Thinking about how much movies like Iron Man cost, just spending 20 minutes with Jon Favreau has to be worth about a million dollars. At least six figures. Near the end of shooting, as Tony Stark's laboratory has been broken down, Favreau took a break to do the promotional thing. This was also the first time I'd seen him since he lost all that weight, so looking at the Jon Favreau from Swingers 10 years ago was kind of freaky.
Crave Online: Is Iron Man money?
Jon Favreau: Yes, he is, I hope. The jury's still out. We'll find out.
Crave Online: Is this a big undertaking for you with all this action?
Jon Favreau: It is, and we have a great second unit. There's a guy, Phil Neilson who's directing second unit. Probably as we speak, if you hear something blow up, he's probably on the other set blowing things up. We’ve been very lucky to have a group of people that are very good at developing and calling the action. I don’t want to sit here and pretend that I have huge action experience. I think I can tell a good story. I think cinematically I can make something compelling. Matthew Libatique is a great director of photography, but what I'm bringing to the table is more the humanity of the story. Enforcing rules on the story as well where it doesn’t feel like two completely different films, and there is the possibility that it goes from Swingers to Power Rangers, and everybody’s like, "What am I watching?" So the trick is to bring up the human story to a world that feels like it’s a comic book, that fits into the genre, and then keeping the action aspect of it, I wouldn’t say restrained but hold it up to a certain standard of reality that you have a broadness that you expect in a comic book movie, but it’s not like just do whatever the hell you want because it’s a movie and everybody just wants to eat popcorn. I think in my body of work I’ve held it to a certain standard, and now in making something that has to be appealing to a much larger audiences than I’ve really hit before, I want to make sure that we’re giving everybody what they want and making it fun and exciting, but also making it something that I could be proud of.
Crave Online: What was important to retain about the comic book suit and where could you go your own way?
Jon Favreau: I don’t want to reinvent it, not like a glowing Superman fiber optic suit. I really am embracing what it is. The best thing I heard is, first we got Mark I out, which we took a little leeway with because in the books it really doesn’t make sense that he would make that out of spare parts, but yet we wanted to keep the personality of it. Everyone was like holy sh*t, that’s so cool. And immediately we were like, "Oh my God, what’s going to happen when the see the Mark III?" And what happened when we showed the Mark III was, "This is great, it’s just like I saw it in my head." That’s a very hard thing to achieve, because everybody sees different shit in their head. And then everybody was like, "Oh but that’s clearly a CG suit." And then all of a sudden, they saw a guy moving around with the suit on, and they’re like, "Wait, that’s not a fake, that’s a real suit with a real guy." Of course it could do different stuff in CG than it can real, and that becomes the difficulty, you don’t want him moving around like Robocop and then he flies through the air and he looks like Spider-Man, so that’s the balancing act that we’re playing.
Crave Online: What has surprised you the most on this shoot?
Jon Favreau: I'm surprised that I'm on schedule. That's the biggest surprise because I brag that I stay on schedule always and I have on every movie I've been on and I'm always on budget, always on time and I thought, "Okay, this one there's going to be curve balls and so much out of my control." So the fact that we're on schedule now and scenes have born out well. I'm surprised also by the amount of freedom I've gotten from Marvel.
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Jon Favreau is so money right now: COMMENTS
hE IS THE FKN MAN AT ANYTHING HE DOES...EVEN BOXING IN MADE...KINDA |
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