Iron Man At Wondercon, Part 2: Future Armors, Flight Scenes And More

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On order to get this out to you guys faster I’m working off of notes instead of transcribing from my recording of the panel. I spent the morning typing up my one on one interview with director Jon Favreau which will be up in two parts, one here and and a more technical oriented one over at Iron Man fan site Advanced Iron some time in the next week or so.

So let’s see what I didn’t cover in Part I of the panel…

Jon Favreau stated that the movie was fun to shoot due to the cast. Speaking of the cast, one interesting item was the fact that he had to fight for Robert Downey Jr. for the part. Robert lobbied hard for the role, but initially the studio wanted to cast a young twenty-something as Tony Stark. Thankfully Jon prevailed.

Favreau is hoping that the film is successful enough to greenlight sequels because he’d very much like to make more Iron Man movies. If this film is a big success, he may have the opportunity to direct the Avengers movie.

Regarding the practical (non-CGI) armor, Stan Winston, who he worked with on Zathura, approached Jon to say that his company could build a practical model of the armor. Speaking of which, I’m going to plug the limited edition 1:1 scale Iron Man movie bust designed by Stan Winston studios.
The movie will definitely be rated PG-13, but not due to excessive foul language or sex and nudity. Favreau wants the film to be family friendly and the rating will be due to the action sequences in the film. For example the bikini babe image posted the other day is from a scene that did not make it into the final cut.

Related to that, he stated that it would be difficult to do a movie based on the “Demon in a Bottle” story (Tony Stark’s decent into alcoholism) from the comics because it would be hard to tell the story in a family-friendly film. Although he did say that often sequels can get away with being darker than the original film.

Favreau also stated that while there are plenty of action sequences in the film, they are not there just for the sake of action. Any action scene in the film must advance the story and not just be there to provide eye candy.

In order for the flight scenes to seem as realistic as possible, instead of just shooting them virtually in CGI, actual cameras were placed on jets and taken up for shooting of most of the flight sequences. He used Top Gun as a guideline for shooting these scenes because the aerial shots in that film were done before the advent of CGI and thus convey a much more realistic sense of flight.

Overall, even though it’s a superhero movie, Favreau wants the action to seem as realistic and plausible as possible.

If you want a more detailed description of the trailer, just head on over to Quint’s post at AICN where he gives a very good breakdown of it.

It’s all good as far as I’m concerned, and remember to keep an eye out over the next week or so for Screen Rant’s exclusive one on one interview with director Jon Favreau!