Crave Online: Is Iron Man money?
Jon Favreau: Yes, he is, I hope. The jury's still out. We'll find out.
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.
Crave Online: Why?
Jon Favreau: Because, there are certain things that Marvel is very meticulous about, and there’s a definite formula to the way action is done, and then when it comes to the scenes between the people we have very, very good actors, and Marvel has been very involved but they are a small crew, you have Kevin Feige and you have Jeremy Latcham, who are sort of our executives on the project, and they’re here, because Hulk hasn’t started yet. And so we could sit in the trailer with the Marvel guys, with the producers and with the actors and talk about what the scene should be based on, what we’ve shot and what we’ve learned. There's a flexibility in material so in a lot of ways there was a lot of freedom to try things different ways, get what we knew we need to get, to get the story to work and then bring a certain humor sometimes or a humanity to it, so there’s a real sense of freshness and discovery in this project.
Crave Online: Were you concerned that this was Marvel’s first movie as a production company?
Jon Favreau: I was ready for the challenge. My last two experiences were developing John Carter on Mars, which we did a bang up job, beautiful artwork, these guys, Furgus and Ostby did a great script for us, and everybody loved it and they were just scared of that genre, or that material, or the fact that they had Star Trek coming out next year. And then the last experience before that was Zathura, where we really worked hard, we got a movie that was well received, but was not really supported. It was the best reviewed movie Sony had that year, and there wasn’t even one billboard up, they didn’t even print up posters. So it was very disappointing that we came at the end of a long string of flops over there at Sony between Stealth, Zorro, everything that they had. By the time we had come out, there wasn't really a game plan I don't think to release the film. Fortunately now it’s out on video and people are seeing it and liking it, but I didn’t want that to happen again, I didn’t want to fall through the cracks. So when you work with Marvel you know that there is a fan base of core fans that are going to pay attention to what you’re doing, and if you’re doing a good job those fans will be very vocal, and word will spread. Right now, so many people try to virally create this sense of grass roots something on the internet and they try to force it. You can’t force it, it has to come organically. When you do a movie like this, you get to play with all the big toys and you have a fan base that is going to be very vocal, positive or negative. I mean, if you have Catwoman, they will put the pillow over the head of the movie and make sure it never sees the light of day. But if you do Dark Knight or if you have any of the myriad of quality movies that come out, word will get out there and people will start to pay attention.
Crave Online: Do you feel pressure to have another hit after your experience with Zathura?
Jon Favreau: Well, what's good is Elf sort of carved a real path for me. If Zathura had been a bad movie and not made money, then I would have something to worry about. I think that's why you always have to make a good movie, because even if the movie doesn't perform, there are people who are lining up to work with you saying, "They f*cked up the marketing but you made a good movie. If you could make a good movie, I'll take care of my end of things." I don't think it's ever been a director's job to create a marketing campaign. I mean, they do. You have a voice in it but ultimately I think they just include you enough to make you feel like part of the process so that you'll hit up the actors to do [things]. They can't get an actor to go to Comic Con. I can turn to Robert and say, "Comic Con is f*ckin' fun. It's going to blow your mind. Wait until you see how many people give a sh*t about this movie. Wait 'til you walk into that room and see." And they'll say, "Really?" I say, "It's going to be fun, let's have a blast, we'll go out to dinner, we'll have a good time, we'll walk the floor, bring your kids. I've done it two years in a row, my kids love it and San Diego's great." And they'll go. Or to say, "Hey, let's do this one extra interview. Let's add another day to the press junket. Hey, let's fly to the premiere here together." If the director says that and is excited about it and buys into what's going on, I think the actors are more likely to do it. I'm more likely to go out and do press for the movie and that's the type of thing you can't buy with marketing money. But I don't think they really look to directors to lead the charge in ways other than participating. So the success of something, certainly success has a lot of benefits. It could keep a career going. It could make somebody very rich even if the quality isn't very good if they're successful. So success is always good but if it doesn't end up being commercially successful, it better be creatively successful. If you can't do either of those, you're not going to work for a long time.
Crave Online: What sort of lessons have you taken from other comic book movies, not just Marvel's?
Jon Favreau: I think Nolan really reinvented the genre yet again. I really liked the first Batman movie, the Tim Burton one was very exciting, but the caliber of cast he was able to get, the level of storytelling and acting, and the sense of fun that maintained with a character that I thought was completely picked over by the time they did their last movie before that, that they were able to hit reset and come with that and make it fresh again excited me, because it means the sky’s the limit for who you could get and a filmmaker with that background. It’s nice that you have all these guys coming out of independent films who don’t resent big movies, it’s not like the ‘70s where it’s like the system is keeping us down, we’re people who grew up loving movies and the reason we’re doing small movies is we don’t know any better or have the resources. And so as you see Peter Jackson, as you see Chris Nolan, as you see Bryan Singer, finding a way to bring integrity and a sense of fun to these big movies, where you feel like you’re watching a good movie, and it’s not one that a director’s doing apologetically, they’re doing it because they love it and they’re excited by it. And then I get to play with all the toys, build the suits, do the CG, build all these great sets, for me that’s what it’s all about. I think it’s the indie background where all you have is character, that’s your car chase, your car chase is a funny scene, your big explosion is two people having a conversation that’s interesting. It sort of sharpens those tools so that by the time you have all these great storyboard artists and designers and CGI wizards coming in, you’re not relying on that, you’re not just hammocking between those set pieces. When I’m here with Gwyneth and Robert I would be working with them in the same way if I had written a spec script and was shooting it for a million bucks. You bring that same sensibility to it, and hopefully, I don’t want to lie to you, I hope it all comes together in a way where it feels like of one movie, but yet it’s not insulting smart people, and it’s not inappropriate for me to bring my kids to as well.
Crave Online: What is the set we're sitting in?
Jon Favreau: This is his workshop, and the beginnings of what will be the Hall of Armor. This is below his house. We built a house that sits on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific up in Malibu, Point View, and we have another set that we’re shooting in today which sits above this, an architectural high-tech home, and this is his sub-basement. So out those windows you would see the Pacific ocean. That's a driveway out to outside his house. You have just all these awesome cars, everything from a '32 Ford Roadster all the way to a Tesla Electric Car. We have everything here lined up, a Selene Supercar, a Shelby Cobra. Everything you could possibly need for fabrication, design, you could build anything in here so this area was more of a living area. This is where he would seclude himself. We suggest that all the innovations and inventions that come out of Stark’s mind usually start alone here as opposed to his office at Stark Industries, but this is where most of his work happens at 4 in the morning.
Crave Online: Are the fans giving you good feedback?
Jon Favreau: Yeah, the fans are great. They’ve been great about everything, they really have. You almost want them to have a problem with something early on to get it out of the way. Fans for any movie are important; for this particular type of movie that’s the nucleus of your audience. I don’t know if the internet is something that could be seen as dictating the marketplace, I don’t understand how that works yet. I know that as a filmmaker, I get that the fans of this particular genre are very smart and know more in certain cases than the people that are working on the movie, as far as how much and specific their information is, so I like to go there and just get to the minutia of the detail in certain cases, because it’s like Wikipedia, it’s a collection of information from a lot of people that tends to bear out in a very cogent way. And there are certain people that are idiots, but they don’t tend to be drawn to this material that much. They tend to give a damn and most of the stuff I see is, "Thank you for caring so much about it, I’ve been waiting for this movie for 20 years, I’ve been waiting for 10 years since I heard they were going to first make this. This was my particular favorite superhero and it’s nice to see that it’s getting this type of treatment and this type of cast." When they first hear it’s made they get excited, then they hear who you’re casting and they say, "Oh, it might actually be one of those types of superheroes movies, not the other kind of superhero movie."
Crave Online: Are you signed on for three Iron Mans?
Jon Favreau: If the experience is as good as this for another one, I would keep going. It’s hard to say, because I’m sure Gore and Sam, I don’t know how excited they would be to do four after what they’ve been through, that journey is ten years, but I would see working on these thing, I think it’s fun and great and hopefully gets easier as it goes on, as you get it down.
