Iron Man is an interesting character for us.
We’ve done Spider-Man.
We've done X-Men. We 've done super powers.
Many of the Marvel properties have long histories in Hollywood.
Iron Man was at least at Fox and New Line
before coming back to us.
And for whatever reason, you know, the time wasn't right.
It's been a different journey for Marvel
since it's really their ﬁrst real venture, coming out as a company,
fully ﬁnancing and releasing Iron Man.
And it's a big deal to be a part of this production.
So much of the company is now invested into this potential franchise,
which is really what these films were meant to be.
But we need a storyteller
Jon is a talent in many ﬁelds,
in front of the camera, behind the camera.
When you look at Made and Elf and Zathura,
that's the track of a ﬁlmmaker that is nearing the top of his game.
But very important for us with him is his love for Iron Man.
That was the movie he wanted to make.
Iron Man is one of the comics where you have very few purists
who have attached themselves to speciﬁc storylines.
In the case of Iron Man, it's the myth of Iron Man, it's the suit.
It's what the suit could do.
Things change from time to time with the suit,
but there's a basic character that Tony Stark has
and a certain look that the suit has.
I went in to meet them, and then wound up screen-testing
for Tony Stark, for Iron Man. It was, like, I went into the building
and everywhere you go, there's another movie you love,
and the Spider-Mans and everything, and you go,
"God, it would be really great if I could do one of these."
It was kind of like an independent director and cast,
but, you know, doing this great big ﬁlm.
So it was the best of both worlds.
-|'m jealous. -Next time.
This is the part of
the Marvel offices that they gave us for Iron Man preproduction.
Normally, we would, you know, start this...
We would rent some office space near a studio.
We're about to move to Playa Vista Studios.
So, this allowed us to sort of get a running start
and be close to the people who are part of Marvel Studios here.
So it was nice, 'cause we had these great digs
and we got to use the meeting spaces.
And we're starting to outgrow this space.
Here are some different... The evolution of concept art for the suit.
These are earlier designs that we didn't go with.
But they helped evolve the suit into the final look.
The suit evolved over decades,
and it wasn't until an artist named Adi Granov
took a whack at the costume and reinvented it,
that you found a suit that looked more like solid armor.
More like something with a military application.
Almost like a flying machine
and not like a suit that somebody slipped on
that was skintight and happened to be metallic. This suit felt real.
It felt like something mechanical, something that was tech-based.
And that was the image that I gravitated towards,
from the whole packet of 40 years of Iron Man images
that was given to me.
The suit for the movie is completely different.
In my artwork, I try to make things appear functional,
but they’re not functional, because there isn’t a real person inside.
We spent months and months,
trying to figure out how different sections bend and intersect,
and how there could be a person inside.
And if he bends his arm, will it actually break his bones?
I mean, all those details like that.
And then the helmet, and how the helmet opens
and can the head ﬁt inside the helmet?
And then does that make the head look too big?
I mean, all these things that, in a comic book,
I mean, Ijust draw whatever looks the best.
We have,
basically, the chest piece,
which you see on one of the other renderings here,
the abdomen piece, which would go on sort of like a tank top.
You have the boxer shorts area and then the leg.
The whole idea is to make each of these components expand,
so that you can just slip into them as one big piece.
And then, as you put them on, they would collapse
and end up snug on the leg.
Here's Ryan working on some keyframe work from the movie,
of Tony Stark first waking up in captivity.
This is the beginnings of...
Some thoughts for the beginnings of the first gray Iron Man suit.
So you can see the chest piece,
and as you can see,
these arm-pieces were inspired by this piece of hardware here.
This armature that we got from Stan Winston
was basically a starting point to say, "What are the basic pivot points
"that you would need to be able to move your arms
"and have as much flexibility as possible?"
This is also something that we used to help limit the movement
that the performer used
when we were doing some mo-cap tests for the 06/ on it.
This is sort of a dogfight sequence that happens late in the second act.
As we can see, we're sort of cross-cutting
between Rhodey, the pilots and Tony Stark flying.
And these have been color-coded and worked on and photocopied
because this is part of what was used to be input into the animatic.
This was all input into the computer and animated,
and you're able to watch it like you would a movie.
I think, very early on, Jon had a very compelling vision
for how he wanted to cover the Iron Man action stuff.
He wanted to shoot it like
we took the Iron Man suit, turned it on,
and basically, we're flying beside it in a helicopter,
and that's how we got Iron Man on camera.
The one thing that we still have over pre-vis and animatics
is that you can draw a scene really, really quickly,
and you can draw changes really, really quickly.
And as it should be. I mean, it's an exploratory part of the process
to find the vocabulary of the movie and find the angles you want
and come up with the coolest stuff possible.
If anything, that's the comic book artist. He 's sort of like,
"I'm just going to draw and draw and draw.
"I'm going to make this scene huge. " You know? And before you know it,
it just expands into something that's absolutely unmanageable,
unshootable.
lt'll never go in any schedule.
But what you can do from that is take the things in it
that you respond to. And that's what Jon did.
So, this is what I was hoping would be my office,
but they made an appeal to me that this was the biggest room so we had to...
We need a room for all the pre-vis crew.
So you have animators, CAD artists, everybody who is involved with
taking what we did on the storyboards and translating it into 3-D animation.
There are certain shots, like, this is a really successful shot here.
We like this one a lot. His little lights come on, his flying lights.
And then coming into the Santa Monica Pier.
Some of these are a little bit too quick, some of them are a little bit off.
The flow is pretty good. But once we refine it in the pre-vis,
it will then translate pretty much one for one with the final film.
We 've seen flying in so many movies,
especially through buildings in New York City.
We wanted to put this one on the West Coast,
where flight sort of began, or where you had Hughes' aircraft,
and sort of keep the tradition
of him being a Howard Hughes-type character alive.
I really like this one, how he's flying over all the buildings.
Really feels like you're flying up into space, into the stars.
That's really cool.
So, when we're done with this, it will actually,
hopefully, translate into the actual movie.
And we'll be able to watch some finished film
while we're working on the movie,
and show it to the actors and the crew for morale.
That's really great.
And the camera shake is pretty strong. That's really good.
See, this is exciting. This gives me goose bumps.
You're not even fighting a bad guy here.
All you're doing is, really, flying through the air.
As I was talking to the people doing the pre-vis,
the artists, the storyboard artists, the animatics, it was about,
"How do you really, viscerally, make you feel as though you're flying?”
We've all dreamt about flying.
How exciting is one of those dreams? It's never boring.
I think just the feeling of flying for the first time, in a movie like this,
if you handle it right, should give you chills.
Just seeing him fly, really feeling like you're flying with him,
if you cover it the right way, shoot it the right way,
present it to the audience in the right way,
it should be an emotional experience.
And then, when you ﬁght the bad guy, even more fun.
But don 't blow past that stuff. What's it really like?
What would it really be like to get in a suit that could fly?
It would be a life-changing experience.
Don 't lose sight of that. You're making a movie.
And movies are about emotion. They’re about allowing the audience
to experience something they can’t in real life.
But let them experience it in a real way. And that's the hope.
The hope is to ground this thing in reality
wherever we can, because it's so superhuman.
These heroes are so larger than life that any opportunity we could ﬁnd
to sort of screw it down to reality...
We would be hard-pressed to make a movie
without taking advantage of those opportunities
that you would really feel something about.
Generally speaking, if you're making a movie about a billionaire who can
go anywhere and do anything and has any amount of money to do anything,
and you have a restricted budget
and you have to try and create that world that he lives in,
that's a big challenge.
He doesn 't just have the CV, he has the 737 private plane.
You know, everything is elevated with him.
It's notjust a house, it's an insane mansion
on the bluff, in Malibu on a cliff.
And so, there was a lot of fun in designing, location-scouting,
casting, shooting. You get to play a little bit of fantasy,
'cause when you think you've got something that's enough,
you amp it up more.
When we were looking for a place to ﬁlm,
there were a lot of possibilities. Marvel doesn’t have its own lot yet.
Maybe someday they will.
And so we were looking for stage space that was large enough
and in the Los Angeles area.
And one of the places where a lot of ﬁlms have shot is here at Playa Vista.
And we thought it was really cool,
because this was the place that the Spruce Goose was originally built.
It was Howard Hughes' old assembly factory,
and his headquarters for some time.
You know, it wasn't lost on us that the legacy of Howard Hughes
was sort of alive and well here,
and Tony Stark is a little bit of
the heir to the throne of the Howard Hughes reputation.
You know, for so long, the divisions were kept very separate.
The film division out in Hollywood,
which really was producing the films with other studios,
was separate from the publishing division, where they make the comics,
was kept separate from the animation division.
And it was important to me to bring all those divisions together.
So there's multiple chambers, obviously, to this thing
for the escape sequence.
Marvel Films invited a bunch of us out,
myself, Joe Quesada, Axel Alonso, our big editor brain trust,
and a number of our key creators.
It was a great thing even just to go out and be asked
and to walk around the half-ﬁnished sets
and see all the preproduction design.
It really makes you feel, just as a guy working at Marvel,
that this really is our movie, as opposed to a movie.
Is it too much of a shift to ask that he feels that he's fallen short
-of what his father's ideology... -I think that that's
with either his alcoholism, his tardiness, his womanizing...
Working in the comics for so long, and then sometimes watching the movies
and going, "No, that wasn't quite right.
"If they'd just stayed a little closer to the source material..."
So, part of our being there was saying, "Guys, how far are we
"away from the source material? How do we steer it back?
”Is it okay to steer away this way?
"And how do we just make this the best possible movie?"
I think, also for Pepper, she has to realize
that the moment that kiss happens, she's the glue in his life.
Without him, the whole thing...
We had two great writing teams on this ﬁlm.
Art Marcum and Matt Holloway came on and did some early drafts for us
and continued throughout the process, on and off.
And Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby came on board as well.
They had worked with Jon on a ﬁlm he had developed
at another studio that didn’t end up moving fonrvard.
Marvel Comics has been really fantastic
about giving us the whole history,
teaching us everything we could ever want to know about the characters,
and then saying, "Feel free to explore around those parameters."
When you see he's in there, you'll love this. Right there.
We made a decision early to go with Stan Winston Studios
to design, with us, the Iron Man suits.
That's gonna be too kicky. And that's too mattey.
I like the brush feeling here.
I'd like to say, "Gosh, everybody was just clamoring after us to do Iron Man."
But the fact of the matter
is that the minute we heard
that Iron Man was being made, we went after it.
We're all Iron Man fans.
It was like the perfect thing for the studio.
So we went after the show,
and just about the time
that Jon Favreau was signed to actually direct it,
was when we took our first meeting with Marvel,
and Jon was in that meeting.
This particular film was a little bit more interesting
because there was already a design idea,
or a series of design ideas in place.
They had conceptual drawings of Iron Man
that ﬁt a certain body proportion and a certain body type.
So we had to inherit those and then bring them into our world
and make them function.
The big challenge was the fact that
they hadn't cast anyone to be Iron Man.
And here it is. Here's the final.
-And that's what we come to. -Here it is.
That's what we get for the amount we have to spend.
The journey you generally go through in the creation of a suit,
is you sit down with Stan Winston, his design team,
our internal team, Favreau, the producers,
and everyone starts with drawings and images,
and you Photoshop and you get to a 2-D drawing,
like a color drawing that you can hang up.
That then gets moved to a modeling stage, to a 3-D model,
so you see a QuickTime of a model that turns.
Then that goes to a clay-maker,
and then you see the ﬁrst clay made of it,
and it's something tangible now, that you can touch and you can spin.
And we're convinced that a human head
would actually fit in this thing, right?
The ears are right up inside, right up against the...
It's exciting. This is when you really get a sense of the movie coming together.
When you start to see this.
It's a bigger leap, in some ways, to go from an idea to this,
than to go from this to the actual movie.
And then there 's generally a maquette that's made,
which is a miniature desktop model of it.
It might be only two feet tall.
It's a work in progress, but it's coming along.
-That's great. -Obviously, we don't have the wardrobe.
And then you wait. And you know the next step is the suit.
And it's the full-size, shootable, physical suit
that a person's going to get into.
I’ve never made a movie of this size before, or of this genre.
I’ve always been a fan, but it's a daunting undertaking.
The day I knew everything was going to be okay,
was the day that Robert Downey Jr. was attached to play Iron Man.
That is gorgeous.
What Kevin's going to do, they're going to take a cast of your foot,
so that it's a very low relief strap.
Stan Winston 's reputation, and Shane and the guys on that team,
I’ve worked with them before. Every time you go into their shop,
you go, "Oh, my God. And they did that? And they did that?
"And Al, and this, and that. "
And you see a history of ﬁlms that I grew up on.
The reason that I'm playing Tony Stark, the reason that I'm involved in Iron Man,
the reason that I'm so excited is, I'm crazy about movies.
That's why I wanted to become an actor.
That's... Like, I could cry watching C.H.U.D.
Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.
| buy into the movies. I love it.
I see The Fly, I don't care if that's Jeff Goldblum going...
You know, I'm in it.
They're transporting, the fly's dying...
I mean, I'm a sucker for this stuff.
Again, I'm just thrilled that we landed another gig with you. That's cool.
Me too, man.
The best thing I can tell you about me
is, ultimately, Ijust don't do anything.
Well, I'm sick. I'm out of here.
-All right. -Later.
-Get a good night's sleep. -Stan, thanks.
Good to see you, Robert. I'll see you soon.
lwalk in like a fan because, and I say it humbly,
because I really don't do it.
I did it when I started. Now | oversee it,
Shane oversees it, everybody... I just enjoy it.
I come in, and it's easy for me to say, "Wow, that's cool. Do more of that.
"Now, make sure my name is on the screen."
How many gags are you doing?
We're going to do the inclined one after this one.
But this one, right now, you're more upright.
We're just going to do a small blender section.
Hey, I don't like my little tummy there.
I'm not doing all this core work for nothing. That's all I'm saying.
Behold the mass.
-l'm beholding. -What the...
-We could hold off on this part. -"Hi, honey."
We are building a prototype while we're going.
We've never built an Iron Man suit before.
You're zooming in on my hammer right now, aren't you?
Ease up on the hammer.
What kind of twisted parlor game's going down here?
And so, you're given a launching gun,
and then you have to hit the finish mark with the suit done.
So it's not like we are ever able to make one,
and then scrap it and make another one,
and make improvements and scrap that.
We have to actually work it all out
and deliver at the time we 're supposed to.
Faster!
Right now you're in the Stan Winston mold shop, in the finishing shop.
What you see behind me is where most of the parts are being modeled,
and parts are being painted.
There's about 450 individual parts
that make this suit.
This is going to be the Mark ll's chest.
This is where the RT will go.
And it's actually SprayChrome metal
and it's been brushed.
This is actually the process of putting in the rivets, based on the design.
And actually, it's not really a polished rivet at all,
it's just the illusion of a polished rivet.
These are two pieces from the Mark III.
And these are from our early test.
This enormous calf, it has sort of the accouterments
ofjet engines and things.
But the foot goes in here,
and then these panels had to be designed to slide and move.
These are large sections of the Crimson Dynamo that are being made.
This is a negative, flexible mold,
and these are just quickie, temporary molds to pull out hard shells.
What's interesting about what Trevor's painting,
is that this is a flexible paint for urethane.
It doesn't crack or buckle.
And we have a lot of parts that are actually flexible.
It took a long time to get that to work.
And this is Tim Nordella, who is mechanizing the Crimson Dynamo.
There's a hatch that opens,
revealing the sinister man who's inside.
Eventually, it'll all be dressed like a very, very tight...
And down below, like the cockpit of a dive vessel.
and the escape hatch of this particular thing here.
When you work with someone like Stan Winston 's company,
so far, this is Jon and my second ﬁlm with them,
it's still a pretty magical experience when that suit's ﬁrst rolled out.
Shane likes to put it behind a curtain, generally,
and unveil the curtain in a very dramatic way.
And there was Iron Man, standing behind.
What can we do today?
-Wow. -Wow.
And then you look at it and you touch it,
and it's half excitement and half fear, because it's very real.
And generally, you're pretty close to production at that point,
when that suit's shown to you.
So, hopefully your research was right, and the proportions all line up,
and the textures are good, and the colors,
and all the decisions you made along the way make sense.
Once you start to not see the whole guy,
the proportions of him,
and I think 2.35 is a good move here,
I think it holds up really well.
When Jon ﬁrst saw it, he was all smiles.
I mean, he was really happy.
Once the stuntmen had really become accustomed to the suit...
When they started out,
they were just a little afraid of damaging it.
Plates intersecting and chipping off paint and that kind of thing.
But by the end of the day, he'd really gotten the full range of motion
and sort of learned to live in the suit.
Those dailies at the end of the day were just amazing.
I think everyone was just blown away.
You have to be strong and you have to be athletic to do this.
It's like wearing very heavy football gear.
Your endurance level has to be up for it,
because it's a double-edged sword.
We have to make it light enough to move,
but we have to make it heavy enough not to just completely crack apart
when somebody puts too much muscle into it.
Do, like, the first guy outside the door.
The Mark I, with the flamethrowers and stuff,
was close to a hundred pounds.
Without the flamethrowers and the gas, and everything on it,
it was maybe 60 or 70 pounds.
Okay, and roll camera.
-Rol|ing. -Rol|ingl
What it feels like you're doing inside the suit
doesn’t relate at all.
When I'm walking, if I look down to see my mark at all, they notice.
But when I roll my shoulders up and try to hit the hero pose,
they can barely see it. So it's taken a while to watch ourselves on camera
to learn what it looks like, and what the moves relate to.
Another rotation, Mike.
Right here, it locks out.
And here, the weight comes down on my shoulder.
Soto be erect... Is this what you're looking for?
| just want to see it.
To see if it... 'Cause right now,
| see you crouching...
The hero poses kind of came from us just kind of striking poses
and looking at what looked best
and then them saying, ”Yeah, hold that, hold that, "
and things from the comic book that they had took, and poses they want,
Just different looks and, you know,
just trying to show that you can see his character. If he's angry
or if things are going good in the suit, they wanted to see that on camera.
-Rol| camera. -Rol|ing.
Action!
Yes, of course, there's going to be a great deal of digital work
that has to be done to bring something like this to life on screen.
But the fact of the matter is these suits truly exist,
and they are going to be there,
and they’re gonna be on the set.
And there are going to be actors,
and we are going to see the real thing along with the digital things,
but when you, as an audience, are looking at it,
it screws you up a little bit, so you really don't know what you're seeing.
"Is that real? Or is that digital?" And then you let go.
My background as a ﬁlmmaker is not in this sort of genre.
l have dabbled a little bit in special effects in Zathura and Elf,
but really, I come from more of an independent background.
Primarily, a comedic background.
And so I really wanted to offer
a human side that would ﬁt in with my sensibility of ﬁlmmaking.
And in assembling the cast that I did, between
Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrovv, Terrence Howard,
that's a cast that I would be happy to have
in a drama or a comedy.
And to be able to have them to support a bigger-than-life superhero,
really offers a possibility to exceed
what people 's expectations might be of this type of genre.
Listen to me. Listen to me.
You are like a little child sitting next to its father in a car
with a plastic steering wheel,
turning the wheel. But it's the father who's driving, Tony.
Then let me out of the car.
Join me, let's get the hell out of Stark.
-We can raise all the funds we want. -You're out of the car.
What do you mean?
l was the one who arranged the injunction, Tony.
Well, you could have saved a lot of trouble if you just...
-Did I hurt you there? -No, that would be great.
That'd be great. I'm gonna...
I think it was my manager, David Schiff, who was very excited about this project.
He was telling me about Iron Man, and I said, "Who's directing it?"
He said, "Jon Favreau", and I said, "Oh, God.
"He's such a wonderful director, writer and actor."
I said, "He'd be great to work with.
"Who's playing Iron Man?" "Robert Downey Jr."
So, "Wow," I said, "That's a pretty good team right there."
And I said, "Keep me posted, this is something I'd like to get involved with."
We'll let you warm up a little bit,
and then we'll start throwing a little movement into it.
Robert's a guy who’s very disciplined in his approach to everything he does,
and he's really gotten his body and his mind into
a very, you know, sort of clear, disciplined state
and that sort of carried over into how he prepared for the role.
Wherever the direction is, just point the opposite way, right?
Yeah, when you feel it going the other direction,
act like you're trying to counter it.
There you go, just like that.
I think he was very aware that he sort of had a burden in this ﬁlm
that he hadn't had before.
He could sort of be charming and funny and come in and out of a movie
and steal scenes in the past,
but now he was a sort of an iconic superhero.
It's good to eat about 10 minutes before this, right?
-Oh, yeah. -Yeah.
l weight-train crazily.
And I do a lot of martial arts and yoga.
Kung Fu, Wing Chun Kung Fu, but I was doing that anyway.
Now you're going backwards, so then you pump it up.
About a year ago, lsaid, "I really want to put on some size, "
which isn't easy when you're in your late 30s, and now I'm 41.
I thought if I'm ever gonna do a movie like this, I've got to do it quick,
before it's not embarrassing.
But anyway, I feel like I’ve got a ﬁve to seven-year window,
and then if it goes past that,
then I'm sure all the optical stuff and CGI
will have advanced to make you look better.
That's good.
-How's those legs, baby? -Yeah, no, no, great shape.
Legs are ready.
You wear this.
Fits fine.
You guide it across your face.
Don't let your face get scratched on anything. All right?
Robert Downey Jr. 's ﬁrst reactions to the suit
were extremely positive, and he was thrilled.
So that made us feel good, because it is him, after all.
He has to feel comfortable being in it.
He enjoys the process.
He wants to be in the suit as much as possible, which is fun.
That's what I wanted to see.
Just kind of walk around.
They don't bend either, right?
-Oh, I see. -No, they're basically rotational
but they've been rotated, so all the moves are like this.
I thought I'd been training for all these years,
and that l was pretty butch. And I put on that Mark I suit,
which is his escape vehicle,
and I almost had a personality meltdown.
It also just gives me a great respect for the stuntmen
and the guys who were doubling... I don 't even want to say ”doubling, " me
Careful, actor at work. Something just snapped off.
And I'm not claustrophobic, and it wasn't anything like that.
ltwasjust, lwore it for half an hour and I kind of ran around,
and the next day I felt like my spirit had been broken, like...
No, I'm exaggerating,
but it's like, these guys are seriously tough-ass guys.
Mark I suit days, we cancel the strength training.
The ﬁrst time I saw him put on the helmet,
I looked at him, I said, "Robert, you are Iron Man.
"I mean, how amazing is that?
"For the rest of your life
"you are Iron Man."
Nobody’s going to take that away from you.
And he looks at me, and goes, "Yeah, it's amazing."
I think we need to add some rust to it, but...
-Here we are. -Three RTs.
I love the lag bolts in there.
That's great.
Well, we 're right about to start shooting, and we’re rehearsing now.
We have the run of the set.
We actually started shooting second unit.
We went down to the Santa Monica Pier and shot the Ferris wheel yesterday,
and that was exciting, ’cause we crossed a couple of shots off our list
of the thousands we need.
There 's a stress factor that kicks in,
and that starts to go away and diminish
once you capture each shot and each scene on ﬁlm.
But right now, all there is is anxiety, stress
and going over and over again, your plan of attack on this movie
that's certainly the biggest movie I've ever been involved in making.
I think we have about a 74-day shoot
and day one is on Monday.
-It was definitely good talking about that. -Happy trails.
Or even really this one but it'll be...
With all the details and stuff...
There's not a lot of variation of color in there,
so if we could do anything, just to have, maybe,
little highlights of rust or something like that.
Here we go. And roll sound.
Sound feed.
A-mark.
And action. Robert...
Robert really wanted to play Tony Stark,
and I really wanted him to play Tony Stark.
It wasn't the most obvious choice from a studio 's point of view,
and fortunately, Marvel is a new studio with a lot of freedom.
We weren't dealing with the classic studio system
where they have their lists that they generate.
There was a lot of freedom to cast the best person for the role.
Because, fortunately, with Marvel movies,
the image of the superhero is, in fact, the big draw, the big star.
And they've learned that they've had a lot of success in the past
when they've hired people who were good, interesting actors
and relied upon the name of the brand itself
to be the thing that becomes the rallying cry,
from a commercial standpoint.
You, then, are able to try to make the best movie possible.
How dare you refuse the great...
You're only alive because of his generosity.
You are nothing. Nothing! You understand me?
People have drawn parallels to the character in his own life.
But that wasn't by any means the decision
or part of the criteria by which we chose him.
He 's a tremendous American actor
who has an incredible body of work
and, lthink, has the personality of Tony Stark.
He has the look that sort of matches with the comic books.
There 's a childlike quality to Robert. There's an imagination to Robert
that is very similar to Tony Stark, who's an inventor.
There's a sense of humor to Robert, which Tony shares.
There 's a conﬁdence...
There were just so many qualities, as you began to look through
the history of the comic books, and who Tony Stark was,
and really, who Robert is, as an actor and as a person.
It allowed the great Genghis Khan
to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine.
What is life like when you're locked up in a room
like that for two or three months?
And Robert brought a lot of his own personal experience
to the cave, too, which was fantastic.
I mean, he taught us how you make tea in prison with a nice old sock.
Or how you make coffee. Or how you play games.
You can make backgammon sets out of nothing. Things like that.
With Robert in the Iron Man suit, we tried to keep it at a minimum for him.
We try and keep it at a partial suit for him,
so he can do his acting, because it's so restrictive in that suit.
And then we would let lLM ﬁll in those blanks
where the suit would be full.
-Stop. Stop. -Come on.
-Get up. Get up! -Please. Please stop.
As an actor, I’ve never gone through a process like this before.
Because usually you have a written page
and you have a deﬁnite, set idea what it's going to be like.
But we really found Yinsen doing rehearsals,
sitting around the table and just talking.
And the fantastic thing about this project has been,
everybody’s been so open.
Maybe if you shave about 90 seconds off your death, it would be nice,
'cause it's a little uncomfortable leaning over there.
-Well, 90 seconds... -You heard me.
Robert Downey is just a jewel.
My girlfriend says, "I think you're in love with him or something."
Here we go. Ready? And action!
This is our last day in here.
And I remember when these walls were white,
and before there was set dressing in,
and we were trying to figure out what the heck we were going to do in here.
And it's a really cool feeling, and sort of bittersweet,
but it's satisfying when you say, "It's done."
There's no more decisions to be made
after 10 months of trying to figure out what we're going to do.
But we started off here, and now, coming out of here,
I feel like I understand who Tony Stark is, more.
I think Robert does as well.
And hopefully, when this whole sequence is cut together,
people will totally buy that Robert is in the Iron Man suit
and that he built it and it makes sense.
But you don't know. I mean, now, we just finished,
I haven't seen any of the scenes cut yet,
but I know that every day's work was really good and really strong,
and we did better than what was in the script. So...
We're shooting a close-up of Robert, 'cause we can,
and then we're leaving the set behind for second unit
to shoot a lot of action stuff.
But this was fun. There's a lot of memories in here.
In the Mark I suit was mostly Mike Justus.
Mike is a strong, ﬁt guy, and in the very beginning,
he would be in it for a couple of hours, and he literally was spent.
It was so hard to do.
I mean, imagine carrying around almost a hundred pounds on your whole body
and being asked to move around quickly and do fight scenes.
Ready. And action!
But as he did it more, he got more in shape to do it,
and there were days when he was in that suit, 10, 12 hours.
At the end of the day he'd go, "Man, I feel pretty good. "
Cut!
Well, we ﬁnally got out of the cave,
and now we’re shooting at Disney Hall.
It was designed by architect Frank Gehry.
It's a very beautiful space,
should add a nice look to the movie.
And since Tony Stark is an engineer and a designer,
we felt that it was important
that the locations tie in to that sensibility.
And when this was available to us, everybody jumped at the opportunity.
We have to shoot here at night, so it's going to be very gruesome,
brutal shooting hours, 'cause we're shooting from dusk till dawn.
And this is the first day that we're actually on nights.
So I think people will be fading fast.
Mr. Stark, lwas hoping I could get a reaction from you.
How's panic?
l was referring to your company's involvement in this latest atrocity.
Hey, theyjust put my name on the invitation.
I say the names and then I say my name,
and I'm like, "Holy crap, it's amazing!"
It's amazing. It's one of those moments.
lwill leave set, and I'll call my agent, I'll be like,
"Okay, dude, here's how I'm going to break it down today.
"I don't know. A man called Jeff Bridges?
"Yeah, yeah. I had a scene with him."
So it's exciting. And last week, lwas like,
"I had a scene with Terrence Howard and Robert Downey Jr. Yeah. Check it."
It's so good.
Hey, Potts.
-What are you doing here? -Just avoiding government agents.
-Are you by yourself? -Where'd you get that dress?
-Oh, it was a birthday present. -That's great.
-From you, actually. -Well, I got great taste.
Yes.
-You want to dance? -Oh, no.
-All right, come on. -Thank you. No.
The scene at Disney Hall was my ﬁrst scene in the ﬁlm.
I had taken quite a lot of time off to be with my children
and have babies and everything,
so it was kind of intimidating, the first scene back,
to be in this extremely backless dress.
It was good that in that ﬁrst scene, that Pepper’s kind of nervous
and feeling a little bit uncomfortable.
I had always wanted to work with Robert.
It had been one of my lifelong ambitions.
And when l was talking to Robert before I accepted the role,
he said, "Aren't you tired of doing these great little movies
"that no one sees? Don't you want to be in a movie that people see?"
And I thought, "Yeah, that would be fun."
Cut!
-You're greedy. -It was too much.
You're a greedy human being.
Stan, can we get you for the B-roll?
Is everything okay here for you? Are we taking care of you, or...
l have never been taken care of this well in my life.
we're going to have to go there again and do some acting.
Who is the best director of any Marvel movie?
Well, not only the best, but as far as I'm concerned,
-Jon Favreau is the only director. -That's right.
Unless some other director gets me a half a dozen pretty girls.
Ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to witness the fantastic new car...
We like to keep them a bit wet as they look even more fantastic.
And action!
How's it going, Hef?
Oh, sorry. Thought you were someone else.
It's okay. I get this all the time.
Now then, let me set you up here.
-Cut! -Cut!
Ladies and gentlemen,
that's a camera wrap on the creator of Iron Man.
Yeah!
All right, Stan Lee!
-You the man! -Thank you.
So when you hinge,
I'm trying to get a camera over your right shoulder, to get him.
l have another camera over his right shoulder to get you.
So I should be on this spot.
-I mean, this is where you like it. -Yeah. Yeah.
I had never shaved my head, I always wanted to.
I saw the comic book character, then I said,
"Well, I'll do this. I'll talk to Jon about it."
And Jon says, "Don't feel like you have to shave your head."
I said, "Oh, really?" I kind of wanted him to say,
"Yeah, you gotta shave your head."
But he didn't. So we chipped at it. We kind of took it down steps at a time,
and finally, took the plunge and shaved it all off, and it felt,
you know, the most Obadiah-like that way.
Hey, what a surprise.
I'm not going to say anything.
-ls that good? -I doubt that.
-l'll see you inside. -All right. Okay. Yeah.
-And... -We've got a lot to talk about.
Hey, listen.
They say the best weapon is one you never have to fire.
I respectfully disagree.
I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once.
That's how Dad did it. That's how America does it.
And it's worked out pretty well so far.
-Go wide. Wide-out the whole frame. -Yes! Yes!
For your consideration, the Jericho.
The Jericho, one thousand one, one thousand... Bang.
This right here is Lone Pine.
lt's doubling for what we 're suggesting are the mountains of Afghanistan.
I think they did Gunga Din out here.
I know they did a lot of Westerns out here.
This particular angle works really well for Afghanistan,
but if you look different ways,
different rock formations make you feel like you're out in the West.
Here, we 're on protected land,
so there are a lot of parameters that we have to observe to shoot here,
but the trouble that we went through is well worth it,
because it really gives you a look
like we traveled halfway around the world.
When you get to work with the guys at the top of their ﬁeld,
you just go, "Okay, that thing's going to blow up in back of me,
"and I'm gonna be okay. "
Or you get hit with a little frag and everyone runs over
’cause you're like, you know, the star of the movie.
And you're like, "My God, man, 10 years ago,
"I could've got knocked off my ass and have stuff stuck in my skin,
"and people would be like, 'All right, back to one."'
'Cause if you're not down, then you're not out.
Ready and action!
l was pretty blown away by how much we were able to do
at such close proximity and...
But I'll tell you, you know, it deﬁnitely helps you
kick up some dust when you know what you're running away from.
Jon brought everything.
Jon is the primal force behind Iron Man.
He's easily half the character.
He 's infused himself into every department.
He's an... I won't say he's a gentle giant because he's very formidable,
but he is the most composed person
in a position of unimaginable stress that I've ever seen.
He's so gracious and so evolved.
Robert, you're just such a good actor. We got that?
That said, he's a pain in my ass.
He's checking his goddamn BlackBerry,
texting and putting things up on MySpace while I'm out there dying.
But he's that kind of big brother, too.
So, he didn't call me out to pitch for his team
and then, like, come and, you know, ice my wrist when it got sore.
He's like, "You're a grown man. This is gonna be really hard.
"I told you it was.
"And sometimes, I'm a million percent there for you,
"and sometimes, I'm just gonna watch you do whatever you're gonna do.
"Because it's not up to me to take care of your feelings. You're a grown man."
Awesome. That's pretty good.
It's pretty good.
Working with actors in the military sets,
I don't try to make them warriors from the ground up.
What I do is, I focus in on the skills required to shoot the scene.
They are actors, after all.
They only need to know how it's done.
And then, as actors, they will pick up on it.
I started just pushing down
and, you know, these things are ﬁring
like 40 rounds a second.
And I'm holding it down,
but that would make the barrel very hot, you know,
so you'd have to do it in bursts.
And his whole thought was, "Die, mother... Die, mother..."
Huge gun. I mean, you feel your teeth shatter aftenNards.
It's incredible.
Cut!
Thank you, everybody.
Crew of Iron Man, excellent week. Really great week, guys.
That is a wrap.
What's going on here, coach?
A little windy today.
It wasn't like this when we scouted it.
We're gonna shoot Tony landing in the sand dunes
after he escapes from the cave.
And then walking through the desert.
We got two Marine helicopters coming out here.
I don't know if we're gonna be able to land them.
Here we go. Picture 's up.
It was sand storming and it was kicking up so hard, and I just remember
laying there, buried waist-deep in all this gear...
Roll sound.
And I just remember, I was inside the helmet
and I just had this great moment of gratitude
to, kind of, the elements and what a privilege it was
to be able to be there, playing this guy,
with the caliber of people I was working with.
Special effects, we got this.
I needed three cakes to fit all the candles.
Light it up.
I just said, "Wow, man, what a cool deal,
"what a cool suit, what a great crew, what a blast. "
Tony Stark.
Wardrobe, there's a boot down there. You know what? That's okay.
We've been out here in the sand dunes. It's been a Windstorm.
There have been a couple of semis flipping over on the highway.
The winds were kicking up to about 50 miles per hour.
So everybody's making do. We're all goggled up.
And everybody's been a real trouper and they're out here working.
We've had cranes swinging out of control,
and today we're just on sticks
because it was just too windy for any equipment more than that.
-Terrence is flying in. -ls he really?
-Yeah. -Is that Terrence?
Yeah, highway's closed so they flew him in.
It's just a brutal day,
very indicative, honestly, of what the circumstances
are like in Afghanistan. So it actually, kind of, you know,
rang true to what things are really like there.
Well, at 395, something must have flipped,
and they had to send a helicopter for me.
Yeah. How was the ride?
It was incredible. The doors are open. My assistant almost cried.
We brought in a couple of HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters...
Action, Robert!
...where actually, you know, a pair of rescue men in real helicopters,
and shooters that do that stuff for real,
came in and were part of that scene.
When we get out of that helicopter,
the ﬁrst breath you take in is half-ﬁlled with sand,
and your lungs fill up with it immediately,
and the cameras are on you,
and we've got 10 minutes to get this whole shot.
And you've gotta run across the desert.
Now, if anybody's ever ran in the sand on the beach,
they know how hard that is.
Now, imagine running up a sand dune with your lungs half-filled with sand.
The second day, when Raza recovers the suit,
the winds were so violent
that we couldn't really use any equipment.
And Louis D'Esposito, our executive producer, was like,
"You know, let's go to our cover set, " as you would if it rained.
I felt that all that wind, that heavy wind, was a very haunting image,
and so we put goggles on all the bad guys
and wrapped them with scarves,
you know, to help protect the performers,
and also that's really what they would wear and we just let it play.
And as a result, it has such a great visual quality
that if you wrote that into a script, you could never really achieve that.
You know, you can’t put enough Ritter fans in there
to make that kind of wind,
but when it really lands there in your lap,
I think, as a director, you have to take advantage of those opportunities.
Time for Iron Man to get out of Dodge.
This walk of destruction... What is it like being inside that suit,
shooting flames, with the armor on,
-how does it feel? -|t's an awesome feeling.
It feels powerful. You're just burning stuff.
You almost have a false sense of security
’cause you really feel super-protected by the suit.
And the way that the boys over at Stan Winston designed it,
I can move pretty well in it, for as much as it weighs,
and the special effects guys rigged me up,
just making me look like a bloody stud, so I can swell out some flames,
and it's an awesome feeling.
Take a couple of hits, and then, like, you...
You know what, it's history. This one I'm doing for my kids.
They're gonna watch this and go, "That's you, Dad?"
I'm just like... I'm digging it.
Hi, Taylor. Hi, Tristan. Hi, Mom. Awesome! I love this.
Just from wear and tear, we got a little tear in one of the lines,
and it spit fuel, which, being under pressure,
kept spraying on my legs, and I ignited.
And I kind of felt,
"Well, that feels a little hot. Maybe not. Yep, it's hot."
It was, you know, an unfortunate thing,
but Keith Woulard and Tommy Harper had all the boys set up
to take care of me. They put me out.
What's going on there, coach?
I'm finding my character.
The inner driver?
-Yes. -What're you doing today?
I'm playing Happy Hogan.
At the time, it seemed like a good idea.
Let's try to make my hair look like how it looks in the comics.
And this is it. This is what you get.
It's not too dissimilar to your regular haircut.
Is it not?
-Just straight instead of curly. -We're gonna put a little product in here
and straighten it out. It's a little thicker.
It's more of a cameo in this ﬁlm.
I wanted to give myself a way to be in the ﬁlm.
As a director of a big movie, there isn’t really a lot of latitude
to do much of a performance, but I was able to, sort of, weave my way
in and out of scenes. He's an ex-boxer,
who’s Tony Stark’s driver/conﬁdant/bodyguard,
kind of a sidekick of sorts,
although he's not a superhero in any way.
And he doesn’t crack a smile,
and so he, ironically, is given the name Happy.
And it's more for the comic book fans to see that, you know,
we 're sort of trying,
you know, in a way, to incorporate as much of the source material
as we could, being that this is the ﬁrst Marvel movie made for Marvel fans.
So, here it is. This is it. This is Happy Hogan.
I hope the fans like it.
-You like it, Pete? -|t's great.
-I really do. -The real reason I'm doing this,
Ijust broke it to Gwyneth that I marry her.
A-mark.
Edwards Air Force Base is here,
about 70 miles north, northeast of Los Angeles.
And Jon wanted to include Edwards Air Force Base
in the story, speciﬁcally, just because it has such a proud heritage
of flight test. And they really wanted to tie that into,
sort of, the research and development aspects of Stark Enterprises.
So we did a lot of filming there. We shot there for three days.
We shot on a C-17 cargo plane. We brought in an F-22
and a Global Hawk, as set dressing.
And we used about 300 airmen and, actually, Marines as well, as extras.
So you've got first look, one shot, one kill.
We're at the merge even before they know we're there.
Terrence Howard, we opted, in this ﬁlm, to make him
an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.
Although he was a member of the military in the comic books,
he wasn't somebody of that stature.
But he was somebody that bonded pretty early with Tony Stark.
As a matter of fact, he was involved with his rescue, from what I remember.
We tried to incorporate that into the ﬁlm in a way,
as sort of an homage to the books,
but we really wanted to flesh out the character even more.
And Rhodey becomes War Machine, if you follow the course of the books,
and as we sort of look fonrvard,
to see this as a chapter in a series of ﬁlms,
if we could be so lucky,
I think that following Terrence Howard
as he becomes a superhero in his own right
is something that I'm really curious and interested in.
That lovely lady you woke up with. What was his name?
-I don't know. -I think it was Ivan.
No, it was your sister.
Right.
Come on. Give us a few seconds, you guys.
Pleasure to meet you all.
Soon after that shoot, those guys cycled over to Afghanistan.
So, no joke, those are really tough guys and they got a real tough job to do.
And it was really nice to see Terrence and Jon and Robert
interact with them and just be really humbled
by what a tough job those guys got,
and what real pros they are.
It's nice seeing you.
-Do another one? -Yeah.
-One more? -Okay, once again.
One more, guys. We're going again right away.
The workshop was always the most important set for me.
It was the space that was gonna tell you,
before he got captured and builds the Mark I suit,
that he's a guy who likes fabricating. He likes working with his hands.
We have him working on a '32 Ford
that we show in a picture that he's working with his dad on.
And it just shows that he's bit of a gearhead,
that he's a guy who, not only is he a genius as far as design goes,
but he actually has a hands-on knowledge of how to build things.
And he's an inventor,
but the type of inventor who doesn 't just work with a pencil.
That was important, to make that leap,
so that it didn 't just jump into fantasy-land
when he was in a cave and builds this suit.
That he makes a breakthrough that was inevitable,
because he has a mind that is capable of these kind of realizations.
So we put together a shot that would be any car builder's dream.
We have everything from old English wheels
that look like they were passed down from generation to generation,
maybe they were his dad's that were passed down.
And we also have like CNC machines that are sort of state of the art,
or plasma cutters, and everything, we ﬁgured,
was tied in, automated to the brain of the house.
So, I wanted to create a real mix of high tech and low tech.
Why are you hustling me out of here? Where you going? You got plans?
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do.
You don't like me? What?
You don't like when she has plans.
I don't like you.
You don't like when she has plans.
I don't like it when you have plans.
Well, I'm allowed to have plans on my birthday.
-So, there you go. -Is it your birthday?
It is.
-Again? -Isn't that funny?
Same day as last year.
-Wow. -Yeah.
You're probably feeling coolness.
l was deﬁnitely not a comic book reader,
but my brother was.
So I grew up with Marvel comics around the house and
my brother had Spider-Man Underoos and Spider-Man sheets
and Spider-Man everything
from a very young age, and he was deﬁnitely into comic books.
So I was exposed to it.
Although, you know, I'm a girl, let's face it. So...
You feel it? You feel the...
-Oh, pus. -Don't worry about it.
It's not pus. It's an inorganic plasmic discharge from the device,
-not from my body. -It smells!
It's basically making a very tall, upside-down you.
I'm a huge Military Channel and Sgt. Rock... lmean, so...
Superheroes are great.
Superheroes who manufacture weapons
and then build one that they wear and use,
to me, is just a complete nerd-gasm.
Now we're ready. I think the band's ready to go on.
So, without further ado, I present Robert Downey Jr.
and the Boot Brigade.
In the origin story of a superhero, you have certain responsibilities,
one of which is, you know, showing how the hero came to be.
And it takes a lot out of a movie to have that kind of burden.
But what it gives you is the opportunity to allow the audience
to sort of become the hero with the hero.
And I have the most fun as a viewer
when I see the learning curve of a hero.
There's a tendency to wanna just go right for the ﬁghting
and right for the action.
But I know my favorite part of the ﬁrst Spider-Man ﬁlm
was watching him come to terms with his powers,
learn how to swing from his webs...
And I, you know, I referred back to that a lot
as we met and went to preproduction meetings,
talking about what the set pieces would be.
I thought you said you were done making weapons.
It is.
This is a flight stabilizer. It's completely harmless.
Three, two, one, go!
Well, watch where you point your flight stabilizer.
It's really dangerous.
I like the guy, that he's probablyjust as likely
to kill himself trying to save people as he is to do the right thing.
As far as Robert Downey doing stunts, he wants to keep doing more and more,
and I gotta keep reining him back
'cause he's very game to just keep right on going.
Should be following him while he's going.
So when he hits the wall and falls down,
there'll be like a beat of no movement,
and it'sjust punctuated by the blast.
Yeah, it's a timing thing. So...
I like to think that I can do a ton of stuff
and I 'm pretty game and physically able,
and probably should be for the next, like I said, five to seven years.
So...
But then I'll talk to Tommy,
and he'll be like, "Yeah, yeah, we're not gonna have you..."
"I could do that." He goes, "No. No, you couldn't.
"Well, maybe you could, but I wouldn't let you."
It still hurts.
But it hurts every day,
getting up looking like this.
It hurts in here, emotionally.
But I'm doing better. I'm doing better.
Can I go now?
Okay.
Thank you.
We're about to do
Tony Stark experimenting with the combination of boots and gauntlets.
This is his first successful flight in his workshop.
Robert here has done a lot of training on this wire rig,
and the tests we 've done were pretty successful.
Ready and action!
You're off, right here. Frame up on me.
Good.
Day 11, test 37, configuration 2.0. For lack of a better option,
Dummy is still on fire safety.
If you douse me prematurely, I swear to God,
I will donate you.
You'll be at a city college.
All right, we're gonna start off really nice and easy.
Don't talk when I am talking.
1% capacity. In three,
two,
one.
-Nice. -Three, two, one, drop.
Great.
Steady.
I’ve done wire work both as an actor and as a director in the past.
I think that people have been seeing wire work for so long that,
whether consciously or subconsciously, they can tell where the pick points are.
They can tell where the wires are attached.
And even if we use, you know, computers to paint everything out,
there 's something about the physics of it
that is unconvincing to me.
And I was very skeptical if we could use it at all
or if it would take the audience out of the movie.
What we did was we developed a way
by which the character was picked or supported by his feet.
So he wasn't being suspended
by his center of gravity or his hips or his back,
as is usually done in these ﬁlms.
Sorry. Clean up later.
His feet are supporting his weight.
So it actually looks like he's being supported
by the blast of the repulsers in the bottom of his boots.
And you could see, the dynamics as he's flying through the air
feels much truer to what the real physics
of flying being powered by your feet would be.
Learning one's powers
-is always the most fun. -Okay.
What would happen to you or to me or to anybody
putting this thing on and trying to operate it?
It's like surﬁng.
One, drop.
You feel pretty clumsy in the beginning.
And here,
he's wearing an engine. Pretty elaborate thing.
Yeah, I can fly.
Okay, cut!
Oh, man!
Ready? And lights, and action.
Something interesting happened when we saw
a black and white rendering of the Mark III.
It looked kind of silver, and that started our wheels turning,
and then we sort of backed into the design of the Mark II,
which is sort of a chromed,
aircraft-aluminum, sheet-metal-looking prototype version of the Mark III.
And then we started incorporating exposed rivets.
And because of the wonderful ﬁnishes that they were able to create
through the chroming process
and nickel-plating process over at Stan Winston,
he really has a very unique look, and that's something different
from anything you've seen in the books before.
But it helped provide sort of an intermediate step
between the Mark I armor and the ﬁnal Mark III design.
-Tommy, how much is that car? -$50,000.
It's a replica of a 1967 Cobra SC.
Where's it made?
In Poland, at a MiG factory.
Here we go.
Three, two, one, go!
Reset.
That brings a tear to my eye.
If you like cars at all, that hurts.
So you just step off.
Over the course of the movie, I dropped a bit of weight.
I started off... I remember when I was scouting,
I was quite a bit heavier than now.
My assistant, Karen,
helped me out. She brought me a lot of meals.
I didn't spend a lot of time at craft service or going to catering.
And over the course of the film, I lost weight.
I lost probably about 75 pounds. Maybe more.
Up... Give or take, depending on where I'm at now.
And I wanted to lose weight
because I was playing Happy Hogan in the ﬁlm.
And so I wanted to hit a certain weight, lose a certain amount of pounds,
and I just kept going. And there were problems, too.
'Cause my wardrobe would change in size
over the course of the ﬁlm.
Even my wig size changed.
It's amazing. Everything sort of changes.
Your shoe size changes.
I have real hair, but I wanted to have cool hair.
So, straight hair.
Ineverhad, like, a real shock of straight hair,
like in the comic books.
Ihad a wonderful time working with Peter Billings/ey,
who is a close friend of Favreau's,
and I got him to shave his head bald.
Not as bald as mine, I didn't want him to upstage me.
-It's like, yeah. -Is yours, like, velvety, too?
Oh, yeah. That's nice.
We both have good heads of hair.
Peter wanted to shave his head to look a little different,
age him up a little bit.
When you threw a lab coat on the guy, he looked like he was 14 years old
and so shaving his head, and throwing glasses on him,
and growing a mustache gave him a little bit more of a distinguished look.
There's an ID, probably a couple of pens, watch.
In approaching this cameo,
I really wanted to send a message to the other actors,
who I felt were really phoning in their performances, that,
"Guys, let me show you a level of commitment to acting."
William! What seems to be the problem?
The camaraderie that Jon nurtures on a set
is to ad lib.
You don't see that all the time on movies this size,
where somebody's on wires, you're up against a green screen,
or you can't move too much,
because there's going to be a computer effect,
and it can get very rigid.
And it was very important to Jon that the film not feel rigid.
That the ﬁlm feel and have a flow to it,
and have a sense of fun to it. Always believable,
but never too ovenrvhelmingly pretentious or self-serious.
We're iron mongers. We make weapons.
It's my name on the side of the building.
And what we do keeps the world from falling into chaos.
The spirit in which it was shot, and the way we did it,
was like you might do a small, independent art ﬁlm,
in a funny sort of way.
Towards the end of the movie, I think we 're just starting
to get up to speed, and start to relax
and have faith in this process that we 've...
The way we do it.
Each time we would do one of these scenes,
there'd be a great sense of relief, like, "Man, we got through that one.
"We pulled it out. How did we do it?"
This technology, it comes along once in a generation,
and it's a gift.
-I think, lthink... -You could keep him saying...
Either that or I could take it, and you said, "I said no,"
-and I put it in front of you? -Could do that.
Ifl have, if! have one...
"If I have one drink, could we move on?"
-"Yes." Takes a drink. -And he takes it.
Now, do we cheers before that? That would be good.
-"We have one drink? Okay, here." -Okay.
-Settle, please, and roll sound. -And boom up.
Boom up. Boom up.
Ready, and action.
Honey, I hate it when we fight.
-Good morning, Mr. Stark. -I told you, I'm not mad.
-I'm just indifferent. -I said I was sorry.
-Thanks. -I don't want to hear it.
What more do you need than an apology?
You don't respect yourself, definitely know you don't respect me.
Jon recognizes that the script is a skeleton.
The comic book is a skeleton.
What we are creating is real life, so he allows it to grow and to improv
and to become something alive and three-dimensional.
-I want to do it sober, okay? -I want to be fresh.
I know what I'm doing. I live this. This is business travel.
I got a throttle between my legs, going...
-You know what? -...hopping...
Just do what you want to do. Just leave me alone.
Join me. One drink.
-To business. -I said no.
To the future. To the Air Force.
Will it get you to shut up?
The look of the ﬁlm is something that is
as much a part of the franchise as the character himself.
And as a director, it's one of the elements
that you have a lot of control over.
Maybe she does one move,
and then Sarah can come and do a move.
I'm not a cinematographer.
I wouldn't know how to light a scene as a cinematographer or gaffer.
I have a lot of respect for what they do.
But I do understand a look that I like.
who I've been wanting to work with for a while,
and I’ve been a fan of his, since his much smaller ﬁlms.
He brings a certain style to it, a certain grittiness.
And he's also able to give it a big movie look.
And he understands how much a priority reality is,
and how the challenge, for this movie, was to ground it in reality.
Because it's such a fantastic story, such a fantastic character,
that your job as a director is to make it personal.
Welcome home, Mr. Stark.
Thanks, Jarvis.
-It’s been a long time. -Yep.
You know, there are two ways to go.
One is just to create a spectacle that people could munch popcorn
and ogle at and enjoy, and that certainly is a lucrative proposition.
But as a ﬁlmmaker who’s going to be working on this thing for two years,
and possibly other ﬁlms to come,
it's important for me to have an aspect to it
that I could really buy into, beyond just being a trifle,
you know, being just a treat for the audience.
You also want to do something where you're telling a story,
maybe speaking to something, going for something a little bit more.
And the way Matty lights,
and the way that Mike Riva designs the sets,
it brings reality to it.
Sir, you have 1, 713 new voice messages.
Including three from the Mandarin.
About the time that we cast Robert Downey Jr.,
I was thinking about the house, and trying to figure out
what kind of design it should be.
And even though we had decided on
this kind of angular, flat, metallic, hard-edged look,
the idea that Robert Downey Jr. has a...
He comes with a certain vulnerability with him.
And it may sound strange,
but we redesigned the notion of the house after casting him.
I thought that he would be more suitable
in something that architecturally mirrored who he was.
A little softer inside, a little bit more susceptible,
a little more vulnerable.
There was a certain vulnerability about him,
so I thought, round is nice. It's more elegant.
And it just seemed a little bit more womb-like.
When this project ﬁrst came along,
they gave me a bunch of the comic books,
and history of the characters, and so forth,
and I said, "Obadiah Stane's got this wild suit, Iron Monger suit,
"and all these different things."
I got kind of excited about that, again, the kid in me.
We'll counter your moves.
So wherever you move, we'll go with you
and take the weight of the suit itself.
You have rotation by yourself, Jeff.
Yeah. I've got it now by myself, right?
No, you can spin. Spin your waist. There you go.
That's always just you.
Then when I met with Jon the ﬁrst time, he said,
"Oh, no. You don't get to wear a suit."
And I went, "Oh."
And because the Mandarin was originally the bad...
There was gonna be two different bad guys.
And I said, "Okay, well. Let's see how it works out."
And then, the scripts were being worked on,
and when it came back, he says,
"It looks like... You wanted to wear a suit,
"now you've got your suit." I said, "Well, great."
How ironic, Tony!
Trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it the best one ever!
And now I'm going to kill you with it!
You pulled out my targeting system! Hold still!
Fire.
Cut!
Ready, and action!
All clear.
I think it was the most strange for Gwyneth, who,
although she had worked on a green screen show, Sky Captain,
she'd never really worked on an effects show.
And she said that was very different than this.
Because in this ﬁlm, she's looking at a ten-foot-tall robot
that's being operated by puppeteers in front of her.
And she's having explosions go off behind her,
and windows being blown out, and lights going crazy,
and things melting down.
And she was right in the heart of it, running through sets at full tilt,
and with things blowing up behind her.
And she had never experienced anything like that before.
I told her it was Remains of the Day II when we signed her.
When I did Sky Captain, that was very surreal,
because there was literally nothing. There was nothing practical.
There were no props and no sets
and that was just like doing
experimental theater or something off-off-Broadwa y,
because you were just in a room with some actors.
And this, I was so used to working with actors and real sets,
that when they said, "Okay, now a big monster's coming out of the ground,"
then I felt like, "Oh, my God."
Look, Gwyneth, look!
"This is so silly." And Jon said, "Oh, don't worry."
So, Ijust thought, right, you just have to really go for it.
And cut! Very good!
One, two, three...
One, two, three!
The ﬁrst half hour of being in the Iron Man suit
is like the coolest Halloween you ever had,
except you're alone in the trailer
before they call you on the set or whatever,
or you're getting ready, and you just catch a glimpse,
and you go, "That's right. Grandma'd be proud."
And then, because it's not really...
It's designed for guys to wear, but I'm not a stuntman.
And most of the stuntmen aren't doing 65 scenes in the next three weeks.
Most of them are young enough to not have a teenager at home.
Ready, ﬁre!
Push the button, Pepper!
It was tough, and as we went further and further along,
I realized I could wear the suit all the time,
but I can’t wear the suit all the time and be an effective actor.
I'm sorry, did that interrupt your flow?
I guess this is a draw.
In the last couple of weeks of shooting, I was like, "You know what?
"I made it this far. I need to sleep. I want to eat pasta.
"I don't care if I'm puffy tomorrow.
"Don't put me in a T-shirt. Kiss my ass."
I did all that stuff, because then the job is,
you drop the saddlebags,
and you just charge out of Dodge City,
'cause you want to get out without getting your ass bit by a rattlesnake.
Now it's time for both of us to go.
That's the law of nature, Tony!
Ladies and gentlemen, on to Las Vegas.
That is a wrap. Thank you, everybody.
Here we are, out in front of Caesars Palace,
the third movie I 've done here.
And we're exhausted. We're doing a death split,
which means you start at midnight and go into the next day.
We tried to turn around,
everybody stayed up as late as they could,
gambling and partying last night,
and tried to sleep all day.
I, for one, was not able to sleep all day.
And I have to act and direct today.
So this could all go to hell in a handbasket
on our last day of principal photography.
But here we are. This is the big finish line.
We always knew that if we got here, we'd be in good shape.
So it's a bit of a celebration. It's going to be a fun scene.
We're gonna start outside, then go inside.
Here he is, Tony Stark.
-Tony Stark. -I was just saying, we don't need sleep,
-we got talent. -That's right.
A-marker.
And action!
Work it, work it, work it!
Winner!
I'm just so proud of everybody and satisﬁed and the whole deal.
I mean, in my psyche right now, it's that thing of...
Like someone was saying, the last day of high school,
and you know?
You kind of just can’t wait to throw your hat up,
but then you're like, "What am I going to do with the rest of my life?"
And I just remember, last October, November,
and meeting Jon regarding this,
and then screen testing, and then preproduction.
To me, like, most of us were burnt by the time preproduction was done,
'cause we prepped ourselves into a tizzy.
And then there's the starting, and the first two weeks in the cave,
and then going to Lone Pine
and then Edwards Air Force Base, I mean...
It's the problematic thing of looking at a schedule,
or looking at what your...
Anyone looking at what their life is for the next three months,
it's like, "This can't be done."
Thank you, everybody. That is a wrap.
You know, every movie has its trials and tribulations.
We did encounter a snow storm in the middle of the desert,
in the cave scene, which was very odd.
We did have sets that blew away and blew down,
but, actually, the movie gods were with us most of the time.
And while it was always daunting, it went fairly smoothly,
which was great for our ﬁrst production.
Very important for our ﬁrst production.
Ladies and gentlemen, Jon Favreau, director of Iron Man.
That's a testament to Jon, to the crew that we put together, and for the cast,
who were always game, who could always maneuver
through whatever circumstances were thrown at them.
And we did it. We came in on time and under budget.
Take a look at this. Get a look at this...
Take a look at this.
-I want you to go to SU132. -Okay.
It's looking good.
-And Dan extended it? -Yes.
-Looks like he did.
-This just came in? -That's much better.
-It came in yesterday. It was a temp. -Oh, wow.
It's coming along nice.
-There's your little ribs moving. -All right.
-Can we see that again? -Let's put up the expensive cropper.
That actually does help a lot, John, that little...
That little rib event.
Yeah, we got to rack that.
I want to see under the floor a little bit too. 'Cause that helps.
Well, they also added... What I like is the heels
that we had on the Mark II as well. They added it here,
which we didn't have in the other version and that's very cool.
The thing, I think, that makes the biggest difference,
is they have the arm actually operate the screw.
And that one, too. There's one on the... Right there.
As we go up, just take it a few frames fonrvard.
That thing's coming off of there.
I almost want that to linger a little bit more, so we see that.
It's almost happening out of frame.
It is. It is happening out of frame.
So we should just delay that when that piece comes out.
If we could delay that event... 'Cause it closes as soon as we're on it.
Yeah, it's 'cause there's something right at the beginning,
you want something sort of in the middle to go...
So you just go, "Yeah, the party's started."
But it's definitely cool. It's definitely better.
It's much better. And that actually helps a lot with his little flippies.
All right. Anything else to look at?
And when would you like to cut?
Is that where we get out? I thought it was longer.
Why is it trimmed so short?
-Wait till next week. The answer is... -|t's on the step.
-That looks like it's very short.
I felt, some of what was cool about it was that he walks out.
I am in the mo-cap suit in this.
This is a shot where we were trying to get the first reveal right.
-So you have it, like, cut there. -Look at them now!
Do you have the previous...
That's way short. So here's my question.
Clearly, we're going down a dead-end road here,
because we're changing the performance on this thing.
I like the camera angle, but now Dan's cutting out,
I'm assuming going downstairs,
I'm not going to tell him, "Hey, get me one more half a step."
-That breaks the shot. -We||, should we try and get Dan here
for a minute, and maybe at least he can tell us...
We can, but I know what he's gonna say.
He's going to say, "Why would I have him just go a half a step?"
It throws off the reveal. This is all about the reveal.
So, right now, I'm cutting in on the middle of the head turn.
And the head turn's throwing off the reveal,
so let's change that, and maybe that'll take some of the curse off of it.
But we're now cutting even shorter the reveal,
and the whole idea of this was to make it longer.
Which is why, when we did the mo-cap performance,
we looked at the full length of the plate to see what we had.
-Right. -And then after we did that,
-we found out that we couldn't get it. -Exactly.
Check it out. It's cool.
-This stuff is looking fricking awesome. -|t's amazing.
-That's a temp, too. -That is a temp.
-Can we file it? -So can we talk about...
-Should I put a mullet on there? -You guys like the texture of the gantry?
-I love everything about it. -Yeah? Okay. Good.
I love the animation too. All those pieces coming in?
-Okay, that's SU95, right? -SU95.
I think I'd buy that more.
I think that's got to clap more closed.
-See how it's sliding? -|t's got to go...
-|t's got to slide in and then go... -Yeah.
And I think there should be some sort of under gap to it too, which is starting...
It's starting to imply. I think it's going to be good.
Should there be backs to it or something
-so it doesn'tjust feel like... -I gotcha.
-Do you know what I mean? -So it should be
seamed around here?
Something. There should be another, maybe, cranial element
'cause it just feels very 2-D... It just feels very...
The whole thing is, as Iron Man, it should be...
Yeah, should be tough. Strong.
Do you want to have one spin or no spin at all?
I like the spin. Remember we talked about him going out upside-down?
-Yeah. -That's what we had talked about.
Like he was coming out upside-down and not spinning.
The spin feels a little bit like when he... In the dogfight?
Maybe. That's what we'd talked about.
So I feel like he's out of frame and I feel like it's a little too...
-A little too self-conscious. -Too showy.
-A little too showy. -Okay.
Where am I going now? Down to the mix?
And then, hopefully, we can sit with Dan and we can look at six to seven ADR.
-All right. -Bye.
-Been up here before? -No.
-First time? -It is amazing.
-How do you like these posters? -This one here?
There's that little room.
And here it is, the Akira Kurosawa mixing stage.
Let's see if he's in here.
Ijust wanna make sure that. ..isn't where. ..
I like the... The actual RT sound itself.
Well, now, lwas only bringing you in for that.
-Let's see that one more time. -The RT, we haven't really mixed yet.
Good, let me see it again. I think it's good.
So those sound like servos, right?
So the layers I'm expecting,
that we'll get to now are gonna be
the winding up of the RT, also...
Right, and also movement.
You know, presence and sort of
servo/plasma sort of type of sound for him
-moving around as well. -Good.
And because this is like
when we are seeing the RTs being used against people, too.
It's the first time we're really showing it.
-Right. -We might wanna sweeten it with like...
On top of the sound we have, we should have something in our pocket
like a thunder crack or something, to sort of bury in there,
kind of like we did with the pig squeal and stuff.
Right, right, right, yeah.
Just to give it a little more pop, if it's not...
'Cause it has to be a little more ovenrvhelming than it is later.
It has to have its own, like, signature "Holy shit, this guy..."
It's like the first time Dirty Harry fires the Magnum.
-Right, right. -|t's gotta really be a special one.
Don't worry about consistency,
worry about impact.
Jon Favreau called for Iron Man and said,
"Can you help us?"
"It's Iron Man. Are you kidding me?
"Of course I wanna work on Iron Man. Of course we wanna do that."
I mean I love Marvel comics. I love Spider-Man.
I used to read Iron Man.
John Nelson called and said,
you know, "Can you guys come in and look at some of these interfaces?"
There's a lot of text you can't quite read.
And it's all very... It's very technical.
But it wasn't advancing the story.
But this was the kind of thing.
Different ideas for how those interfaces look.
You know, Jon always used the reference of,
you know, the iPhone kind of thing, sort of the simplicity.
He felt like Tony Stark
would be really visually sophisticated and notjust like a technological nerd,
but he would have a real sense of style.
And all the products in his house
would have a real sense of this high-design sensibility.
Connect to the sys. co. Have it reconﬁgure the shell metals.
Use the gold titanium alloy from the seraphim tactical satellite.
That should ensure a fuselage integrity while maintaining power-to-weight ratio.
-Got it? -Yes.
Shall I render using proposed speciﬁcations?
Thrill me.
So we wanna show that the computer is processing something speciﬁc to that,
whereas the interfaces prior, some of them,
just looked complicated.
But they didn’t look speciﬁc to the story
and Jon was very speciﬁc about,
you know, you have to hit this story point.
Even though it's a pan from one monitor to another
and you only have
three seconds.
I still wanna get what’s going on with those monitors.
The beginning designs of the hologram.
That's that.
But then they let us work on the main title,
and we came up with a ton of stuff.
We had the idea of the title itself, kind of forming like...
As a company of our size, we always like to
put our best foot fonrvard
and get as much out there as we can.
Make a really good impression on the pitch.
So we pitched a lot of different styles and a huge range of things,
from the shiny, glossy kind of look
to something kind of gritty and textural.
When I'm involved in an effort of that scale,
I always like to just do something completely different,
knowing that those stand a great chance,
but maybe there's, you know, an opportunity for something else.
I had a board that had flying.
The interface, he says, "I am Iron Man. "
And then the HUD display encases him in the...
Comes up around him, and then he takes off.
The kind of brief that I gave the people here
is that I thought, when he says, "I am Iron Man,"
it should be like a celebratory thing,
like you leave the theater and, you know, you're pumped.
And I also thought about...
I liked the interaction of the robots.
And so we had a board that was all about type,
that was kind of being, you know, very complex kind of situation with type
being made by robots.
And Jon felt like there wasn't a lot of detail material
of the suit itself.
So he very much responded to a board
that was all about the inner mechanics of the suit.
But we had this little motion test and
Jon saw it and he really liked it.
This is what we had showed to them, the first meeting.
Idecided, well, you know, maybe it would be kind of interesting
to do something that's like a video game,
kind of wire-frame looking.
Tempest. It was fully Tempest.
The color, the look of it.
It was that and a combination of TRON. I liked TRON a lot at the time, too,
and a game called Battlezone. So I was a real...
I would go into arcades all the time as a kid,
and spend like $40 in quarters at a time on these...
And that was a lot, then, to... I'm kind of dating myself.
Jon saw it and he really liked it.
And I think he wanted to move away from
the kind of language of Spider-Man
and have something that was more
kind of funky and now.
Kevin was a little bit more,
you know...
He was wondering if...
It became a conversation then about what's the level of rendering.
Well, it looks retro and Jon's like, "No. That retro is, that's what's cool.
"That's what's cool about it."
In talking to the director,
at that point we were going back and forth so much,
you know, between, what can it be...
We went a little bit too far, I think, in the sort of printed kind of look
and it ended up looking like paper, in a way.
So we were kind of unhappy with that.
Fortunately, after showing them that, they didn't like that very much,
and we went right back to it.
What was super cool for us was that ILM had given us this...
They gave us the CG model for Iron Man.
So you can imagine the detail in that.
We were peeling apart layer after layer.
It was just endless. I think these guys had spent months at this thing.
But it was so fun to be able to just take that plate, you remove it,
there's this mesh, you know. You remove that.
There's all these little screws and bolts and nuts and all of that,
which is really evident in this shot here.
It's crazy what these guys did.
Theyjust... You know, it's like real machine work.
They just went and did every single piece.
The detail these guys put in... It's just such a labor of love for them.
They really, really ﬁgured this thing out.
You know, like, we wanted a little bit of a hint of film here,
you know, then we just kind of give it a lot of nice grain and texture
and all that kind of stuff.
Ilya had come up with this look, you know, to
give it a little bit of an imperfect quality.
And they wanted us to put War Machine in there.
So we found a good opportunity to do that, I think on this, here.
Dave Rinder had modeled this.
So all of this was made here at Prologue.
We had a couple reference photos to go off of,
to be able to do that.
And then here...
I even like laser tag.
You know, how they have all the black light kind of thing?
My kids play that. They love that stuff.
But I think it's not as popular anymore.
I thought it might be kind of fun to explore thatjust a little bit, right here.
So, here we are.
You guys are working extremely hard, I know,
-but I think... -Can we get a close-up for this part?
We're working extremely hard,
but one of the things that we do need to do
is kind of formulate how we're gonna finish, now.
How we... What is our task at hand
to get this movie so that we can clearly have prints by the end of March.
The one relentless thing, calendar-wise, is vis effects.
That's the thing. Once we run out of time, we're done.
-Right. -And so,
I wanna make sure that they're not waiting,
because oftentimes, they have people hot-bunking
and working around the clock at these vendors,
and if I don't get in there when they need me...
-Absolutely. -...there are people waiting and,
at a certain point, the bell's gonna ring
and we're not gonna get those shots in and that's, honestly,
the most concerning part of the process to me right now.
As of today, we have 162 outstanding shots,
out of which, 22 were always the Gulmira ones from March 21st.
So, outstanding is 140.
The caveat, though, really,
ultimately, is gonna be Iron Man's voice,
because no one's ever seen it.
It actually isn't something that really works yet.
-Yeah. -So, it's like one of those things.
It's like your VFX.
Until they work, they don't work. And it's like...
And it could mean pulling out a lot of lines or adding lines
and stuff like that.
Yeah, the character of the film
is radically altered, so that's the one...
That he shared discovery, that he'll have a lot to say about...
-Is it the same for Monger too, or no? -Probably.
Yes, it is. He hasn't heard reel four yet, where you're actually...
And maybe he'd enjoy learning extra lines.
It doesn't really start till reel five,
because we don't use Iron Man voice in first flight.
Now the space battle stuff,
because it's such an important story point,
and because there are so many moving parts
between ADR, performance, robot voices,
the effects themselves, the music,
all the things are gonna sort of come together,
and have to pay off in a way that I'm not completely confident in.
A big thing that we're gonna have to dial and understand,
as we see the shape of it in the cut,
and as all the finals lay in, is the degree of ice that's on him.
And that's gonna be all Ben over there,
and that's gonna be something where I think we're gonna be
really dialing in and out more than we have
with most of the shots we've been working with them.
Once again, to be honest with you, Charlie,
I just honestly think we're not gonna...
We'll need to go through that weekend, I think, just to get this thing mixed.
Just to get up to the playback on the 17th.
-I'm just... -So you wanna be mixing
-all the way through to this... -Well, I'm just...
I'm just being real with this pace, you know.
What we're trying to do and what's all going on here.
Now, I told them no soul patch on Rhodey...
-No soul patch. -...in his Air Force one.
-But that one I think was already done. -No, these are awesome.
How do we get them?
They'll be toys. They'll be able to purchase them.
-Purchase? -Or, I mean I can send them to you,
-but they'll be, like, in the toy store. -What're you talking about, Jeremy?
Come on, you know what I mean. You know, what I mean.
Look at that one. The Mark I's awesome.
-Pretty great. -Very cool.
-That's the best Monger. -Yeah, isn't that awesome?
It's sick. That's the best toy yet.
How do you feel about that, Matty?
-Yeah, that's better. I think it'll... -General|y, I guess...
-|t's not really worth chasing, really. -Okay.
Well, it's just this one shot.
Let's... Can we see just...
What is it about the color that seems a little...
See the blue on the left there?
Maybe we could use it as a guide to try to swing it more...
Okay.
It's hard to really read it on the glass. This is also...
See how I'm swinging it away from the red in his skin tone...
-Yeah, I know. That's fantastic. -Okay, great.
That's kind of where I want it to go.
It's a very interesting time now, and I remember this on other movies
and, boy, you don't know what’s gonna happen.
This could be anything from a flop to a moderate single.
You know, where you get on base
and just keep plugging along in your career, to something that...
Where it's beyond where people's expectations are.
I honestly don 't know.
I 'm sort of the worst person to handicap that kind of thing right now.
I'm in the worst seat in the house. I'm right in the...
I 'm right in the thick of things. I don 't know where we are.
Can you click it up? Maybe a hair.
Right now, I'm worried about the minutia.
Right now, there's still shots from ILM we're waiting to get back.
I don't know if that space battle's gonna pay off.
You know, I'm still in the sound mix, the DI.
We 're still making picture changes. That's just the nature of things.
You know, this non-linear style of postproduction.
It used to be you would lock a movie, you'd do the music,
and you'd sit back and mix at this point.
Well, we 're still making picture changes.
Ramin's still composing score cues for us,
if it doesn’t quite ﬁt.
We're dancing as fast as we can.
And then, I'm gonna be promoting the thing all around the world.
I don't mind it, though. I think that if it was just up,
it would be less saturated back there.
...looks like a Star Wars poster.
This is a bit of a fever pitch.
We're getting all the shots in. We 're trying to ﬁnish them up.
All the work of, you know, two years is all paying off now.
We showed it to some people. We've shown an unfinished version
to, like, Paramount foreign distributors. They laugh. They like it.
We've shown scenes at Comic-Con, WonderCon,
they all like it. I've shown friends.
But this is a Marvel movie. We don't test these movies.
So... I don't know. They don't want it getting out on the Internet.
It's a very secret process. So...
I really don't know how people are gonna react to this thing.
I know that the people close to me seem to like it.
I know that there's funny scenes, there's scenes with a lot of heart.
There's a lot of truth in it. I love the performances.
I love the cast. I think the suit worked out really well.
I think ILM did a spectacularjob.
The score sounds good to me,
and certainly the sound effects sound great.
So, I don't know.
Okay, so this is the all ADR cut that's loading.
Send them two new versions.
All right.
Let's see what we got here.
How do you think the Mark] chest piece is gonna hold out?
The suit's at 48% power and falling, sir.
That chest piece was never designed for sustained flight.
Keep me posted.
I 've located Ms. Potts.
Pepper!
-Tony! Tony, are you okay? -I'm ﬁne. How are...
-Obadiah, he's gone insane! -I know.
Get out of there right now!
Where do you think you're going?
Your services are no longer required.
What a waste.
That "What a waste" sounds... It's a...waste.
Well, all those three lines,
are they complementary, is the big question.
I don't think so.
Yeah, yeah, assuming we could get it to sound the same.
Your services...
Okay, 'cause you have...
The whole thing about him pointing the gun...
Aline over pointing the gun explains why he's not smoking her.
-Right? That's the whole thing. -That's the idea. Yeah.
So, "Your services are no longer required,"
I would push over that. I know we had it there once before.
I would say, I would get "What a waste" out of there.
Okay. I will duplicate your thing down here.
-Sure. -Okay, where are you working now?
-ADR work bin? -Yeah.
Okay. So, right here...
You...
He hates when directors point at the screen during photo ops.
I do it all the time, now.
Your services are no longer required.
Right here. And getting rid of "What a waste."
There's mixed sounds 'cause that stuff is so long.
You're using mixed sounds?
Yeah, so we'll just right...
That'll be just in the dialogue tracks.
That's even worse. It a director snaps, he loses his fingers.
These are the cuts. This is how they know to cut.
-Give the rhythm of the cut. -There's just... It'll just be like...
Your services are no longer required.
The only thing I think we could put in is a "Pepper Potts"
before "Your services are no longer required," to bridge that cut.
Pepper Potts. Pepper Potts.
You could tell me that this thing barely made its money back
in its theatrical release, I would believe you,
or that it blew up, and I would believe that, too.
I know there 's a lot of big movies coming out this summer.
And they look good.
As the head of Sony distribution told me last time around,
he says, "There's only so many seats in the bus."
You know, and you got about
three or four movies get to be a hit
in either a holiday season or a summer season.
And you're either in it or you're not.
Pepper Potts.
-Pepper Potts. -Pepper Potts.
Pepper Potts.
Your services are no longer required.
Pepper Potts.
Come on, Jeremy, you said that was a good one.
Pepper Potts.
That was the studio's select.
That was the one that came with the line
"Pepper Potts, I have the feeling you're trying to avoid me.
"So beautiful, what a waste."
I know that I 'm proud of it.
I know that we've done everything we can.
I know that we're hitting some sort of note,
because we’re getting feedback.
After Comic-Con, we showed the footage,
people got on board and got excited about it.
And now it's being spoken of in the same breath
as Batman and Indiana Jones.
I mean, we weren't part of that conversation when we started off.
We were like an unknown quantity.
It built from like a small, little grassroots thing into something where
people are anticipating it.
So, I know the awareness is there,
which is something I didn't have on Zathura, the last ﬁlm I worked on.
So it feels different than that.
As our first film out of the gate, I couldn't be happier.
I couldn't be more proud of the film that we've put together,
the team we've put together, of the cast that we've put together,
and of Jon.
It feels very, very good to have this kind of buzz on a character that,
outside of the hardcore Marvel fans,
most people didn’t know a year ago.
Most people said, "Well, is he the guy in the metal and the suit,
"with the goatee?" Maybe people knew.
And now, the name Tony Stark is as famous as the name Iron Man.
It feels exciting. It feels like people are ready to go out there
and start the summer off with our ﬁlm,
which is gonna deliver.
We 're the ﬁrst one out.
People seem to be, you know, ready for the thing.
Let's see if that Internet buzz translates to a larger buzz,
and an anticipation with the general audience.
But I do feel conﬁdent going in.
And I get the suspicion that I'll be doing more of these,
and you know,
it could potentially change the nature of my whole life and my whole career.
I'm gonna see it now, for the first time.
How does it feel to kind of have this moment?
I'm in great company and I've never had it so good.
Is it cool to be directing a movie? Like a comic book movie?
It's awesome, man.
I grew up reading this thing, and now here I am making this movie.