IRON MAN: JON FAVREAU

NEW YORK --The Continuum continues a series of interviews from last weekend's Iron Man press junket with director Jon Favreau, who also plays Happy Hogan.

Following is an edited transcription from the roundtable interview:

Question: What didn't make it into the theatrical cut that we can expect in the director's cut DVD?

Favreau: What do you want me to say? Do you want me to say Hilary Swank? Do you want me to say Nick Fury? Is that what you're reaching for? What is going to be there? There's going to be a sequence between when Robert takes off to go to fight back in Afghanistan, where there's a whole party sequence in Dubai that we had filmed that just felt like it just slowed the momentum down. There's a cameo from Ghostface Killer that was there, where him and Tony Stark knew each other.

Question: So the Samuel L. Jackson sequence isn't going to be in the theatrical version?

Favreau: You didn't see the movie? I love the echo chamber of the internet, because that's where things become reality.

Let's put it this way. I think the challenge has been first people getting to know who Iron Man was, and I think that the online fans and the did a tremendous service to me and the film by bringing it to everybody's attention, because this is the big water cooler. And when they saw the footage at Comic-Con and saw all the online leaks, either the ones we sent out there with releases or ones that found their way through spies. People started to get Iron Man, to anticipate it, and the word started to spread, and it worked its way into the mainstream and now everybody wants to see the movie.

The problem is that for two years, we've been in dialogue, and there weren't a lot of surprises left, so I guess my job is still to try to figure out how to make it feel like people have been waiting for this movie and watching all the stuff online and all the minutes and minutes and hours of material that seem to be on there, to have it be still a fresh experience when they see it. My job is to still entertain the people who have been following along everything.

When something doesn't seem like a surprise and everybody expects it, it sort of makes it not fun, so I just want to try to still remember the fans that have been watching diligently and have enough there that makes it exciting for them as well.

I have never lied to any of the fans. I just try to be ambiguous if I think in the long they would prefer I don't answer the question.

Question: Did you think about what you needed to add so that new fans could enjoy it as well as old fans?

Favreau: I think the fans of the comic books, from a studio standpoint, if this were a big studio movie, would be completely irrelevant. Time and time again, it's been proven that studios care about making money. It's their job. They want to take the source material and use it to make it as appealing as possible to the broadest possible audience while costing the least to make and making the most profit.

When Marvel sets out to make a movie, their priorites are a little bit different. They're servicing a fan base. They're protecting the source material. They are the keepers of this pantheon of characters that have made the corporation profitable over the last 40 years. And they've built it to this merchandising empire, and I think there's an added responsibility they have.

And when they hire me, I definitely feel, as a fan, to stay true to the expectations of the fans. That doesn't mean always doing exactly what's in the source material, but it means considering it and make decisions not because you want to arbitrarily want to change something. But because you think it services the material the best.

So there was that responsibility. But nobody knew who Iron Man was, outside the core fans. So we had to educate everybody out there as to who Iron Man is and what he can do. So, although you can't ignore the fan base, your fan base are not the people who are ultimately going to be dictating the success or failure of the movie commercially. So you have to make a movie that's accessible to people who don't know anything about Iron Man.

And that's the fine line I had to walk was to put enough Easter Eggs in the movie for the fans, stay true in the casting and the way I present visual effects and tell the story, choose the heroes and the villains and the technology, but also present it so that somebody could plunk down their 10 bucks, sit down and go for a ride and take their mind off the election for two hours.

Question: What made you think of Robert Downey Jr.? Was it a challenge to sell him to the studio?

Favreau: Sitting across from him, the light bulb went off over my head and I realized this was the guy who could bring me home, this was the No. 1 draft pick that's going to take me to the Super Bowl. I got how to make the movie. We were not going to be just a poor man's Spider-Man if I could get this guy.

And the problem, of course, was that he was far too interesting of a choice for the studio, and there was an unequivocable, resounding no when I presented him. There were people who were fans of his and people who said, "Look, clearly, it's the best choice creatively, it's just that it's the first movie, it's too much money. Nobody knows Iron Man, so now you're going to be defining Iron Man by Robert?"

People know Robert more than they know Iron Man. That was not the case with the Hulk and Eric Bana. It's not the case with Spider-Man and Tobey (Maguire). It's not the case with Batman and Christian Bale.

I understood their misgivings. He's 10 years older than they would have liked to hired somebody if they're starting a franchise. Hopefully, if this movie does well, they're going to make a lot of them for many years, and he's already in his 40s.

I got it. But as we went round and round, we realized that this guy brings dimension. This is like hiring Johnny Depp to do Pirates. People are ready for this guy to play this role. It's not him starring in Elf, it's him as Tony Stark. That's Tony Stark. People want Tony Stark to be Tony Stark. That's why people make rap songs about him. He captures that sort of that bad boy attitude and makes this movie not be Batman.

This is a 40-year-old rip-off of Batman. When Iron Man was first invented, they were copying each other, DC and Marvel. And Batman came first. And now you have an incredibly compelling franchise and if Dark Knight is half as good as it looks online, it's going to be a monster.

I can't be making Batman. I've got to make my own thing. So I've got to play up the subversive attitude that Marvel had when it established itself as a reaction to DC. You had Superman who could do no wrong, living in Metropolis, Gotham City, this fantasy land. Then Stan Lee brings him personality to Marvel, it was subversive. They were living in New York. They were have trouble paying their rent. They were getting in trouble. They were running into each other in the neighborhood. They had problems. They had flaws. And it was that subversive humor that defined Marvel, not an epic, big quality.

So we had to find the attitude. That's why paid through the nose for heavy metal music that you'd never see in another super-hero movie. That's why we open with "Back in Black." That's why it's Robert Downey Jr. It just had to have attitude, be rock 'n roll and be in your face. That's why it's on the West Coast. That's why it's Howard Hughes and The History of Flight and The Right Stuff. I wanted to have different imagery.

You change the attitude, you're doing Dark Knight. That's the brooding, gothic version of the billionaire industrialist. Bruce Wayne, when he gets depressed, he listens to his music on his headphones and he locks himself up in his study. Tony Stark, when he gets depressed, he gets bombed and wraps his car around a telephone pole.

It's a different type of character, so we really wanted to play up those differences so didn't compete with a movie that I know is going to great. And thankfully, we're a month apart. We're not competing directly.

Question: Robert was intriguing when the movie starts slow in the beginning because you want to watch him.

Favreau: It gave us a lot of a latitude to be patient with how we did the origin story. That's the Faustian deal with the first movie. You've got to show the origin story. So every first movie is two movie, the origin and then what happens with the water system of Gotham City. They're always going to have that Frankenstein feel of being two movies.

Question: When did you decide to insert yourself into the movie?

Favreau: As an actor, you mean? As an actor, I'm in there because it's probably me being selfish and wanting to be an actor in it, and know that Happy Hogan has more to do later and I get to have a few scenes with Gwyneth (Paltrow, who plays Pepper Potts) later, but she doesn't know that.

Question: Actually, we told her about that and she responded that she wants to make out with you.

Favreau: She does? I'm definitely doing a sequel. Even if I'm not directing, I'm there, because I'm in love with her. Those heels walking around the set, everybody on set would just get quiet, but Happy Hogan was also a tip or a nod to the audience saying, "By me putting myself in, that's not just an extra driving the car, that's Happy Hogan." If you read the books, he's going to be going to be in the sequelŠ we don't have room for him here, but he's in there. I'm considering you guys

Question:And then the reason for the male-female thing, that's my wheelhouse, that's what I'm most comfortable with. I love those meet cute scenes, I love romantic comedy. You look at Swingers, I can write that dialogue for days, and to have Gwyneth and him, and there was a real affection between the two of them, and a lot of that was two-camera set-ups or me writing a scene the night before and bringing it in or us improvising or trying three different versions of the scene before the press conference. I love those scenes and so much of my personality gets infused into this movie because of the spontaneous nature of how we shot it that if I dig it, I think it comes across.

Question: Can you talk about what villains we might be seeing in the second and third films?

Favreau: I think Mandarin for sure, I think War Machine for sure. I think you got to go with War Machine, you got to give Terrence more to do. He really had to be patient in this one, and he could have been Tony Stark, know what I mean? If we wanted to go against the grain of what was in the books. He characterizes that, and once you break him out of the role that he was relegated to in this one, I think he could go toe-to-toe with Robert, and it could reall be a cool buddy set-up. Then you need some big bad guys, and I think the bad guys are going to be tech-based for the most part, seeing what's worked about this film.