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Interview: Robert Downey Jr. On Iron Man
Date: April 29, 2008
By: Kellvin Chavez
Source: Latino Review
Robert Downey, Jr. has had a rip-roaring career for over two decades and despite personal crises, has been continually respected by audiences and fellow actors for his talent. Even with those hard times behind him, who would have predicted the actor would play 'Iron Man', the popular armored superhero from Marvel Comics?
Director Jon Favreau has found his Tony Stark an as the billionaire inventor turned superhero, Downey stars in one of the most highly anticipated films of the summer. While promoting the film, he recently discussed how important it was to stay faithful to the material for the fans, whether or not the studios manipulate the media and how he fits into their grand promotional scheme as an actor and a product.
One of the vices of Tony Stark's is alcohol, though it's not addressed in this movie. Would that be addressed in a sequel, do you know?
Downey Jr.: 'The Demon in the Bottle' series.
Was that taken out?
Downey Jr.: Well, seeing as how I will entirely be calling the shots for 'Iron Man' two, three and seven – I don't know. I think an interesting way to address that would be to do it not in an obvious way. My idea is that it's like it's Tony's fortieth birthday and he's drinking and having fun and then he's drinking way too much and it's not cool anymore and then he thinks he's just starting to have fun and then he says and does things and experiences things or gets himself trouble with someone who winds up being a nemesis later on. I think it's better to mythologize something like that. I think that you can actually get more out of it that way, but what do I know.
Can you talk about any changes that you made on the script of this movie?
Downey Jr.: Yeah, we had great writers and they'd just been nominated and I said, 'Hey, I was nominated once too. So, anyway –' We really all worked together as a team and sometimes they'd hand me stuff that I said, 'Thank God they wrote this. It's so smart and cool and perfect.' And other times I would go to them with ideas or Jon [Favreau] and myself. By the time that we got to act three I was like, 'I can't have this confrontation scene with Pepper.' It was like, 'Pepper, don't you understand I've changed and I've got to do right?' I was like, 'Uh huh.' So we rewrote the scene and we were scribbling it out on cue cards and we had to shoot something and we only got a master before lunch and I said, 'Wait a minute. Properties!' The prop guy comes over and I said, 'All these screens in Tony's workshop, you can put data up on them, all this cool data. You can certainly put some text on them, can't you?' So I went so high tech Brando there. I was like, 'Pepper, after all these years –' screen two – 'don't you think…' running my own 'Saturday Night Live' there.
How did that strike the writers, when you'd take the script and throw it up against the wall?
Downey Jr.: We're getting along fine. Yeah, I realized that some of the stuff that I was like, 'That's garbage!' is the first big laugh in the movie after all the schlock that Jon and I wrote getting just these little titters and chuckles. It's always a group effort, but my thing is that we showed always feel free to ball each other's junk up and throw it up against the wall because we're not here to serve a legal document. If you asked me, that's going to be the problem for me in the rest of my career and I know it now. I don't care who you are or what you just won or what you just wrote. Now we're making a movie and now what you wrote in your Nedermeyer furniture in your Upper Eastside office doesn't fucking mean anything to me. If it's genius then we can talk about it and if it's not then we have work to do. I don't think that genius and superhero script belong in the same sentence. That said those guys are awesome and I really learned a lot because what really works somehow or another, and this is Jon as much as anyone else, is that the move tracks all the way through. You can kind of hold it and play with it. I think that's where most movies, let along genre movies, fail. It's really, really hard.
Do you look back at your career and think if you hadn't been so reverent it'd been better because you've done a lot of good movies.
Downey Jr.: Well, it's always a balance, isn't it. In some instances, like if the director is afraid of losing control for the sake of getting a better idea then - I don't want to say that I'm with the wrong director. I want to say that I'm with a director who's at a certain level of development and that's okay. I think that you're always playing that game of psychic politics with whoever you're working with. It's really important to not just a be a mean spirited person with no boundaries. I think as long as you're aggression in the creativity isn't mistaken for being disrespectful, nobody's feelings got hurt on this. We all wanted the same thing.
How much input did you have going from this film to 'The Incredible Hulk' as Tony Stark in the film?
Downey Jr.: Well, big companies have a way of manipulating people and they got you because we're here at the 'Iron Man' print roundtable and you're talking about another property. So they asked me to go a day in a bar with someone or this and that, and I was like, 'Is that what I'm doing? And over here doing a commercial for Audi? Wow. Is that in my contract? It is. I sit on the car? Okay.' Then it was like, 'Ed Norton wants you over here.' I was like, 'Wow. It's like I'm a contract player.' It was because they knew and they put it out there and one person at every table and one person at every place that I go you hear 'The Hulk' which is coming out this summer while we're talking about this.
I'm only asking because I saw some of the footage.
Downey Jr.: Okay, great. But here's the thing, you're asking because they wanted you to ask.
No. I'm asking because I wanted to know what your input was.
Downey Jr.: Right. Why did you want to know? Dude, I'll spend the next twenty minutes on this. Lets talk about the fucking truth because the truth is that you saw this and they made you want to know about that. Damn it. It's okay.
You think they wanted him to know?
Downey Jr.: Do you think they were just sitting up there and thinking, 'Lets see. I wonder if it'd be fun to have this in the thing?' They're smart. They're a big company and they know what to do. God bless them.
Tony Stark would know what to do.
Downey Jr.: Yeah, but Robert, RDJ, is like, 'Woo! Yeah! Let me paint Thor on my forehead? Wee!' What do I care? I just think it's interesting to note how we are maneuvered, for whatever it's worth.
You said that you'd kind of done a Harrison Ford on your life, when I talked to you earlier. Is that what you're doing now, that there are all these buy-ins for something like this?
Downey Jr.: 'Hulk'. 'Hulk'. What's the release date of 'Hulk'? I need to know.
June 13th.
Downey Jr.: Thank you. Now we're working together.
Was it important to keep Tony Stark true to the comic for the fans?
Downey Jr.: Yeah, that was super important to us because Tony Stark being faithful to the fans is the best Tony Stark that will ever be in terms of the way it was. I just like this idea too, when there's so much reference and then you get new people involved and they go, 'Ah, we don't need to look at those comic books. Look, the action sequence with the F-22's –' I was like, 'Wait! Whoa! Hi, guys. They spent forty-five years, really smart people, really talented artists, really, really good writers on this. Forty-five years. Don't you think we can give this forty-five minutes? Don't you think we have to?' At a certain point too, what is it called – artistic license is to not realize that what you need is already there. I guess that's one way to go if you want. I'm really emotional about this because for me, when we were doing 'Chaplin', I was like, 'You can't tell his story any better than the way that it really happened.'
How much of the old comic books did you actually read?
Downey Jr.: 'Hulk'. At one point I called up Jeremy Latcham who's a dear friend, he's Kevin Feige's assistant at Marvel. I said, 'Hey, can you send me all the "Iron Man" stuff?' He goes, 'Uh, I'll send over the –' I said, 'No. I can you send me over all the "Iron Man" stuff that you guys have.' He goes, 'Robert, it's quite a voluminous amount –' I said, 'Can. You. Send. Me. All. The. "Iron Man". Stuff. That. You. Have? Thank you, if the answer is yes. Check one.' They sent it all and I was like, 'I'm not going to get caught flat footed here.' I can't tell you that I could repeat it all by rote but every single piece –
How big was the package?
Downey Jr.: It was like a pallet from storage.
These movies based on the characters make $100 million's, but the comics don't sell anymore, at least not to the kids which is where they started.
Downey Jr.: Right and they were also considered classes and evil and they were controlled and almost rubbed out of existence, for what reason I don't know. We're talking about mythology and we're talking about flights of fancy and we're talking about people exploring their own fantasy life, and so maybe they thought you'd read a comic book and say, 'You know what, I want to be a pinko –' or who knows why, but it did happen.
If they had the technology to do the jet pack would you try that personally, risk life and limbs to fly?
Downey Jr.: Jon and I were on the way to Australia from Mexico City back through L.A. and I'm doing my thing and I'm looking for magazines because I find if I read three or four rag magazines that quick in a row it's like an Ambien and I'll just fall right asleep, but there was 'Popular Mechanics' and it says 'The Real Iron Man'. I thought, 'Maybe I'll pick that up.' It was a picture of this Raytheon super soldier and the technology is probably, I think, about ten or twelve year our, some semblance of the technology being perfected.
But would you do it?
Downey Jr.: Would the guy who's playing Iron Man actually suit up and do it? Yeah, wouldn't you?
How much of the rest of your career do you see dedicating your career to doing 'Iron Man'? At what point do you say that you've had enough of it? Do you think about that?
Downey Jr.: Well, probably no more than you think about what you're going to do when you get out of college or you don't even know what elementary school you're going to go to yet. It's not that I'm saying I'm not a grown man, but this movie hasn't even come out and performed yet. We might not even get a chance to do another one.
But you see that every two or three years you see a new 'Spider-Man' etc. So how much time do you want to spend on this?
Downey Jr.: It's a really fertile story. I didn't think that I would feel this way initially. I had other reasons, some of which were tied to this, but I really didn't think this genre of movie could be so ideally suited for the way that I like to express myself. I don't think that I'd peel off and just do genre after genre after genre or whatever, but in a way, between this and 'Tropic Thunder' and the film called 'The Soloist' that I did, after that – I hear what you're saying and so to answer the question honestly, big movies like this and concept comedies I think are really cool. Doing a very high minded drama is interesting to me, but this genre can incorporate all of those if you're able to trade off some other things for being able to call some more creative shots. Like, past what point do you have enough money and why wouldn't you want to trade that to be able to have more influence? I don't know. I've never had a ton of money and I find that now that I haven't for a while I really don't own anything and I don't really feel like I need anything and so why would I chase that again? The times when I was kind of like had the position or had the dough or had the big house, it just felt like it was more to manage. But it's not more to manage something that you can kind of create, something you can do. Jon and I have had this really interesting thing where we came together when I'd done 'Kiss Kiss Bang Bang' and he'd done 'Zathura' and we felt that we'd put our best foot forward and there hadn't been a machinery or an understanding or a real expectation for it to mean anything on the back of it and we were really disappointed and so we felt like, 'Just for now lets try to do good movies that we can hedge our bets on and imagine that a large amount of people will probably see.' It sucks talking into a telephone with no one at the other end.
Do you have any ambitions to direct?
Downey Jr.: I do.
How uncomfortable was that suit?
Downey Jr.: It was like wearing a gold titanium glove.
IRON MAN OPENS MAY 2nd.
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