Iron Man - not your average superhero

AAP | Monday, 21 April 2008

Your average superhero movie tends to be more style than substance. But when director Jon Favreau took on Iron Man, one of the original Marvel comics, he wanted to ensure the end result wasn't your average superhero movie.

Key to that plan was casting former drug addict, felon and Oscar nominee Robert Downey Jr.

"Once I was able to cast Robert in it I said there's the opportunity to make what happens between the action set pieces equally, if not more, interesting than the action," Favreau says.

"It was an opportunity to overcome my greatest misgiving about the potential outcome of this film, which would be that it was a mediocre, big budget action movie that would make money and disappoint fans of my work.

"Robert offered the opportunity to play the type of humour that I like, the improvisation sort of feel to the material, and of course he helped attract the wonderful cast."

That cast includes Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, and Oscar nominees Jeff Bridges and Terrence Howard.

Downey Jr stars as billionaire industrialist and genius inventor Tony Stark, whose company Stark Industries is the US government's top weapons contractor.

Stark's carefree lifestyle is changed forever when he is captured and held hostage in Afghanistan.

Upon his escape he vows to take Stark Industries in a new direction, protecting the world with his new alter-ago Iron Man.

For Downey Jr the film was a chance to play with some cool technology, and make a film his 14-year-old son Indio could enjoy.

"A lot of my male friends who were my road dogs back in the day, they're married and they've got kids, so I'm hearing from my buddy Robert Rusler, who was in Weird Science with me, saying that his son is pointing at the posters and going 'how many days until Iron Man?'.

"It blows my mind."

The 43-year-old actor had to get in shape for the movie, in which he wears a high tech red and gold metal suit that transforms him from Tony Stark to Iron Man.

The suit makes him bullet-proof, allows him to fly, and gives him an array of weapons to fire at the bad guys.

While there are many spectacular action sequences in the movie, Favreau has chosen to focus on the story behind the creation of Iron Man.

"The challenge in these types of movies is what do you do between set pieces," Favreau says.

"Often times in a movie like Transformers they just keep throwing them at you, and that's not my strong suit.

"My strong suit is dialogue, character, comedy, story.

"I always feel that if you tell a good story the action gets incrementally more satisfying."

Iron Man was first created by Marvel Comics in 1963 and is one of the few Marvel characters who haven't had a film made about them.

He is also one of the lesser known comic book heroes.

That suited Favreau, allowing him to define the character himself.

He also had to update the 45-year-old comic for 2008 audiences.

In the original story, Tony Stark was an anti-communist hero who was shot down and captured while visiting Vietnam to observe his new mini-transistors that were being used to assist the US war effort.

In the movie Stark travels to Afghanistan to demonstrate his company's latest super weapon, the Jericho missile, to the US forces stationed there.

"When he came on the scene there was Vietnam and he was a weapons manufacturer, and now we find ourselves back home in a very similar political tenor," Favreau says.

"Now as we find ourselves in a confusing part of our history militarily it really speaks to the same themes.

"So that seemed like a wonderful opportunity."

Because the US military has a strong presence in the film, the filmmakers sought and received US Department of Defence approval, which gave them access to military assets and advice on the script.

The US military were also keen to ensure they weren't portrayed negatively by filmmakers with a political agenda.

But Favreau says he was never interested in turning Iron Man into a political film.

"The message (in the film) is somewhat ambiguous as to what the political background is," he says.

"I think we empathise, I certainly do, with the military, even though my political views change from year to year.

"I don't have a strong political point of vieew, I'm one of the few people in Hollywood I think that is not stridently vocalising my opinion both off and on camera."

Favreau says superhero movies have become increasingly popular in post-September 11 America, and he wanted to use those kinds of contemporary issues as a backdrop for the story.

"The villains and the good guys (in superhero movies) have always represented very simple versions of very complex anxieties that we feel as a culture and then the good guy gets to beat the bad guy, and that's a very cathartic feeling that you go to the movies for," he says.

"I know even after 9/11 when we in the States were all completely shell-shocked, movies like Spiderman came out where you had a good guy fighting a bad guy in New York and there was something emotionally stirring about such a simple film.

"And I think that that's our job right now - to give a sense of relief so you can walk away from the news that's running 24 hours a day, go to the theatre, and feel like you're escaping but yet show a backdrop that expresses those anxieties."

Iron Man opens on May 1 in Australia, and if it is a global box office success there is the potential for plenty more Iron Man films to come.

Favreau admits the franchise could go on for the next decade, and Downey Jr says he is keen to reprise the role.

"I think May 2 the movie opens (in the US), then there's the 3rd and the 4th, and then we'll be waiting to see what kind of business we did," Downey Jr says.

"And then once that hopefully goes well, the very next day we're going to start prepping for the next one."