. Iâm betting that movie audiences will feel the same way. That being said, there is a little bit of lip service here and there to that. There is also just the very nature of Tony wants to, once he barely survives that house attack you saw today, and even you saw it in the message he left for Pepper, heâs basically saying âIâm going off the grid to try to figure something out.â
Does he know that Phil Coulson is alive and on S.H.I.E.L.D.?
Feige: Does Tony know that? No.
Since the last time we spoke one of the big things thatâs happened in the Marvel universe is that James Gunn has come on to Guardians of the Galaxy. When can we hear more about that and what should we tell people to expect at this point?
Feige: I donât know when youâre running all these articles. I would say that I hope that we will have some casting announcements in the next 3 to 4 weeks. That would be the next thing you hear about, is the cast. We start filming at the end of June in London.
A lot of us are really big fans of your work and weâre very excited that you got the keys to this Ferrari, can you talk a little bit about making this film and just what it was like to be able to take on Iron Man 3? And when did you know that you would make sure part of it was set at Christmas?
Black: That just evolved oddly enough, it just seemed to organically come out of planning a story that took him to a different place and left him stranded in the snow. I donât know if I have the keys, I have the keys but, you know, at some point thereâs a course you have to run, which is to say, you canât take it anywhere you want. You canât open it up on Main Street and then go 150 miles an hour, but what can happen is you find ways without going back to my old bag of tricks. Iâm saying itâs like a comic doing...they say, âYou canât do the midnight show, youâre doing this for the local church group, its 8 oâclock and were serving stew. So can you please tone it down and just leave out the blue material?â So I had to find innovative ways to be less of, âThey fuck you at the drive through.â
Feige: I donât think Shane knew the difference between a PG-13 and an R, frankly. We would say, âShane, you canât really do that.â âYou canât?â âNo.â
Well, you do call a little kid a pussy.
Feige: Well, itâs not like weâre completely backing off that tone. And, by the way, in maybe I think the first assembly I was like âShane, weâre not going to be able to say that.â There was another insult that he has later in the movie and I said, âYou keep that one, weâre not going to be able to say pussy.â Shane, to his credit, said âLetâs leave it in the test screening.â It was the first test screening we did, the audience, as you guys did today, went crazy for the curse word, crazy for it, and nearly burned down the theater on the second one, which I had not predicted. So we took out the second one and left that one in.
Are there other characters that Marvel has that you have an affinity for? A lot of us are wondering when maybe Marvel might make an R-rated movie and that might be where you could use some of the âblue materialâ. Iâm just curious if you have an affinity for other characters.
Black: I donât know I always thought that certain characters could be adapted in a cool way. I wanted to do...Quentin Tarantino kind of poisoned the well with Django, but I always thought there was a 1970âs version of Black Panther, which was [a] period that could be really cool and involved a lot of the racial tensions of that time. Thatâs not going to happen. Other Marvel movies that I really loved, or marvel comics growing up, God, mostly just the typical ones. âNick Fury Agent of Shieldâ the Strenko years. But you canât do them because Sam Jackson is 60 years old and he plays this sort of patriarchal figure now, but Nick Fury was what I adored growing up. If you ever read the ones [Jim] Sterenko did for âTales of Suspenseâ followed by âNick Furyâ standalone 1-8, some of the best comics ever made.
What was the most physically challenging thing to do on the film? Was it the sky diving or can you describe what happens without giving the plot point away?
Black: The most physically challenging thing is that everything involving these suits flying is either on wires where youâve got to take forever to rig somebody or itâs invisible. So thereâs a guy on wires and he turns and gets hit by an invisible thing that throws him backwards and you have to match everything and nothing's there. So in the editing room itâs constantly vexing to me. On Kiss Kiss Bang Bang weâd show up on the day and we would say, âAlright, weâre doing an action scene, the car crashes, where do we go?â You couldnât do that. You canât show up on the day and say âOkay he jumps of the tower and the building explodes, letâs begin.â You have to have it so meticulously planned in advance. The invisibility factor was for me the daunting thing of not knowing where anything is because itâs all just going to be there later.
Feige: Were still very much in the visual effects phase of this film, but there have been a handful of times as we sit in the screening room for hours and hours going through effects shots and Shane goes, âWait, that looks real. I didnât think it would look that good.â I said, âWhat do you think weâre doing? Of course itâs going to look that good.â âHuh, it looks real.â
Black: All it takes to piss them off too, Victoria [Alonso] the special effects girl will sit next to us and Iâll say âWow, thatâs a great cartoon. Thatâs a really good cartoon.â And she just goes nuts. But, no, the effects look real, photo-real. Iâm very surprised.Â
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Hereâs the official synopsis for Iron Man 3:
Marvelâs âIron Man 3â³ pits brash-but-brilliant industrialist Tony Stark/Iron Man against an enemy whose reach knows no bounds. When Stark finds his personal world destroyed at his enemyâs hands, he embarks on a harrowing quest to find those responsible. This journey, at every turn, will test his mettle. With his back against the wall, Stark is left to survive by his own devices, relying on his ingenuity and instincts to protect those closest to him. As he fights his way back, Stark discovers the answer to the question that has secretly haunted him: does the man make the suit or does the suit make the man?