It sounds like a crazy idea to hire the director of 'Elf' to bring the comic book hero "Iron Man" to the silver screen, but actor/director Jon Favreau has successfully graduated from comedies and family films to helm one of this summer's tentpole releases.
While promoting the film he gave us some insight into his fight to get Robert Downey, Jr. cast, his love of comic book movies and what happened to that 'John Carter of Mars' project.
The alcohol problem is laying around the edges of your film.
Favreau: Yes.
Are going to pursue 'Demon in a Bottle' at some point?
Favreau: I'd like to, but if you look at this through with him going through a billboard hammered it seems that someone else did it this summer. 'Hancock' picked over 'Demon in a Bottle' pretty heavily and I love Peter Berg. I got no problem with Peter and I think he's one of the best directors working today. I worked with him on 'Very Bad Things', but there are only so many things you can do. There's a famous image from this series [of comic book] where he's flying through a billboard and that's in the new trailer of 'Hancock'. So I don't know if we could really go there now. It depends. There are so many superhero movies out there so you're sort of walking through the mine field of what's already been done. You can look at 'Dark Knight' also which is a reflection of a different aspect of what 'Iron Man' could've been. Here he is, an industrialist billionaire inventor, self-made, no superpowers and so we really have to steer clear of all of those things because you want to make your own movie. I think we brought a lot of the attitude and we made it a little more rock and roll, west coast, Robert Downey Jr. as opposed to Gothic and brooding and internal. This guy is a much more extroverted guy and so that's always the challenge with these movies.
I talked to you when you did 'Zathura'.
Favreau: Oh, yeah. When's that coming out, by the way.
I loved that movie and my whole family did and I wear the shirt proudly.
Favreau: Good, thank you. That's great to hear. That's all I go by. But these anecdotes are all that I really have to cling to that unfortunately and that's part of what guided me to this. It was such a disappointment.
This business abounds in disappointment.
Favreau: Yes, that's right.
Did the commercial failure of that movie affect the way you approached this thing?
Favreau: You're raising a lot of issues and I'll try to address them all, but they're good ones. I'm interested in talking about them because I don't really talk about them much. I chase after 'John Carter of Mars' pretty hard. After 'Zathura' I was meeting with the people of Paramount and they were presenting to me their whole slate of comedies because 'Elf' was still my high water mark and there's not a lot of people who do comedy well and the people who sort of do are busy working in comedies. Comedy is not a director's medium. I can bring comedy to everything that I work on. There's room for humor anywhere, but I like to tell stories that have emotional resonance, that are funny and aren't things where you're sacrificing that for the humor which often happens in a quote/unquote comedy, but comedy is very lucrative and inexpensive and they're quick to shoot and make. So they're very compelling, but that's not what drew me into movies ultimately. So when I was meeting about comedies I said, 'What about "John Carter of Mars"? What's happening with that?' Nothing was. I was able to get onboard with that and I used whatever the holding money was that they were giving me to hire artists and we had actually two of the writers here, [Matt] Fergus and [Hawk] Ostby, work with me on that and that was my labor of love. We got the script to a great point and the visuals were fantastic and we had a great presentation and ultimately Paramount who had just green lit 'Star Trek' said that they didn't think it was viable commercially. For whatever reason they didn't want to go with it. They didn't even pay to keep the rights. I was like, 'If you just sign the smallest check to the estate we could keep the rights.' They were like, 'Nah.' As soon as it was up Pixar grabbed it and now they're announcing it's going to be their next big franchise. It's going to replace 'Narnia' as Disney's big franchise. I really like and know the guys over there and I've talked to Andy Stanton and told them whatever I can do to help – I'm just happy to see it get made. I think that they'll do probably a better job than I would've, but it just shows you, I think, that my instincts were right on that thing. It was a really good opportunity. It might've been too big of a piece to bite off or whatever, and whatever disappointment that I felt then I'm happy now because 'Iron Man' seems to have incorporated everything I wanted to do. It's a culmination for me of the characters from 'Swingers', that sort of Vegas attitude, a Tony Stark type of anti-hero that seems to be right. You can see the connection to 'Swingers' in that aspect of it and the comedy that I was able to play up, especially the physical comedy and the FX from 'Elf' and learning to work with actors and see what's best about them and how to bring that to the screen, with Vince [Vaughn] and Will [Ferrell] and then all the stuff in 'Zathura', even though it sort of disappeared, it was still a movie that was critically successful and I learned a tremendous amount from doing it and that really prepared me for all of the challenges that I was going to face on this film. It seems like this is one of those wonderful moments where the marketing and the cast and the team that we've assembled is mixing with what the public seems to be hungry for and everything seems to be coming to a head here. Sometimes you have disappointments and sometimes things pop. You just spin the wheel every time and it looks like we're going to at least be relevant for one weekend, one weekend at least.
So you've got no attachment then to 'John Carter'?
Favreau: It's gone. I mean, it's gone and I hope that they do a good job and I hope that I get to do a voice in it.
Did you get to call them rat bastards or anything for stealing it?
Favreau: No. They were very smart to get it. It was someone else's dream project before mine. They've been trying to make that movie for a hundred years. That was a competing project with 'Snow White'.
Did you learn anything from 'Children of Men', between like a noble failure and a big success?
Favreau: Man. Look, when 'Zathura' bombed, and there's no other real way to characterize it, my wife turned to me and said, 'It sucks. I get it. But it's not always going to work out well. If this is your failure, if this is the scratch in the Rolls Royce you couldn't have asked for a better way to fail.' I could've failed the other way. I could've been Jon Favreau, the sell out who made a piece of shit movie that made a lot of money and we've lost him to the dark side, but instead it turned out to be this little gem that's under appreciated, that no one gets to see and is lost and please spread the word because your kids will really like it and might bring people together and it deals with sibling rivalry and there's a nice warm message at it's core. It compared favorably to all the movies that I grew up watching. So it's going to fail let it be commercially and not creatively.
And it launched Dax Shepherd.
Favreau: Yes, into 'Baby Mama'. It's just one of those things that couldn't get out of the blocks. Not everything is going to be perfect. That's why at a Jewish wedding you crush the glass because something is going to go wrong and you might as well control what that is. There's always going to be some problem. I've had great experience with 'Elf' and with 'Swingers' and then I've had disappointments. You have to make the best movie that you can and then just right around the corner is 'Iron Man'.
How much input did you have in the crossover of Tony Stark to 'The Incredible Hulk'?
Favreau: That's something that he did. He asked me if he should do it and I said to do it if he wanted to do it. I didn't tell him to do it or not. I know that he shot a scene one day in a bar. That's all I know. I wasn't there for it though.
How important was it for you to stick to the comic, stay true to it?
Favreau: I tried. I think that I owed a lot to the fans. It was the first Marvel Comic movie and I know the big studios have run roughshod over the source material because they don't really care and I wanted to care more.
What about the sequel?
Favreau: To this? There's no sequel officially announced.
But it's going to be huge.
Favreau: I hope so. I hope that they come to me for it. I'm pretty demanding though. I want to shoot at home in L.A. They want to shoot in other places. It gets expensive although we were on time and on budget for this and I think at the end of the day that's not always the case with these movies. I'm not going to say more than that.
But you don't have anything like, 'Oh, I don't do sequels'?
Favreau: For this, no. For 'Elf' I wouldn't though. I wouldn't do 'The Legend of Curly's Gold'. But I would do a sequel to a comic book movie. The second ones are always better, right. 'Spider-Man II'. 'X-Men II'.
'Superman II'.
Favreau: Was it better? I know people also say 'Empire Strikes Back' and I think that 'Dark Knight' is even going to be better and I thought the first one was good. The first one had problems. It's two movies sewn together.
You spent the first half tying to set it up.
Favreau: Yeah. I spent half the time fighting for Robert to be cast. It's done. The hard part is done.
And it seems to be ramping up because he says, 'I'm Iron Man' as a last line.
Favreau: Yeah, and so now it's like, 'Where do we go from there?' Now it's going to be totally different. It's kind of cool and it's kind of unexpected and it's really Tony Stark. That also opens up, 'Now what the hell do you do with the next one now that he's facing that?' We also introduced SHIELD.
What inspired the Tom Morello cameo and then what happened to Nick Fury?
Favreau: Well, Tom Morello also did a cameo in 'Made' for me. I know Tom. We're friends. He's a huge 'Iron Man' fan from way back. It was always his favorite superhero and it also made it easier for me to ask him to lay down some guitar tracks for the film. He's playing guitar on the soundtrack as well.
He's playing an Afghan terrorists.
Favreau: Yeah. It fits his politics as well. It worked out well and was a dream role for him. Then Nick Fury, lets put it this way – if something isn't a surprise it's not fun. I just want to keep surprising the audience and so when the internet eco-chamber makes everyone so sure and smug about something it's not always the case.
