New Jon Favreau Iron Man Interview

Iron Man Fanzine Advanced Iron has an extensive and previously unpublished interview with Jon Favreau in the issue that was just released yesterday. It’s from the San Diego Comic-Con, where A.I. Editor John Comerford and I had a chance to sit down with Jon and talk to him for about 20 minutes. There is some great information there including new insights into the Tony Stark character.

Here are a couple of excerpts of the conversation…

AI: Kind of coming back to the armor itself, you talked about the finish and pointed at the game, which is running behind us here. One thing I was curious about, and of course this is sort of a fan question, but the armor is sometimes depicted as obviously having a metallic sheen to it, but then other times it has this chrome-polished look.

Favreau: “Yeah!”

AI: Why didn’t you guys go with that ultra-chrome polished look as opposed to that shiny metallic appearance?

Favreau: “I took a lot of cues from [Adi] Granov.”

AI: And he doesn’t do that…

Favreau: “He doesn’t. And my first pitch was because Stark is a hot rod guy and a hand fabricator. He’s a guy who’s working on his old ‘32 Ford when the movie opens so you know he’s a gear head. You can really believe that when he’s in captivity he’s not just a guy who’s a scientist who can design something, but he can hands on fabricate something almost like American Chopper.”

AI: He can get his hands dirty…

Favs: “We give him all of this fabrication gear and CNC machines and also old English wheels so that you get that he and his dad used to work on old hot rods together. His dad, Howard Stark probably was around from the Howard Hughes era and was probably at the forefront of aircraft design and designing stuff for World War II. And so that whole generation was also the hot rod generation who were breaking the land speed records out in Bonneville, on the Salt Flats and the dry lakes. We shot at Edwards that used to be Lake Murock in the 30’s where all the hot rodders would chop their cars up and go out as fast as they could. And that was all informed by the people coming back from WWII who had all this knowledge and fabrication skills from working on aircraft. So that aircraft community became the hot rod community and so I wanted to make it a real California story of a guy who comes from that tradition. And I would believe that if that guy got locked in a cave with the right stuff, could build something. And we designed a suit that looks like Granov’s depiction of the Mark I, but also something that felt like it could have been made practically because it always felt a little convenient that he could build that suit with the stuff that he had.”

That’s just a short excerpt from the interview. Favreau talks about the aerial shots with the jets, his thoughts on CGI and how it will be integrated into the film, the inevitable comparisons between Iron Man and Batman, grounding the film in reality, The Mandarin’s role and whether he will appear in the film and much more!

There’s also some info on a fan-made Iron Man flick that’s a pretty big production that will be coming out in the next month or two and a ton of other stuff of interest to Iron Man fans.

To read the rest of the interview head on over to AdvancedIron.org and you’ll see the downloadable issue featured on the home page.