How did you interpret the Mandarin, Tony Stark’ s greatest foe from the comic? From the very beginning we were all about a real world interpretation of the Mandarin. I hate to break it to you, but he’ s not from space and the rings are rings. There is showmanship. There are accoutrements – paraphernalia from warfare that he sort of drapes himself with. He studies insurgency tactics; he surrounds himself with dragons and symbols of warlords and Chinese iconography because he wants to represent this sort of prototypical terrorist.
So he’ s the ultimate terrorist, but he’ s also savvy; he’ s been in the intelligence world, he knows how to use the media. He is the terrorist that represents all terrorists. And taking it to a real world level.
Drew Pearce
we’ re going to see Tony Stark, within the course of just a few days, put through the paces. And Robert Downey Jr’ s just the one to bring that sort of a thing to life.
How far did you go with the Iron Man suit? How many are there? At the beginning of this movie there are 42 suits. The newest one is based on a technology that was sort of hinted at in the comics, but we do it a slightly different way.
Tony has basically put little outlets subcutaneously beneath his exterior layer of skin that can draw the suit to him when he wants it, so it’ s still rock solid, still protects him from bullets, but it’ s also flexible enough so that he could just throw the suit off him at someone else.
Drew Pearce, my co-writer, and I went sort of hog wild when we were told that there should be extra suits. Talk about biotech and how you pushed the technology.
The thing about the Extremis that always interested me in the comic books was you had the sense that Tony Stark puts on an iron suit and hides inside it in a way. But with the Extremis people, you get the sense that they’ re burning up from inside. So one of them could actually say to Tony, for instance,“ You drive a car; I am the car.”
I like that notion, so rather than give the biotech to Tony, I thought it might be interesting to toy with giving it to some of the villains and make them more frightening.
Can you talk about creating the style of this film and merging sci-fi and fantastical elements? At the same time as it feels a little fantastical, it doesn’ t feel unsophisticated, and that’ s the thing. The task becomes to generate a sci-fi plot that does feel real-world and fits within the rest of the structure. The actual race to the finish is based on a kind of thriller format. We went for the structure of a thriller, the bigness of a comic book action movie, coupled with the reality and sophisticated chill of a villain that is frightening in today’ s world.
This is a huge tent-pole movie to direct. What was different? There were just more factors, more elements, and more departments to deal with. I learned a lot and I was led sort of by the hand through a process I’ d not been familiar with of pre-visualising enormous action scenes with artists and animators. You have a scene where the house falls down and you can’ t just show up at the house and go,“ Okay, knock out that beam, would ya?” On this film, everything is planned in advance.
ORIGINAL Publisher 44 | WGSA MAG June 2013