Hi, I'm Jon Favreau, the director of this movie.
So we start off with our logos, Paramount and Marvel Studios.
And we start here by having...
Hopefully, you'll recognise some of the dialogue
we pulled from the press conference that ended the last movie.
Otherwise you're hearing the music come up,
and it's building to something dramatic.
It's interesting, if you look in the deleted scenes,
there was another opening we were considering,
which was, "Pepper, I'm dying.
"Oh, God, I'm dying. Help me. Oh, God."
And then you cut on, and then you see he's hugging the bowl.
That beginning, it didn't work well for us for a number of reasons,
but we included it 'cause it worked as a scene.
But in the movie, the tone wasn't working well.
We had problems in the beginning trying to crosscut between light Tony
with scenes of Ivan building his stuff,
because it just bumped tonally so much.
And so we decided, after trial and error, trying many different things, to...
Instead of having him watch the Expo on the screen before he died,
which is what we had had here,
we figured that we would set us in the context of the first film
and actually begin this six months ago
and give Mickey Rourke his opportunity to introduce himself
and to create a sense of danger at the beginning of the film.
We had tried in the first film,
which, if you recall, starts with a flashback.
He's driving around, he gets taken hostage,
and then we flash back to, I think, six weeks earlier, if I recall.
And so that allowed us to play Tony Stark
in a much different way than if we had done it linear.
We had actually done linear cuts.
Everybody who saw the movie said, "Why are you doing a flashback?
"Can we see it linear?"
And so we put it together, and what happens is,
Tony Stark would just not be a very likeable guy.
Everything he was doing was made... He was forgiven much more
because you knew that he was gonna end up in a really compromised position,
and probably the worst position that you can think of,
which was basically in a hostage video.
And so here we wanted to create this sense of danger,
that something was looming, something dangerous was coming.
And here, if you see, "arc reactor," and here's your first clue.
There's Anton Vanko and Howard Stark. What does that mean?
Well, Anton Vanko's his dad, Howard Stark is Tony's father,
and this whole "sins of the father" vendetta theme
begins to be introduced here.
And here he is with his Russian prison tattoos.
And there we have on his wall,
as any respectable serial killer would have, the wall of clippings.
And here we're trying to emulate the building of the first suit in the cave.
So this was Ivan's cave,
figuring he's drawing from the same information.
He's the shadow of Tony Stark.
And there's our monitors and his little...
We had Matty Libatique shooting this. We referenced a movie, P i,
that he shot with Darren Aronofsky years ago,
some of our inspiration for the way the monitors were set up.
Of course, that was black and white. This is colour.
Here we go. We see that Iron Man has become the Person of the Year.
We learn clues about what's happened over the last six months.
There's the parrot drinking the vodka. Very important shot.
That's all Mickey wanted to know. He was like, "Is the parrot shot in?"
"What parrot shot?" "The parrot drinking,
"the cockatoo drinking the vodka." I said, "It's not really..."
"Well, see if it's in. Can you put it in?
"It would mean a lot to me if you put it." So, we put it in.
There it is. I like the shot, too, but that was very important to him.
Here we go. This is emulating the shot from the first film.
Here it is. We tried to mirror all that stuff.
And here you hear some choir, you hear John Debney's swelling score.
Much different than our first film.
We wanted this film to feel more traditional than the first one,
which is a little bit more rough around the edges.
Here he's been a superhero.
I'll be quiet for my credit. Okay, let's...
We wanted this to be a superhero film
that felt a little bit more like other superhero films,
'cause now he's owning it a little bit more.
And here we go. So, there's our downbeat to the film.
Boom. There it is. AC/DC, Shoot to Thrill,
"Six months later."
So, here's what we're trying to do. We're trying to do a misdirect.
You think it's a mission. You don't know what it is.
There he is, in the back of a C-1 7.
There's explosives. He jumps off.
And this shot was gonna be our first introduction to Iron Man
in this movie,
setting the table for what I hope will be a great reveal of Tony Stark.
Because you're waiting for him.
I showed this to Garry Shandling, who's very aware of...
You know, you put on a show, especially from stand-up,
it's like, "Who's your opening act?"
Well, he has Mickey Rourke sort of as his opening act here.
Now you have the dancing girls and you have the music,
and then the helmet eventually comes off
and we introduce Tony. So, it was like,
"How far can we go with this?"
And there's Flushing Meadow Park. I grew up right there.
You just saw my building that I grew up in, across the street.
And we set this thing in the world's fair,
but we call it the Stark Expo in our world.
We're saying that the Expo went on every 1 0 years
and Howard Stark, Tony's father, set it up.
And it hasn't been going on since 1 974.
And now Tony, as part of his new plan...
He said he wasn't making weapons any more. What's he been up to?
What is he gonna do with this newfound power?
He's going to put on a show, he's going to celebrate himself.
This was an image I had in my mind pretty early on,
the idea ofAC/DC blasting.
I got the idea for this when I was watching AC/DC
while we were putting the script together.
Before we knew what the story was, I was at a AC/DC concert
and I was like, "This is where we should find Tony Stark.
"He should be a rock star now."
And then I thought of the idea of NFL cheerleader-types
with a costume that looked like the suit.
And then you pull off the costume,
you pull off the suit, and there he is in a tuxedo,
like James Bond getting out of the wetsuit
with the tuxedo on,
'cause he's kind of like a retro James Bond-type.
And so, here's where he explains the back story.
There's been peace. No, he hasn't been blowing everything up.
Just the appearance of the suit settled things down around the world.
We wanted to come into this movie with an unexpected choice,
and that was just basically the deterrence of the suit.
Much like when the bomb was first invented,
everything settled down. Everybody chilled out a little bit,
until, of course, the inevitable arms race happened.
And that's sort of what we're mirroring here
with Ivan building the same tech.
So now he explains what the Expo is,
and what the movie's about, really. It's about legacy.
Did he inherit the sins of his father? What was the best part of his dad?
What's he gonna do with his life?
And we're about to find out, too,
that he knows he's dying from this invention.
So, Tony's a good guy. Tony's still trying to be a good guy here.
So he might be a little full of himself,
but clearly there's something driving him to do something.
He knows he's not gonna be around. How does he want to change the world?
So, he's using this unprecedented moment of peace
to put the emphasis on leaving behind something great.
Now this part, I'm really proud of. This is John Slattery. I love Mad Men.
I reached out to him, I said, "Hey, could you do this?"
He says, "Really? Is it... What kind of part is it?
"Is it just a cameo?"
I'm like, "Well, I think there's more to it than that.
"I think we could really do something cool here.
"I think it'll be worth your while."
And here he is. He's sort of like a Howard Hughes, Walt Disney-type.
You can see the great artwork on the wall behind him in the little film.
We shot the film to look...
I think we even shot it on 1 6mm stock. Yeah.
There's all the artwork behind him of all the Expos from all the decades,
and there's the model, and there's even a little arc reactor model in there.
And we came up with the "O" logo.
There's Olivia Munn. She had been...
We included in the deleted scenes what she had been.
She'd been a girl at the party. The party had a lot of challenges.
And the tone of the party, we didn't want it to get too funny.
She's a very funny comic actress and she did a fine job for us,
but we couldn't include that part of it because it was throwing the movie off,
as good of a job as she did, unfortunately.
I've been cut out of a lot of stuff myself as an actor, because it didn't fit in.
There's Larry Ellison.
And there's the Stan Lee cameo.
And there was Seth Green in there for a moment, if you look closely.
And here's the lovely and talented Kate Mara,
and our product placement.
And you hear the Richard Sherman theme,
which I'll talk more about in the end credits,
playing in the background here.
But Olivia Munn, as I was saying before, I told her that we couldn't include that,
and she came back and did...
I said, "We have something we're about to shoot."
We were doing something and some additional photography
to help with the exposition,
to help people understand what the Stark Expo was,
and she came in and did a great job as Chess Roberts
from the comic books.
And here we are with a purchased stock shot
that does not hold up well in IMAX, I might add.
Here we go. Here he is, Howard Hughes trial,
where they're trying to nail this guy down,
but his personality is too large
and he has public opinion on his side, because he's doing wonderful things.
And there is peace and there is prosperity.
And he's more powerful than the Senate.
And it's almost like Caesar. It's a Caesar-like rise
we wanted to mirror. And we wanted to make it fun and funny.
And this scene was our first day of photography.
There's Garry Shandling, who I've known for many years.
I asked him to do this.
He doesn't do films that often, he's very selective,
and he agreed.
And this dialogue, we were beating on this thing for a long time.
Justin Theroux did many, many passes of the scene.
It was a very long scene.
You see in some of the deleted materials
that it was actually even longer.
We had Coulson in the back.
We were introducing a lot of characters in the scene.
And one of the problems with this movie
was that it's slow getting out of the blocks.
You're introducing a lot of characters, there's a lot of beginnings to it.
And we didn't want it to drag.
And so, hats off to my editors,
Dan Lebental and Rick Pearson.
Boy, they worked on this thing... This was Rick's...
Rick got this from the day we shot it, the first day,
and there were so many cameras and so much footage.
This was his hobby. He would work on this thing like...
It was like the Crazy Horse monument in the Dakotas.
He would go out there with his jackhammer
and carve away at this scene.
And it took till the end of the movie,
till the end of the editorial process to finally land on a proper cut.
And Dan came in, and he offered his insight.
It was just a bear. It's too long of a scene.
We introduce Justin Hammer,
played by Sam Rockwell. He does a fantastic job.
I worked with him originally on Made.
If you go back and look at that, you'll see he is the concierge,
who does a fantastic job in that. He's always great.
And I wanted to hire somebody that... We really made the part for him.
Because it was supposed to be two Russians,
then it was going to be one Russian.
And Ivan was gonna get killed, there was gonna be Boris,
and he was gonna get killed on the track.
But then the other Russian was gonna continue on.
And I was like, "Boy, I wish I could hire Sam,
"but I don't want to see Sam do it with an accent,"
and so we made it Justin Hammer, another character from the books.
'Cause Rockwell was actually somebody who,
when we were making lists of people
that would be interesting choices to play Tony
before I met with Robert,
as we were putting ideas together,
which is the way the casting process works for all of these roles,
he was a name I kept throwing out. I said, "I know he doesn't seem obvious,
"but this guy is really talented. He could do something cool with it."
And what's fun now is I got him to come in
and play a very broad
and comedic version of another one of his...
Like, the guy who wants to be Tony Stark,
who took over when Tony vacated the position
because he gave up making weapons.
And here this second-rate Tony Stark comes in,
and more often than not, it makes you cringe.
And I love that kind of humour, and Sam was great at it.
He really owned it, and he never...
He had a lot of fun with it, but I think he kept the reality of it
to the level that was right for the tone of this film.
And there's Don Cheadle.
We introduced him earlier with a shot over his back.
We were really thinking about how we'd do that,
because we were gonna show that shot at Comic-Con.
And we figured, everybody was asking about the recasting,
and so to start on his back and bring him in and have them say...
Actually, I think that wasn't even in the script.
That was something that me, Don and Rob were like, "What do we do?
"How do we acknowledge that something's changed?"
And we threw out some lines,
and the one I ended up liking the most was, "I didn't expect to see you here."
And he goes, "Look, it's me. I'm here. Deal with it. Let's move on."
And I thought that that was...
'Cause whenever you cast somebody in a superhero movie,
they never really acknowledge it. And I thought it was fun,
at least for the fans, to acknowledge it.
But not in a way that it bumped for the film,
'cause it still works for the characters.
And we have our fun with all of his tech.
There's the, "What's the next version of the iPhone?"
Of course, just a piece of glass.
The prop people were coming up with different ideas
for his phone and device,
and I was like, "Just make it a piece of glass."
And so, that's what it is, just a piece of glass,
and then we put some stuff on it.
Those, what we call the "feebles," those other robots that didn't work,
a little bit inspired by RoboCop.
Those were actually tests that were done by vendors
and we ended up using them in the film.
And there were some fine, very fine...
I think that was Hydraulx, if I'm not mistaken.
A lot of great little houses that were able to contribute to this production.
Here we go. Here's the way to get around using the F-word.
I figured if it is on TV, we could bleep him doing it.
Because he said it... He actually improvised it, if I recall.
There was a lot of improvisation here.
We stuck to the script, but we embellished.
Good stuff. There's some outtakes. You should really look at it.
You should really look at it in the deleted scenes,
see what Rockwell did. He pulled out a doll.
That wasn't in the script.
And that was good. That was in for a while.
We wanted to make him a little more formidable than that.
The real estate in this scene was very valuable
because it was such a long scene,
and anything that could be removed was,
just in the interest of pacing and getting to...
There's not a lot of action sequences in this film
compared to most films of the genre, so we wanted to make sure
that we never let things settle down too long.
And there he is. There's the cockatoo that he has.
That wasn't in the original script,
but he wanted to have
the idea of having some sort of little pet or companion.
I saw a picture of him with a cockatoo at a boxing gym that I had gone to,
I think the Wild Card one.
There was a picture of him feeding a bird, I remembered.
He told me the story about the cockatoo. I love cockatoos. My favourite animal.
Thought it might be interesting. Little bit more like a pirate.
There we go. And he cuts it in half.
Then we go back to the house.
And so we ended up with the bird,
and then we added a lot of bird stuff throughout.
And if you look in the deleted scenes,
he actually snaps the bird's neck at the end of the movie.
It's not in the film now, but that was in the movie for a while.
A little off-putting to the kids.
And Jarvis is back. We love Paul Bettany. He's great.
And Dummy and You, we wanted to bring them back in here.
And there's that green goo he was drinking in the last movie.
We look like geniuses now
'cause we bring it back and explain what it's for.
Or not.
At least call stuff back,
and then it seems like you know what you're doing.
There's our little... Testing his blood.
Jarvis helps us here with some exposition.
This was actually a much longer scene before,
where he was testing different elements in his new holographic environment.
We wanted to up his workshop.
If you look, you'll see the floor is now shiny.
It's like a holograph-projection surface.
We played with it a little bit in the re-shoots last time.
It was very fun with him designing the Mark II suit using a holograph,
and so we used it here in his whole workshop.
So, now we find out the device that's keeping him alive is killing him.
We developed this sort of fractal rash thing,
and he's hiding it from his best buddy
and potential love interest.
There's my car.
That was the screensaver from the first film, if you remember,
when Stane walks in.
And here we go. There's your Hall ofArmour back there.
And if you look here, we developed a new system
to up the ante, to make his workshop a little high-tech.
There's the suitcase suit right there. A little foreshadowing moment.
He's given away his artwork.
Some classic cars, a '50 Merc,
of course a '32 Ford, best car ever made.
And now we see he's working on the Mark VI back there.
Not that anybody's supposed to notice, but it's there.
And here we go. I don't know...
During the time that this movie was being developed,
Obama was voted in, and so we had a little fun with that.
And now, how do you...
How do you sort of echo the first workshop scene,
but show how things are different?
So, we tech-up the place, and their relationship...
Clearly, things are getting tougher for all these people here.
We're showing the Expo's coming, the Expo actually just opened.
We show that there's 362 days left to show it's the same Expo.
People didn't understand that the Expo actually lasts a whole year.
World's fairs did.
They thought it was a second Expo at the end of the film.
So we have in bold letters, "Now open. 362 days left."
At least we tried.
If you didn't understand that, then it's not our fault.
We did the best we could.
So, we see that his life is... He was real busy in the first one,
well, now he's Iron Man, also, so his life is...
The wheels are coming off. He can't handle it.
And he promotes Pepper to CEO,
which is as close as you're gonna get between the two of these
to a marriage proposal. They know each other,
there's clearly an emotional bond that they're not really acknowledging,
and this is about the nicest thing he could do for her,
and it shows that he really respects her and trusts her.
Little does she know how tough her life will get very quickly.
And she really does a nice job here.
I think Debney does a really nice job with the music.
Robert is charming as hell here.
And there it is. They have their nice little moment.
Kind of the high point, really.
That scene was much longer, too.
You can look at that. I think we have that included.
There are the three Buddhas back there.
Not sure. I always notice them.
And here we go. Looks pretty good for a backlot.
Mike Riva did a nice job there.
This was a longer scene, slightly,
and he would reveal a tattoo on his neck with the 1 0 Rings.
Mongolian man would reveal on his neck a 1 0 Rings tattoo,
with the same little logo
as was on the flags in the cave in the first film.
We didn't include that.
But if you look in the credits, he's referred to as...
I think "1 0 Rings" is the name of his character.
So a little clue of what's to come in the future,
and how it relates to the Mandarin.
And there's me.
And there is Natalie
with her nice Veronica Lake hair.
She had other looks in her wardrobe that were more striking,
but because we wanted to do the stunt where she flipped me here,
we had to keep her in slacks.
And, boy, she practised this, we practised this a lot, separately.
I think this was the first time we did it together.
And here she goes. There's a lot of improv here.
We ended up with just a silent moment.
He's a little off-put. Tony's not speechless too often.
But just her... Look at how she looks at him.
Boy, she knows how to work it. She has tremendous presence.
And now, here they are. She knows that she likes him.
There's no jealousy here because they're not together.
But are they together or not, and is he doing this to drive her crazy?
So, is she saying, "No, she's not," because she's jealous,
or is she saying, "No, she's not," 'cause it's a bad choice?
It's not a very good choice for an assistant.
You do not want... As good as she is,
you don't want somebody with that energy in Tony Stark's life.
"Who speaks Latin?" "No one speaks Latin."
That was actually something that...
I always love when GWyneth starts giving me notes on the script,
because I always just put it in the script. "She speaks Latin."
And she was explaining, she said, "Nobody speaks Latin.
"It's a dead language." She could write it. I said, "Just put it in."
That happened in the first film, too. There's me. Yeah, I did my stunt there.
In IMAX you can see that, that's my double in the reflection in the glass,
but I did the stunt.
And, no, it was not fun.
Here we go.
I like that joke.
And here they are.
Great. He signs the company over.
So, it already gets kind of bad for Pepper. Poor Pepper.
She's made CEO,
and then realising that now she's gonna be further away from him.
There we go. Here's Monaco.
The palace.
I'd been to Monaco many years ago, and this was another one of the...
You know, you gotta come up with the set pieces before
the whole story's fully in place,
and I was like, "We gotta do Monaco, man.
"We did Vegas last time. You gotta up it. You gotta do Monaco."
'Cause we're kind of like...
Tonally, we're kind of like the James Bond movies I grew up with.
You know, the ones now are kind of edgy and more real.
The ones then were kind of tongue-in-cheek. It was kind of fun.
You know, it was a fantasy.
And there I am with the suitcase.
That was a comp shot.
So, we built the Hôtel de Paris a Bar Americain.
This is where I had been many years ago,
and this was my memory of Monaco.
I had been flown out there by the Prince as part of the Television Festival
and for a black-tie première of Rocky Marciano.
And, boy, it was amazing to go there, man.
I felt like royalty. I was nobody. This is before anything.
And there I was.
I'd gotten that gig off of Friends. I had just done Swingers, actually.
And after Friends, I did Rocky Marciano,
and nobody... It was a Showtime movie.
And there's Elon Musk, by the way, back there.
You'll see his place later, SpaceX.
He's as close as you're gonna get to the real Tony Stark.
And he helped us. He let us shoot in his place
in exchange for a cameo, and that was it. He's a great guy.
We've become friends. I met him through Robert.
Robert spoke to him for research.
And here she is. And actually Sam and her,
in a relationship in real life.
And I know Leslie Bibb, and it seemed fun.
I said, "Yeah. Let's have her. Let's work her into this film."
And then this great bit came out of it. And I love this little...
I don't know if people are gonna remember her,
that the first movie started with him in bed with her
after she was interviewing him from Vanity Fair.
And poor Justin's just trying to be like him,
and the girl he's with has already slept with Tony, and it's just...
This poor guy.
I love him, but he's annoying.
I just get happy when he's on the screen.
I'm a character actor, so I like when somebody makes some cool choices.
And, of course, look at Robert here.
He's just slamming him down left and right. It's not even a fair fight.
It's not even a fair fight, and she's more interested in Tony than him.
You know, it's a little bit of a Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny going on here.
This poor guy.
And now he checks his heart in the mirror,
and we see that things are not going well.
He's checking his blood, and we see the rash is not good.
Why is he doing it, man? What the...
You know, we had a lot of discussions about this. Why is he...
What's he doing wrong that he deserves this?
Just in the greater scheme of things in the movie. I mean, he's just...
He's holding it all together, and he wants to cut loose.
And he's a thrill-seeker and he loves...
You know, people get addicted to adrenaline.
They get addicted to fame. They get addicted to living a life that way.
And so, as the chips are really getting down for him,
and as his blood toxicity's going up,
and he realises that it's the end of the road.
He's not gonna be able to solve this problem.
So, it's like, "What the hell?"
And, of course, that's when he makes himself vulnerable.
And so, here's Pepper.
Now Pepper's very upset here, and that's just something that,
you know, when we were cutting this together,
"Why is she so upset? She knows she's got..." Well, no.
It's like if the President leaves his, you know, little security zone
and does something he's not supposed to do...
If you go to a ball game with the President
and he's supposed to throw out the first pitch
and then sit in the stands, in the box, and then you see him running around
in the field without his Secret Service protecting him,
you know, you worry. And so, this is not cool.
And so, she's upset.
She knows it's not good even before she knows about Ivan.
That's the thinking here.
And there, I like that little... It's nice when...
We were able to do that with two different units
and make it all come together. There we are. We built this car.
So, we, of course, designed a red car for Iron Man.
And then Robert was like, "No, it should be blue."
Like, "Why blue? Red is Iron Man." He said, "It should be blue.
"Don't want it to be red. Make it blue."
And so, actually, you see the colour scheme of the Iron Man car
is actually on, I think, Hammer's car, one of the other ones.
I'm like, "Why is he being blue? It should be red."
And it's like, I'm so happy it's blue now.
It looks so cool blue.
So, you know, that's why sometimes you gotta be open, man.
'Cause I like it in blue, man. I can't even picture it red.
It would've been hokey red. He's right.
If you see, those plates were actually shot,
you know, the cars, we never raced there.
Those cars were all digital, done by Digital...
Done by, excuse me, Double Negative out of England.
These plates we shot, these are real plates.
They populated it with the crowd and matched it up.
We built this part of the set in Downey
'cause we couldn't shoot clearly in Monaco.
They were shooting... The track was being set up for the race.
We got in there before the race, cleared out for the race,
so we shot the stands and we shot the background plates,
and then we put our cars into it.
They let us have access to the track for a little while.
Those boats were all digital back there.
And we walked every inch of this path.
This part is called Tabac 'cause there's a tobacco shop.
It's very well-known by race fans, every turn in this course.
And that car, that's Dan Sudick, our effects guy,
flipping real cars. I mean, we built those things.
And there's the suitcase suit.
And there's us. That's a great comp. We never were in Monaco.
I scouted beforehand,
and then they shot with the second unit with the actual car.
Digital door, real track, real car, fake race cars.
So there's all different combinations of layers in these things,
of real and not real, and I think that's why it's convincing.
But the idea of a Rolls-Royce racing towards him
and the whips on the track, this was something...
This was an image I had in my head.
And so, a lot of this was hard.
The resources were, you know, never opulent
because of the nature of the production.
But I was able to get it to be Monaco.
It was very hard for me to get it to be Monaco.
If it wasn't for the cooperation of the Prince and the ACM,
it never would've happened. They really helped,
and I'm very grateful for that.
Because I think if it was Long Beach...
I mean, as cool as Long Beach is, and I've been there and it's great,
I don't think it has the same impact
of feeling like you're on the world stage. It's still California. And this is...
I mean, this is Monaco. Monte-Carlo is Monte-Carlo.
It's a brand, it's a whole image, and it evokes a whole nostalgic...
You know, it just represented the right thing.
And so, we have to be very clear that it was the Historic race and not the F1
because that's a whole different thing. That's a different organisation.
So there's a lot of signage around, if you look.
And the cars are actually retro cars and not current F1 design.
Here we go. We wanted him to fight without the suit on,
and so put him in peril.
We didn't want the whole movie to be just dudes fighting in suits.
And the idea of Whiplash
and the guy with this Road Warrior-type powered whips was cool.
I liked the idea of him with tattoos.
You know, I was thinking he could be like this Eastern Prom ises-type dude.
And then the idea of Mickey came about. I had seen The Wrestler,
and I was like, "Man, this guy's great."
And then, of course, all the awards attention came
and it became very hard to even...
I met with him before all that awards stuff happened
and showed him the pictures.
I met with him in LA when he was here, and he was into it.
And then, of course, all the awards stuff happened.
It was very hard to get him to commit
because he was travelling around promoting it.
Fortunately, Robert was also going around promoting for awards season
because of Trop ic Thunder.
And Robert would be like, "Hey, you gonna do the movie or not?"
And he would corner him in interviews, which was great.
And Robert's always been a real partner in every aspect of the production.
There we go. And we actually cut up a Phantom,
which I thought was both exciting and heart-breaking.
I guess we've always destroyed really nice, iconic, expensive cars.
We did the Cobra in the last film.
But, you know, it's just... I don't know, it's just unique.
Look at that, man. I was in there for that. That was not fun.
That's real, man. That's not digital. That thing's coming...
I mean, the whip's digital, but the car was really coming apart.
And here we go. The suitcase suit.
Oh, boy. I was like, "How do we do it? How do we..."
It's sort of like, "What do we do that we haven't done?"
And the idea of the suitcase suit, you know, it was like, "Could we do it?"
But you can't do it like in the comic books.
And so, this was a very hard thing to conceive of
and actually make look convincing.
It wasn't till about halfway through post
that I was convinced that this thing was gonna work.
Because you wanted it to fit within the reality of our world.
You didn't want it to just morph onto him
or be like liquid metal, like, you know, T2 metal.
That was done. That's been done. We had to do something cool and fresh.
And the people at Double Negative really worked very hard on that.
Very hard, and I'm very happy with it.
It's cool. It's the right...
There were so many hours and hours and hours, and meetings and meetings
of notes for every frame of this thing.
And it's become one of the iconic images of the film,
so I think they did a nice job.
And so, from a story perspective,
you wanna show that somebody challenged him with a technology.
He won, but it's just the fact
that this dude showed up and it was so close
starts to make people freak out, and make him freak out, too.
And as soon as you lose that public support,
when you're that famous and they turn on you...
Well, you see it in the papers, man. You see it.
The nature of fame and celebrity is very different now
than it was 1 0 years ago.
And you see, you got everybody coming for them.
Later, you got Christiane Amanpour, O'Reilly,
and Shandling's being interviewed. It's just, like, relentless.
When you're at the wrong end of that, it takes quite a toll.
But, for right now, he doesn't know that that's all turned.
Right now he thinks, "Who is this guy?" He scanned the tech.
This is clearly something that's related to what he's built.
And if you remember from the first film,
it was that heart piece that Jeff Bridges was able to build...
Congratulations to Jeff, by the way, on the Oscar for Crazy Heart.
Great movie. He did a great job.
And very happy for him in that moment.
And if you remember in the first film, Jeff had to steal the heart
because he could build the whole Iron Monger suit, but the heart...
Here Matty Libatique does a great job.
This frame right here, with him there.
And Mickey Rourke was like, "I wanna do the scene..."
'Cause he wants to consult on wardrobe.
Very important, wardrobe, hair, teeth, all that stuff is him.
He works that way. He's very much into that.
So he'll do the hair himself, the teeth himself,
he got all that stuff made himself.
Even the glasses he was working on the suit with
in the beginning of the movie. He had all that made.
The Georgian Cross around his neck. Each tattoo he selected.
I showed him a book of the tattoos. He picked each one.
Wardrobe's very important. He says, "I wanna wear...
"I wanna be wearing dirty white underwear."
And I was like, "All right. That could be cool."
And then Marvel was like, "What? What does he wanna wear?
"Is he kidding?" I'm like, "No, it could be cool."
He actually wanted to wear dirty white underwear
and be jumping rope with a chain,
and the chain hitting the ground
would send a shower of sparks every time he was skipping rope.
I thought that was a little too much.
But I did think that we could do something with him,
like he'd been stripped down to his underwear
because he was wearing that suit and everything burnt off and everything.
And he'd worked so much on his body, and then he had all the...
He'd worked out so much, and then he had all those tattoos,
I thought it would be really cool.
And here's Tony, all refined, coming in
wearing his leisure wear,
with his hair all coifed and his goatee,
and then here's this dude, you know, polar opposite.
So you have these two shadows, sort of, facing each other.
And there we reveal that he knows that, that palladium,
he's the one guy who knows he's dying.
So, this guy's got... He's got the goods on Tony,
and Tony does not like somebody having a one-up on him.
You know, this was used in a lot of the trailers.
And the whole notion that if you make God bleed, everything goes.
It's very much...
It's like The Man Who Would Be King, you know.
I think even in 300 they had that, as well.
Once you just nick the flesh of that type of leader,
of the person who's held in such high esteem,
verging on idolatry,
and with the suit there is certainly a theme of that,
that once you show that, that person is vulnerable or human,
it freaks people out. They don't like that.
Not when the following is so nuts.
This is a scene that we actually shot...
If you look, you'll see the original scene that we shot.
It was much earlier, it was after the Senate, with Rhodey in it.
And it was gonna be a space plane.
This was designed to be a space plane.
You can even see in one of the cuts, you'll see her hair,
some tests for her hair going up.
It was gonna be zero G with a four-point belt.
But we used this set 'cause we needed the scene
to help with the story, the emotional story between he and Pepper.
What we found in both these movies
is Pepperjust has become such an important aspect to this film,
and you have to keep them connected and have to clarify their relationship.
And he does so many things that are distasteful,
even to her at the party, and then later they're not getting along in the office.
It's nice to show this moment.
There's just, you know, groups of creative people in Hollywood,
it's very encouraging, that come together and help each other.
Shandling was also very helpful on this
in the editing room, and we do it for each other,
and you don't hear a lot about it.
You think of all these different creative types as being competitive,
but really there's a tremendous generosity, creatively.
People root for each other's projects, and they're there for each other.
I remember calling up J.J. Abrams from the trailer
in the last movie when we couldn't come up with a solution to a problem.
And, you know, he dropped everything.
He was on speaker phone with me and Robert.
And I do that for others. I get calls, too.
And it's a very cool part of what I do and a part that I really appreciate.
So, this is me getting into a different type of filmmaking than I kind of have.
You know, sort of telling it just with images and pictures and plot.
We had to get him out ofjail and make it look like he died.
This is actually a prison that's been shot a lot in downtown LA.
Actually Pasadena, I think.
But they did a nice job.
Riva did a nice job there with the French on the walls.
Good explosion from Dan Sudick,
and, of course, he has to brush off his shoulder.
Like Jay-Z.
And Mickey knows when you can't cut something out.
He knows. He's like...
He knows he just had a big oner with an explosion behind him,
so he brushed his little shoulder off. I've grown to like it.
At the time, it was like, "Why'd he do that?"
But you know what? I'm digging it now.
Here he is.
There's Justin Hammer
with the classical music and the two worlds.
You know, this movie's about contrasts.
I think humour comes out of contrast a lot of times,
status and contrast, and here these two are, and I love this scene.
And there he is. And if you look at...
What's his... Sam wanted to have a spray tan.
I mean, it's so not like him to have a spray...
He caked that on. He wanted it to be just orange.
And if you look at his hands, it's just all over his palms.
But it works.
And here we are, and he sits down.
And we see on his neck the Loki tattoo
that shouldn't be Loki.
He put Loki on his neck
because his dog had passed away, so it says Loki backwards.
But, of course, Kevin Feige said, "You can't have Loki on his neck.
"That's the villain from Thor. "
And so, we adjusted the tattoo digitally in many shots to disguise that,
as not to give an improper Easter egg.
I was like, "Why not, man? It's cool."
"No, it can't be that." So I said, "Okay. I don't know what's going on in Thor,
"but I don't wanna ruin your other movie."
So, it's slightly changed. I think they removed one little part of the "O."
But in some shots it wasn't done, and you'll see that there's some
sketchy blurring done on it that looks pretty good on the TV,
but in IMAX is...
It was an uncomfortable lesson to learn
that you can't push things for IMAX
the same way you can for a regular movie screen or video screen.
So here's a scene, two cameras again. We had a lot of fun here.
A much longer version, but it was good, good, good stuff.
Here he is. He's speaking Russian.
He wanted to speak Russian. He had a Russian coach.
We cut half of this line for timing,
and Mickey was not happy about that.
He's like, "Look, I don't want to come off looking like a fool.
"I did a lot of work to make it sound like I knew what I was doing.
"Please put the other half in."
I think that was the last change in the movie. We restored half the line,
the other half of the line back to it.
The bird. We did little bird riffs here.
The bird actually became... None of this was in the original script,
and we sort of added it and threaded it in.
As with Jack. The guy, he says, "Hey, Jack. What's going on?"
He says, "We got salmon carpaccio."
That Jack thing, he was actually a food stylist
that did a great job as a background performer there
and we ended up incorporating him into the other scenes.
He did a good job. Jack White's his name.
And there's Christiane Amanpour, friends with Pepper Potts,
GWyneth Paltrow. In real life she's friends with, actually, not Pepper,
but with GWyneth, and she called her up. She says, "Will you do this?"
'Cause I wanted it to be hitting the world.
And by having Christiane and O'Reilly,
I felt I was covering the whole spectrum there.
Hopefully it's fun.
Not too distracting up here.
By the way, great holographs and design
by Prologue,
Kyle Cooper and his gang. They did all that stuff, too.
And here's Rhodey coming in.
Here's where we start to build towards...
We gotta build towards why he takes the suit.
'Cause if it doesn't look like Tony deserves to get the suit taken away,
you don't like Rhodey.
If you go too far, Tony's not likeable, and so it's a very fine line to walk.
So he's his friend, trying to protect him here,
and we find out that...
Actually, Rhodey finds out that he's not in a good way here.
His friend's not doing too good.
So what does a good friend do here? Do you leave him alone?
And then later, at the party, we see that it starts to even get further undone.
If you look back there, in addition to the cars,
there's actually an aeroplane that folds up.
That's a real aeroplane back there.
We said, "How do we outdo all those cars last time?"
I said, "Put a plane in there, too."
There's a plane that folded up, and we put it in.
So, this is originally just... This prop is digital.
The bottom of it is real. But it didn't look good.
It was something that was a late-breaking idea.
We did the best we could practically.
But it actually gave us a basis by which to build the digital thing on.
And it was designed by a company called Fuel,
a good house, good small house out ofAustralia, I think.
There, the thing didn't turn on,
and then finally Russell, our prop guy, got it to turn on. It's on radio control.
And it finally popped on, and Robert went with it.
We actually kept that performance, like it's really falling apart.
He's drinking the green juice some more.
So, again here, building the case towards him taking the suit.
This scene used to continue on. If you look in the deleted scenes,
you'll see that he actually went upstairs, grabbed the phone from Pepper,
and then talks to the helicopter that's been watching and circling the house,
making him seem even more undone.
And this is SpaceX right here. Not actually in Queens.
But we wanted to put it close to the Expo
to believe that we can get over there, back and forth
with the car and with the suits and stuff.
But this is SpaceX.
This is where Elon Musk actually builds rocket ships
and the Tesla car, for the time being.
You can't see, but at the other end of the room,
there is a little commissary
where there now stands a life-sized Iron Man statue as a "thank you."
There he is. We show that he's pretty good with the computers.
There we go, and he's gonna go up to the thing.
There's only actually one real one. That front one is real.
The rest of those are digital.
All those people in the background are not extras
that we dressed or told to be there, but they still had to continue working.
We would shoot nights,
and there's always people working there, but we worked around it,
in the fine tradition of shooting in practical locations.
I think we get a lot from it.
It doesn't look like anything you could get from props or an existing set
or anything you could build on a set. That's bigger than a sound stage.
So, it gave us a little bit more scope and scale and authenticity.
So, it was very cool for us to shoot there.
And there's Jack, who we put into all these scenes.
And there's another additional scene that used to come here.
Another scene that used to come here that's also in the deleted scenes,
him showing him his little room.
And there's the party.
And this has been the most challenging part of the film, editorially.
Also in the deleted scenes,
you can see that there was him and her cosying up a bit.
We had this scene right here where he's flirting more with her.
It felt weird.
It always felt like a bummer to Pepper,
'cause you really want him and Pepper to be together.
But you also show that she's up in his face and flirting with him.
There's all these bad decisions to be made around him.
It's all there for Tony,
and he's got to decide what he's all about.
And this is his last night. What's he gonna do?
What do you do? What's his legacy gonna be?
Is he going to leave something good behind
or is he going to just indulge himself and regress?
And we see that tonight, what he decides to do is have a party,
put on the suit...
You're not supposed to put the suit on and mess around.
And everybody loves it at the party, and it's feverish.
They're all gonna be cheering and celebrating
and encouraging bad behaviour.
And I guess in Tony Stark's life, there is always people around
that are gonna encourage that.
And, of course, Pepper doesn't like that or Rhodey.
Those are his real friends.
So, what are you gonna do? He drinks the martini.
This is as close as we get to Demon in a Bottle,
this little sequence here.
That's actually me scratching on the soundtrack
at that particular moment.
And she walks in, she's disappointed.
There he is, dancing.
We wanted it to be funny, but also a little bit weird.
There's DJ AM back there.
Nice, nice guy and, unfortunately, passed away.
I think there's a featurette on the DVD about him.
He was just a great, great, great dude,
and we got to spend a week with him there.
Robert actually dug him a lot, too.
Very, very, very sad when we found out that he passed away.
But very happy that we have him here, and we do a whole little mash-up
that his friend DJ Kevin Scott helped us put together.
He actually fell by accident, there.
But of course, it worked great with the smashing sounds.
In trying to motivate him to go downstairs...
This was another scene that had Olivia Munn in it.
You'll see that he has her up in the air.
Part of it was just to get through it
and not make him too distasteful at this part of the movie.
'Cause when he was too abusive, it was a little rough to recover from.
There's that joke, Justin Theroux, a wonderful little piece of writing.
And I love this moment between the two of them,
'cause it was like...
They both really knew how to play the real of this moment.
And then I threw in, he just peed in the suit.
That was something that occurred to me in the moment there,
based on the line that he just said.
I love her here. "It's not sexy. It's not sexy, trust me.
"You're not gonna be happy about this." He just peed in the suit.
"It's got filtration... You could drink that water."
I came up with that one, too, in the moment.
Take this, too, it looks like he's gonna go with it,
and he does not go with it.
Well, that's it! He's too far gone now.
There's no stopping him now. She tried.
Rhodey sees she tried. Something else's gonna have to happen.
Now, there is a sculpture here, watch this. It's a Giacometti, it's called.
That walking guy.
It was such a bummer 'cause we got the rights to use that,
it's a very famous sculpture, we got the rights to use it,
but then we found out later that we couldn't destroy it,
and he has to blow that glass up.
So hopefully it's not too distracting, it's still there.
Not hit at all.
And interestingly, that sculpture was bought after we shot...
Not that one, that's a replica, but the real one was bought
for $1 50 million by an anonymous bidder at an auction.
So, maybe it was Tony Stark.
Here we go. He's gonna do the Gallagher.
"She wants the Gallagher." He's blowing stuff, playing...
Well, that's like, what's the least responsible thing
you could be doing with the suit? Using it as a party favour, essentially.
And then finally we understand why Rhodey, hopefully, comes up.
Now, this is actually... A lot of it's been added digitally,
but that silver suit was one of the suits from the first movie.
It's a very heavy suit. We've since redesigned it.
He's wearing a lighter version of the suit.
Part of it is real, part of it is digital.
This is a bit that we added with Adam. It wasn't in the script, so it was fun,
and we kept it in, and it's nice to have that.
And this is a little mix that is inspired by stuff that he would do.
Not easy to get the rights to do a mash-up of different songs,
but thanks to Dave Jordan, we did it.
There we go. I love that, them throwing weights.
The storyboard artists had a lot of fun with this little area,
coming up with all the different things that could happen in a gym.
All this dialogue has been changed and changed so many times.
'Cause you can. 'Cause they're in suits.
Boom! You'll see that this, actually, up here...
Olivia Munn, this is where she was, up here.
You'll see that in the deleted scenes.
But part of the reason was to keep it feeling a little more dangerous here.
And too many jokes, it wasn't feeling good.
And now we get into Robot Rock,
which was Adam Goldstein, DJ AM's favourite group
from what I'm told by his buddies.
And Robot Rock\ kind of works with this, too, right here.
I just wanted that image of them
just loading up and hitting as hard as they could,
and not really doing anything to each other.
It's like, those suits... It could go on forever.
And then it gets darker.
And all the people with their damned camera phones and staring at them.
And all the people that were encouraging him
to be acting the way he was.
And now,
it has to go one step too far.
And then this moment, ILM did a really nice job
on what happens when the two RTs hit each other.
We wanted it to be something cool.
We sneak in "War Machine" there.
He says, "You wanna be a War Machine?"
We like to say the names of the characters
without actually really saying them,
as though it's their real name, but have it in there.
Like we say, "We're Iron Mongers," in the first film,
and here he says, "You wanna be a War Machine?"
And so we see when those two things hit each other, that happens.
And we wanted the ending to be some sort of call-back
to something we established earlier.
And I like that they work together to have to defeat the guy,
and it's about him learning not to be alone.
Part of Tony's problem is he isolates himself,
he doesn't let Pepper get close to him,
he doesn't have friends other than the people he works with, really.
His best friends are his computer and his robots.
So, it really is about him learning
to open up to these other people and trust people,
and leading to the Avengers, where he's part of a group.
There's the suit taking off into the night. I like that little ending there.
Those are practical suits, those aren't digital right there,
the ones on the ground.
And here we are back at Edwards. We were there last movie.
It's a great place, great guys. They let us go up in the tower.
And there's Tim Guinee, from the last film.
He was in the CAOC, if you remember, with Rhodey.
And these are all real guys here.
I love that buzzing the tower moment with the subwoofers.
And they let us use a B-2 and a F-22,
and there's a C-1 7.
And they just rolled all the assets out for us.
They let us shoot wherever we wanted there.
And you could only shoot that B-2 from certain angles.
They wouldn't even let us take pictures, last time, of that.
They must've liked lron Man
'cause they really rolled out the red carpet for us.
And I had challenge coins made up,
for those of you who know what those are,
because I would get them from the military units and officers.
It was nice to have something to give back.
So, there are lron Man 2 director coins out there.
And you see, we don't have the B-2 there
or actually War Machine, in that shot.
B-2 'cause we weren't allowed to show it from that angle.
Our excuse is it's stealth, so that's why you can't see it in that shot.
And then War Machine, because I just didn't want to pay for it.
I didn't think you'd notice. Didn't want to add another shot.
And here was another image that we had.
I wanted him in the donut hole of Randy's Donuts the day after a bender.
Just eating.
And I love this moment here. This is like the AA sponsor,
the grizzled veteran who's like, "Is this working out for you?
"Do you like your life? Is this how you want to live?"
You get the phone call, you call your sponsor at the low point,
and the sponsor says, "Are you happy?" He picks you up out of the gutter.
He picks you up from the place
you don't even know how you woke up there.
And he says to you, "All right, are we ready to change?
"Are you ready to change something about this
"or is this working out for you?"
And then you gotta say... You gotta give it up.
You gotta just say, "I am ready to give up my old life
"and I am ready to find out who I really am and work at it."
And that's why I like that moment.
I like those glasses he was wearing, too, if you saw.
They were black-and-red-checked Ray-Bans.
He just happened to be wearing them that day.
And I was like, "You got to wear it with the suit."
He was like, "Really?" I was like, "Yeah." Robert's always up for that.
He's like, "Yeah!" And I really like it. I think it works really well.
It has that '80s look to it. I don't know, it's fun to watch him.
It reminds me of Less Than Zero or something.
But it worked somehow.
And there, of course, is Scarlett in her...
There's no interior to Randy's. Don't drive yourself crazy looking for it.
It's not there. There's no interior.
This was actually shot someplace else in the neighbourhood.
But we put up the Randy signage.
They were gonna be in S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters,
and I was like, "No, no, no. We got to put them in Randy's Donuts, man."
'Cause the first discussions were, like, it's a stainless steel S.H.I.E.L.D...
We were even gonna move them to the East Coast.
I was like, "No, no, no, get them in the costumes in this environment.
"That's our movie, man."
And this was the first time she was in the Black Widow costume on set.
That was when I had tweeted. I said, "She looks...
"You never heard a crew get so quiet so fast."
And that turned into a whole thing of like...
I thought I was just writing it and nobody...
But people who follow me read it, and it turned into, like...
Marvel was like, "Watch what you tweet."
Like that was a sensitive thing to say
she was in the costume. I don't understand.
The point I am making is that everything...
During the shooting of this film,
it was clear that the information age had changed dramatically.
And if you post a picture of yourself hanging out
that has nothing to do with the movie,
hanging out near the set, or talk about it,
those things get picked up and move around very quickly.
And so the way filmmakers interact with the public
is changing rapidly, and it's interesting to see how it evolves.
And that was the one moment I remember learning that.
I said that she looked great in the costume.
And by the way, aside from that, she did look great in the costume.
The crew did get really quiet.
Because she had been working so hard on her martial arts stuff and her stunts,
and between that and the red hair and all that,
and the way they did her makeup up,
it was very different.
I would have never pictured Scarlett looking like this.
And it's just great. It really works well and fits in with the comic books,
and I hope the fanboys really embrace her in it,
because she's a great, great, dedicated performer
who really loves the idea and fought very hard to be in this franchise.
So, I hope a lot comes of it for her.
I hope she gets to do her own Black Widow movie.
So, there it is, showing that we're changing from a suit to a drone.
And part of the reason we did that was,
A, it's kind of in the news, and that's what's happening.
It's actually even happened more since we shot this.
That's the nature of warfare now. No casualties.
It's good for PR, no human life on the line.
At least for your side.
So it's very corporate, safe, futuristic warfare, antiseptic warfare.
But also because I wanted to be able to destroy
and really have a lot of fun with the destruction
that the suits could do with multiple enemies.
If you just have a body count like that with people,
you just can't do it in a movie like this, PG-1 3.
You don't want kids seeing that. And so the idea
of multiple robotic bad guys
that you could completely disembowel and cut the heads off
and have oil squirting out was something I really liked.
I know that Genndy Tartakovsky did it in Samura i Jack\ a lot.
That was the trick he would use on Cartoon Network.
He'd use the samurai warrior cutting heads and limbs off of these things,
but they were all robots.
And so that was something that I thought was really cool.
And I actually contacted Genndy.
I liked what he did with Clone Wars, and I liked Samura i Jack,
and I reached out to him,
and we had been talking and meeting, and I finally asked him,
"Hey, you wanna come on board and help me with this stuff?
"You have a great handle on action. It's not what I'm from."
And he did. He helped out, him and Bryan, his partner,
did storyboards and animatics
and even came for some of the shooting with the second unit
of the plates in the Japanese garden later,
in the Oracle Pavilion.
So, it was great. I thank them so much for helping,
and I learned so much from them, and they brought a lot of great tone
and a nice tongue-in-cheek quality to the violence
and a nice imagination to all of that action stuff.
It fit in well. We were able to balance it all out well.
So, here's our scene between Nick Fury and Tony Stark
where he learns about his dad.
And he learns that if he finishes what his father was exploring,
when he invented the arc reactor with Anton Vanko,
that maybe that final technical breakthrough
would help him solve the problem that he's facing, coincidentally,
because he has that thing in his chest.
How to replace palladium with the element that would make it
the perfect version of the arc reactor.
But he's also enticing him to become part of S.H.I.E.L.D.
and to join the group.
So, Sam Jackson has tremendous screen presence
and is able to carry off a lot of exposition here.
And then we even related it
to the emotion of his relationship to his dad
that was set up in the press conference of the first film.
This movie is about the sins of the fathers in a lot of ways,
with Anton extending this vendetta against the Stark family
and feeling betrayed
because he was turned in for spying by the dad,
and Tony inheriting all the good and bad of his dad.
You see the dad drinking in the video... I mean, in the old movies
in the next scene.
But also the legacy and all the innovations
that helped change the world in a great way.
So, the choice is his.
And so we found a way to incorporate, to create a character arc for this guy,
because it's so easy in the first film, with the origin, to have an arc,
the rise of the hero.
But how do you not just make it a serialised version
of the adventures of a hero?
How do you actually make the character grow?
And so the relationship with the dad
seemed to be the fulcrum of that for us.
And so, now this is the first scene with Coulson,
when, if you've seen the deleted scenes,
he was actually introduced in the courtroom earlier.
But here we go in the movie proper,
in lron Man movie canon, he's introduced in this scene.
And there is the box.
"Property of Howard Stark." What's gonna be in there?
And now, here we pull apart the Mark II.
Legacy built a really cool, practical suit that could come apart.
See the inner workings, and there he pulls out the arc reactor.
For those of you playing at home, yes,
the arc reactor should be in Tony's chest.
Why is it in the suit?
I hope nobody bumps on that too hard.
We figured he built extra ones
'cause he had so much problem the last movie.
He'd always want to have extras around.
It also looks cooler
in the Hall ofArmour if the chests are glowing.
So, we just sort of said that, that was the case.
And you gotta know the special code to get into the room,
so they're safe there.
And here we go.
Yeah, "I'm gonna upgrade your software." Hopefully, that helps
to understand why Ivan was able to hack into the Iron Man suit later,
and control it in War Machine.
So, here we go, man. I was like,
"We gotta have a scene where we have...
"I want this to be like Taxi Driver. "
I think some of the shots are even... The above, the overhead shot of the guns.
So these are real guns, and originally they were fake guns,
the prop guy brought some fake guns that we built,
but the real ones looked so much more cool
that I said to them, "Look, we gotta do..."
We're up at Edwards Air Force Base, I said, "We gotta do the real guns.
"Let's come up..." And then Justin scrambled to write it.
And, actually, Justin is talking over an earwig
to him in the scene, to help feed him the stats on this stuff,
because I had just changed all the lines.
So, he actually has an earpiece in here to help cue him for each of the things.
Sam's a very fine actor, never has problems memorising,
but I threw him a curve ball that day.
And so they ended up having a lot of fun together,
where Justin would feed him lines and he would throw other things in,
and then Rockwell would add things,
and this was a very fun day with Justin and Rockwell, where they...
It was almost like two musicians playing together,
and it's one of my favourite scenes in the film.
So, a lot of this run-on stuff was them both adding...
They were both adding to the other person's thing.
And one of my favourite lines in the scene, he says,
"But I can tell this isn't disco enough for you,"
he says about the Belgian gun.
And I don't even know where he got that from.
I don't even know what it means, but I loved it.
And every cut, I was like, "Make sure that line's in."
He only said it in one take of one thing,
but I was like, "Make sure it's in."
"It isn't disco enough for you."
And then he says here, "You're like a sphinx,"
which is something that Ed Asner said about another performer on Elfonce.
He said, "I can't perform with that person.
"It's like staring into the face of a sphinx."
I'm not gonna say who. It's nobody you know.
But he did say, "The actor's not giving me anything.
"It's like staring into the face of a sphinx."
And so he says, "I don't know what to make of you.
"It's like I'm looking at a sphinx."
Nobody would know that but me, except you guys know it now.
And I love Ed Asner.
And so we dig out of the box all the little secrets.
Kodak, a partner of ours
on the film.
And here we are, there's the arc reactor, and so
we didn't know if we were gonna get away with this.
That the dad's talking to him from beyond the grave.
But between Slattery, the way it was shot,
and the great, great job Downey does here
in just emotionally engaging and reacting.
And we had shot that film earlier.
So, we were actually able to project that film,
so he was reacting to Slattery.
And so, when Slattery asked, "Just a cameo?" I said, "No."
And I think this moment really makes it...
I think it's a memorable moment. I think it was a good day's work for the guy.
'Cause I think he really made a big impression in the film.
And there's Tony, we see how old Tony is.
He's curious about this thing even then.
And, of course, here Tony's seeing what their relationship was like.
Not what you wanna see when you...
If you have one little piece of footage you find with you and your dad,
that's not exactly what you'd want. It's sad.
His dad was an important guy, but wasn't there for him.
And there he is, having a drink.
Little things, you know, subtle but...
Here he is.
It's funny, but it's not to him.
It's fun watching it with a crowd, 'cause they laugh,
but they don't know if they're supposed to laugh or not.
And we see that this damn book and these clues,
what he thought was in the box, he's frustrated. There's nothing there.
He's not gonna live, he's not...
And then here's the...
Here's the thing.
And I showed this to Damon Lindelof, who does Lost,
because I thought they did a really nice job
at the end of the first season, or the beginning of the second season,
when they go down in the bunker and they see...
There was the missing footage from the DHARMA Initiative thing,
and they find the missing frames.
So, this is sort of like the missing footage
from the thing you see at the beginning of the movie.
And Damon was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
"Is it good? Did we do it?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah."
He was a very encouraging guy, very supportive, smart, smart dude,
and one of the writers on Cowboys & AIiens.
I'm actually working with him now.
And there's the acceptance. He says,
"Of all the things, all my work that's so important,
"you're the most important."
And there he is, Robert does a...
It's the best acting in the movie, for my money, right there.
And then, boom! We go out, and he's ready now.
He's connected with his dad, he's uncovered.
It's like therapy, he uncovered the old wound.
He faced it.
His dad accepts him from beyond the grave,
says, "You're not a bad kid."
I like this. He gives a $80,000 watch for some strawberries.
And this also shows that he's famous, like, everybody knows him.
They like him. People still like the guy.
And now he's ready to make amends. He goes to...
He goes there.
There was a lot of discussion about
whether he should be going there to get the model,
or he discovers the model.
And Robert and I felt very strongly it was emotionally correct
to have it be that you go there because he wants to be with Pepper.
He wants to talk to her. He's discovered something.
He doesn't think he knows anything about how to solve his problem,
but he knows what's important to him.
And there's O'Reilly going off on GWyneth.
Life is not easy for Pepper Potts right now.
He really made things uncomfortable.
There's all his stuff, if you remember, from the first movie.
This was his office.
So we justify that the model was there, he sees it.
It's not interesting, not a big deal.
But we felt that if he went there just to get the model,
instead of apologising to Pepper, that it would make him selfish.
And this way, we felt it was more sincere.
He's really trying.
Now, see this thing on the table?
I showed up to the set,
and Lauri Gaffin, our set decorator, was like, "Put that on the table."
I'm like, "That's the most distracting..."
The idea of set dressing is that you don't notice it that much.
She was like, "Look, if you wanna use it, use it.
"You don't, you can totally remove it. It's unique and hi-tech."
And I was like, "No, let's put it right in his close-up."
And so we turned it into a whole bit.
So, it was a gift.
She put the right thing in the set.
But any time any department makes a choice,
sometimes you gotta be able to tell...
As a director, you're kind of not doing anything,
but in a sense, you're sort of watching everything and making sure.
Seeing if something's distracting, or if it's helping.
And you gotta just be there. It's just a matter of balancing things out.
That little ball on her desk was actually a big, important part of the movie
at one point. It was a tech-ball that could change shape and do things.
That was supposed to set up the suitcase suit.
And all we see in the movie now is just that little moment,
looks like he's playing with something on her desk.
But that was a tech-ball. It was a big plot point for a while.
I like this, they get this good. "I need you to leave."
And he's hurt. But he's made amends, you know. He tried.
And you can't always get it accepted,
but at least he's made that movement towards growth.
And that's all part of that sort of subtle,
1 2-step-type thing.
It's like, you humble yourself, you come to terms with your feelings,
you sincerely try and...
He's trying.
And you see he's just up against it.
Everybody's done with him. Well, Pepper certainly is.
Natalie here has slid right in.
Now he's just the odd man out in every way.
And we added...
I want to stick in her speaking Latin, too,
because GWyneth told me you can't speak Latin,
so maybe she really does speak Latin, I don't know.
"You can speak Latin?" We threw this in. This is all on the day.
So now we were saying, "What should she say in Latin?"
So, we're looking through all different things you could say in Latin.
That's not what she said in Latin. What she really says in Latin is,
"Not everything is as it seems," I believe,
which I thought worked well for Black Widow.
Even the sculpture's giving him a hard time.
Nothing's going his way.
But he's in a better head space, if you notice,
'cause of the thing with the dad.
I love what he does here with these strawberries.
I think the strawberries were Robert's idea.
"I should get her strawberries."
"Why are you getting her strawberries?"
"Like, on the street, I should get her strawberries."
And it turned into a great bit.
So for those of you who want to be directors, keep an open mind.
"The key to the future is here."
So, something's popping for him. He doesn't know what it is.
But the dad said that in the video.
In the video? Look at me. In the film.
He's so good here, Robert. Look at him realise it.
Look at that.
And here Lou D'Esposito,
formerly worked with me on Zathura,
shot some stuff for me there, on Iron Man,
now a big part of the Marvel family.
He shot that, went out there with a unit.
Did a great job getting the laugh out of how we get that thing back to the house.
And so we use this holographic stuff to...
You know, we found that
all the stuff we did on the screens last time,
other movies were doing in the two years.
And some did a really good job with it,
but a lot of the stuff we did with the HUD and all that's been done by other people,
so we wanted to do some new stuff. So we're saying it's all holographic,
and we changed the HUDs up, too, on the inside.
So, here we go. There's the map of the world's fair.
Boy, this was a conundrum between our post-vis team from...
Let's see. Prologue did this stuff, but The Third Floor did the post-vis.
And between the two different groups, we were able to figure out
how to make this dialogue actually make sense visually.
Yes, Third Floor did a fine job for us.
And then the HUDs were done
by the people who did our pre-vis last time, PLF.
And they did our HUDs. They did a very good job.
So, here we go. He's trying to figure it out.
We wanted to make it that there was a map to a molecule,
to a new element. Not a molecule, an element.
So, it's kind of fudgy. We fudged things a bit.
But it looks visually good, and Robert sells it.
And we get the idea that he has to form a new element.
And it kind of uses movie/comic book-y technology.
None of this is really real.
I learned about the underlying real technology.
It's just not that cinematic.
I like that he thanks his dad there.
I like how, if you look, you'll see this interactive light on his fingers.
That's because
we used a real light bulb in there that we removed.
For those of you who care about that kind of thing.
I do.
And we're back in hardware mode, and here he is, like in the first movie.
You're not exactly sure what he's doing.
We could have explained it more, but thought it would be fun
if you're sort of keeping up with him and he's just wrecking his house.
I love wrecking sets.
'Cause you gotta wreck them anyway, when you tear them down.
Everybody's like, "Oh, my God, you're..."
Yeah, when they tear these things down, they wreck them.
May as well film it.
That's going through his wall.
And so
he's setting up his prismatic accelerator, that's what we call it.
And in comes Coulson.
And here's our shield.
So, this shield
popped up in the first movie.
ILM, as a sort ofjoke, put it in the background of his workshop.
That would never exist in real life.
So many people noticed it. I said, "Yeah, put it in, why not?"
You could barely see it.
So many people noticed it, it became like...
Part of this whole thing.
So, we actually built one. We had our prop guy build one.
And we said that he should pull it out of the storage container.
And we said, "How can we have fun with this moment?"
Everybody's expecting us to deal with it,
so he uses it just to level out his thing.
But really what's interesting is that what he's talking about is the Easter egg.
Because we're about to show the hammer,
Thor's hammer, at the end of the film.
So we're getting the audience to lean forward,
thinking about the wrong thing,
and then we sort of take the piss out of that.
And then they laugh, but they don't realise
that we really are laying in some Avengers...
Laying some pipe for the next movie.
And Robert did lots of working out.
And here it is,
all his hard work.
As he likes to say, he peaks for about three hours,
and then it all disappears.
And here's one of the moments
where he was feeling good about all the work he'd done, he looks good.
And here it is. So, in our movie,
if you take one piece of metal and you shoot a laser at it,
where the light's been accelerated, whatever that means.
I thought the speed of light was a constant.
But we're apparently accelerating the light here
and making the laser shoot the thing,
and whatever it is, it turns into another element.
All that's important...
Don't worry your pretty little heads about this.
Just know that he made another element based on his dad's thing,
and he did it 'cause he's Tony Stark
and that's his superpower. He's a genius.
What is nice is the way that we shot...
I've learned more about visual effects,
and by having this interactive source actually there,
that was LEDs that we then replaced with the visual effect,
it gives it the nice light on his eyes and face.
And then that prop we outdid with a piece of digital work.
I think that was Fuel did that one.
And there it is, that's digital. It's nice. Looks good.
Looks good. It was much flatter.
There's Ivan and his bird,
getting a call from Shandling and Rockwell.
That was one of the last days of shooting.
Why they are playing golf in Manhattan Beach,
when Stern lives in...
When Stern is in...
He's from, I think, Pennsylvania and lives in Washington.
And Hammer is, I think, probably in Queens.
I guess he's not. I guess he's in California, is what it is.
Which is why it takes long enough. And there it is.
Hopefully, the movie's not out yet, hasn't been reviewed yet,
I don't know if people like this movie or not.
Hopefully, by the time you've seen this, people will have seen that
and accepted the fact that just by showing that shot,
we will believe that Ivan has built a Whiplash suit
at the end of the movie.
There's the bird man.
Take his stuff.
I like his performance here.
He finally gets to go off. "I'm onto you. Something's wrong with you."
He takes the bird away.
I like this.
There's a puppet of a bird. Not even, I think it's just a doll.
What Skywalker Sound will do to help make the visuals more convincing.
I like him going off on him, here.
He's just fed up 'cause he's just been...
Hammer's a guy that will kiss your ass if he needs something,
and then when he doesn't need you, he's just gonna go off on you.
I hate people like that. I hate people like that.
And there we are, we see to the left is my stunt double, Dave Rowden.
I've worked with him for...
I think I met him on Tracey Tak\es On..., Tracey Ullman's show.
I've worked with him for many, many movies.
Hopefully, this scene is not just about
Hammer's creating more conflict between the two of them
and helping build the stakes, but also it'll help...
It'll help on the day...
It'll help us understand
how Ivan figures out what to do and what his plan is.
You get away with a lot being a genius.
And we showed that he could do cool stuff
with computers and with drones and with the suit.
And then we say he's kind of like a dark Tony Stark.
So, we get away with a lot.
But you gotta lay just enough breadcrumbs to be convincing,
but not enough that you get bogged down in it.
You just want people to be able to enjoy it
and believe that it's emotionally correct.
There's the bodies hanging in the background.
There we go, Oracle grid, we got it in.
The good guys got the Oracle computer, so it's okay.
And Oracle was a very good partner.
I met Larry Ellison. He was a very, very nice guy.
He sat around all day just to be a cameo in that one scene at the beginning.
And then we named the Oracle Pavilion after him.
I thought it was cool 'cause he likes Zen architecture,
so I thought a Japanese garden, that should be the Oracle Pavilion
'cause we wanted to set something in a Japanese-inspired backdrop.
That was part of what Genndy and I were talking about.
Here we go, we see that the rash retracts
now that the new thing is in.
And here, momentum is our friend, I hope.
We never actually show him building the Mark VI.
You see in the additional scenes,
we actually did.
And that's a cool shot of our set, matched with some digital stuff.
Digital extension.
And this is...
Here we go, we got Justin dancing to Average White Band,
which is a song from Swingers.
He wanted to do this to warm up and have fun.
He said, "Can you play some music?"
And they would play different music every time.
And he loves to do his little James Brown dance.
He's a really good dancer.
But he would do it more to get in the character,
and the editors actually kept cutting it in,
and finally I said, "No, we gotta remove that."
Finally, we removed it from the cut,
and the producer's like, "Why'd you take that out? It was great."
And I was like, "It was kind of fun, wasn't it?"
And it's in character, so we...
It's one of those things where you just get used to it,
and you miss it when it's not there.
And I think 'cause it's him, we get away with it.
Maybe not, but I like it. It makes me smile every time.
And it just makes him more of a knob.
'Cause that's kind of what you wanna sell here,
that, again, he's Daffy Duck compared to Tony Stark's Bugs Bunny.
Nobody claps with him.
And then, ironically, all these awesome drones come out of the ground.
And they come out of the ground,
and we had one for each branch of the service.
This is one of the shots we were working on very early, with ILM,
because it wasn't a lot of animation, but we had to finalise the designs,
and I think they got the integration very well here.
So there's our army drones with the guns,
I think it's called a Bushmaster, the gun on the back.
I was doing research on real stuff to inspire what was there.
The colour scheme.
And then the Navy, with those Polaris missile tubes
on the shoulders.
I love the fonts, the colours.
And here's the Air Force. It's great. The DOD helped out.
We had all these different themes and we couldn't get the rights to them,
and the DOD helped us out and made some calls,
and it all came together at the last minute.
I think the Marines look super cool with their tiger-stripe pattern.
And there they are. I like those a lot.
I think it's fun. It's cool. It'd be cool if we really had those.
Maybe someday.
It was tough, also, to make the drone heads
look like there's not people in them,
but also not look like the drones from Star Wars.
But I think they came a long way.
Ryan Meinerding did a lot of work on that, on those suits.
Those are all digital. We don't have any real ones of those,
other than the neutral one that was built for the scene with Ivan in SpaceX.
These are great shots. ILM did a great job on this.
Really looks like there's somebody in there.
That's totally digital, right there.
We actually shot a version with the suit, the Legacy suit, that was good,
but the shot that's in the movie is actually digital,
of him coming out. It just looks super cool.
I'm really happy with War Machine's design.
I got the big bust poster in my house.
And there we are, Flushing Meadow Park.
Here he comes. And I just like the idea of...
He shows up and lands, to save the day, and the crowd goes crazy.
They love him. They still love him, more than all the stuff that he does.
And this is a hard moment to make real,
and make you understand and get it right.
How would each person really react in this moment? How do you sell it?
There's a lot of information being transferred around.
I think the fact that ILM did a really nice job integrating everything,
PLF did a good job with the HUDs, performances are good.
We kept rewriting and changing,
and re-shooting the HUDs about three times to get it right.
And I think this communicated the information properly.
That the suit's being taken over,
and then you have to show that he's taking it over,
and things coming down.
You want to make sure everything's clear,
but you also want to make it move fast
and not feel like you're sitting around, waiting too much.
So, I think everybody worked well together.
I think once you buy what's going on here,
then you can enjoy the rest of the sequence.
Good job there. Cool.
A lot of these shots, it took a long time for them to be right,
but they finally came together.
That's part of the process with this stuff. It often doesn't look real till the very end.
See, look at that. I love all those flares and the sounds.
That really goes a long way. Not seeing everything is usually better,
and if you see, we play with darkness a lot here.
And a lot of my notes were, "Just make it look... It looks too good.
"Blur it. Make the lights bloom more.
"Let's look at some real photography." I love this shot.
It's hard to get your bearings, but it's fun, that one over his shoulder.
Getting the twinkle of the lights right.
You sort of do the best you can with all this stuff.
The score, actually, I love, right here, too.
Debney's score with the horns, as they're coming off the stage.
Marc Chu doing his animation here. Very good animator.
First time working with him as the main guy.
He'd worked on the other film.
But this time he was the main guy, working with Ben Snow.
And there's Jack. Look, he got a whole part out of it.
He was a food stylist, guys.
See? If you do a good job, you know...
'Cause dreams come true.
He was an actor before, too. It's not like I created him.
He actually had done acting before.
He was almost on, I think, Top Chef. He's a really cool dude.
And he and Rockwell had a great time together,
bouncing off each other, so I just kept adding him to scenes.
There's Pepper taking control, showing her a little strong in this thing.
Here we go. You see the Hammer Pavilion in the background.
Part of that's our real set.
There we go. And now it's giant killer robots.
Can't mess with the classics. Can't go wrong.
And there we go. I like how the graphic looks like M iss ile Command,
for those of you over 40.
And now we set off on our thing. So a lot of people are like,
"You got a lot of villains," but part of it was not to...
I'm not a fan of making things overwrought.
So, the trick was to weave everything so it wasn't in multiple storylines.
There's only two real storylines going.
It's the Ivan story with Hammer, and then there's the Tony story.
I think when you get too many villains, too many threads are going.
And so we kept Black Widow with Tony and Nick Fury in that vein,
and then you had the Ivan stuff.
And the Ivan stuff connected with Hammer.
So it all, hopefully, isn't too convoluted here.
'Cause that is what happens with sequels,
and we wanted to avoid that,
but yet we wanted to build to The Avengers.
So, that's what we're doing here.
And there we go.
And there he is, and...
And here's Iron Man being a hero.
"Nice work, kid."
We were gonna have him say, "Stay in school," but that was too RoboCop.
Cool. That's actually down at the Nokia centre in LA.
We changed the signage.
Here we go.
There's my big comedy moment.
And that's actual plates shot in Queens there,
right by where I used to live and grew up.
So, it's really fun for me to actually be... I didn't shoot these plates.
Here's a Genndy Tartakovsky moment we kept in there.
That's from his storyboards.
It's really fun for me 'cause they shot the plates
right across the street from my house I grew up at.
So, seeing all this stuff
and putting all the digital work into where I grew up,
it's kind of odd. But really fun. Really fun.
One of the perks.
It's when you really appreciate what you're able to do
and what you have, and all these thousands of people
essentially helping to support a vision and make a great film.
But a lot of the decisions... As a director,
there's a lot of arbitrary jump balls here.
And to be able to shoot that at the Flushing Meadow Park
across the street from where I grew up,
and bring that park back to life, the park that I looked at and...
It was closed after I was...
I was born in '66, and it was open in '64.
I never got to see the park, just heard the stories.
And to have ILM basically rebuild it and modernise it digitally
was a big thrill.
And speaking of big thrills,
here is Scarlett Johansson
after months of training doing wire-work, flips, kicks, martial arts.
Look at that.
Look at that pose. We worked on that pose for a while.
Lucha libre,
which looks a lot better with her doing it than an overweight wrestler.
A lot of different mixed martial arts in there.
She had a wonderful double named Heidi.
Did a great job helping her learn how to do it
and doubling her for some of the more difficult moments.
But I was amazed at how much we actually used Scarlett.
I never expected that.
And there's really me doing it, too. Look at that. I'm pretty good.
I was Marciano.
And she had the attitude down. And the hair, I love that hair.
I guess her superpower is that her hair falls perfectly out of a bun.
And the look.
That's a lucha libre move.
Good editing. Rick did a lot of this. It's good stuff. Really cool stuff.
And a lot of this stuff moved around and wasn't together.
And there was a thing where we strung a guy up,
and I think we found a great... I love that last little moment.
Lot of 'tude.
And there's me fighting... American Glad iator, remember Toa?
He's The Rock's double and cousin. Good guy.
I never really could kick his ass, just for the record.
That would never happen.
That's the most unbelievable moment in the whole movie.
But I guess Happy Hogan was a boxer,
for those of you who read the comic books. I beat one guy.
That was also a Genndy moment, by the way.
And this is, too. Genndy Tartakovsky came up with a lot of good bits.
Him and Bryan. A lot of good bits.
And we expanded on them and changed them,
and ILM worked on them and pre-vis and our storyboard artists,
but a lot of the inception of these ideas came from ideas that those guys had.
They were very, very...
I learned a tremendous amount from them.
This actually was just an interstitial part of the battle
that turned into the ending, the culmination.
And this whole bit of her walking up,
this was part of the additional photography.
You could tell because I weigh more.
And she's actually now being used to reboot Rhodey,
which, in the original conception,
Tony rebooted Rhodey with a long spike,
like R2-D2 has.
Or like, I think, in RoboCop.
And then it was left to us as a dangling participle there
that didn't really have anything to do with anything.
And so this is when additional photography is wonderful.
In the few days we shot, we were able to make sense of this whole thing
and make her relevant.
As opposed to just, she got in there and Ivan's gone.
So, this environment, the foreground is built at Sony,
and everything beyond a certain distance was digital.
I like this little moment here.
This is what we call "the Skype moment."
This was part of our additional photography, as well.
This was...
This wasn't even a scripted moment.
I just shot plates when we were doing the shoot with Scarlett,
who flew in from doing a Broadway play,
wiping of the screens,
and then I set the two of them up next to each other
on little sets, these little fake-y sets,
so that they could hear each other and bounce off each other.
And I would feed them lines and things like that,
and we took some passes at it.
"Hammeroid" was something that...
Dan Lebental would jokingly call the Hammer drones "the Hammeroids."
And so I put that in there, and it turned into a nice little bit
that actually helps a lot, story-wise.
And if you can get the audience laughing while you're doing the exposition,
it makes the medicine go down a lot easier,
and it also helps the plausibility.
If you get people laughing, they tend to be more accepting.
Here, I love this scene. This was out for a while
'cause it felt like it was a momentum stopper.
I love it. It's one of my favourite scenes.
And I'm not a fan of looping or ADR.
And so we asked Laura and the Skywalker team
to do a lot of filtering, and they would've preferred to loop this,
but you lose the chemistry. I would rather have...
And there is water flowing,
and they are in suits, so I believe that the sound could be a little bit off.
But I just liked this performance of this take so much,
and I just love them in those suits.
They performed this basically in tracking suits and pyjamas.
So, it never was funny until they finally did the final rendering.
So, I had to fight very hard to keep this scene in
as I was getting notes from above, saying, "Hey, get it out.
"Take 1 0 minutes out. Get this out. Get this out."
And I was like, "This scene is gonna be good."
And now we're all happy with it.
But sometimes it takes faith, a bit of faith.
This is a Genndy moment, here, with the taiko drums
and them arriving and being around, and this big fight,
'cause I wanted it to be just a bloodbath.
A PG bloodbath, so it's an oil-bath.
And it's fantastic.
My favourite moments of the film right here.
I could watch this forever.
I love it. I love that, like the tank missiles.
They're talking to each other. Look at this, man.
And so much of it was getting a different fighting style.
War Machine was a little too martial arts-y,
and we wanted to make them different.
So War Machine's clunky, like a biker kicking somebody.
And look at this little moment. This was in the middle of the fight.
We ended up making it at the end of the fight.
It was like, "Well, why didn't you use it before?"
So I said, "Well, we should say that."
The most obvious thing.
When Genndy was pitching that,
the thing of a laser that would cut people in half...
And that was just part of the battle. It was just one of many weapons.
'Cause Genndy's very much into... If you look at Samura i Jack,
it's just, like, building on top of the ridiculous.
It's taking those images to the extreme.
And it's really tough, in a movie, to do that
because you start crossing lines that you can't.
You gotta live with this for not just the rest of the movie,
but for sequels. You gotta keep balance.
And as I was bringing those pictures to say, "Hey, this is a cool moment."
The DP and the stunt guy and everybody was like,
"Why wouldn't he have used it... It doesn't make sense."
It was like, "Well..."
And again, a good laugh will set you free often.
So... This is funny.
Like, "Lead with that next time. Why are you making me fight?"
Sometimes you gotta fly right at the problem.
Because the image was so strong, and I'm glad we were able to use it.
It's a great image.
Look who's here.
There he is.
"Good to be back."
Which is what Tony says at the beginning.
So, here's the Ex-Wife we set up.
I've not seen this with an audience yet. I hope it gets a laugh.
I don't know.
So we set up the Ex-Wife so much, and then it does this.
And there's the little fart noise in the water.
With apologies
to people with a more sophisticated sense of humour than me.
There's the shoulder missiles he uses against the bad guys in Gulmira
in the last film.
This is great. Ben Snow pitched an environment
that it got really smoky and dark in here,
and you just saw spot fires and smoke, and that would help change the look.
So, the look of it changes because of that big fight that happened.
There really was a lot of smoke when we were blowing those charges up.
I mean, there's a lot of real explosions in that last thing
that helps sell that little back-to-back fight.
And so I think they did a really nice job here with the Whiplash suit,
and playing with the light and the darkness,
and the chaos of it, and integrating him into the suit.
This was a late-breaking idea,
so there wasn't as much time on this as the other stuff.
I really trusted them to hold the standard as high as the other stuff,
and I think that this CG work is very, very strong.
A lot of it was helped by Steve Scott, our colour timer,
did a great job here, as well.
And then, of course, our performers with the voices
helping to sell the whole thing.
And then here we call back the moment from the house fight,
and hopefully it doesn't feel arbitrary.
It feels well set up. That's the trick.
'Cause none of it's real, but you just want it to be plausible,
and part of that is how you establish the reality.
There was a whole little dialogue scene here of them coming together.
It just felt a little bit false.
You don't want to get too comic book movie-ish.
Don't take that the wrong way.
But a lot of the time, stuff you say in comic books,
when you say it in a movie, doesn't look...
It isn't convincing.
So we just had him say, "You lose," like he did on the track.
Here's our little homage to Predator.
That's the polite way of saying that.
And there he's flying, trying to get his girl,
past the Kodak... There.
Here it is. Boom. He grabs her.
Boom, boom, boom.
And now we needed a place...
The idea, at first, was that they were gonna
land on one of those observation decks,
but it was too close, we needed a building.
So I said, "Hey, I used to live across the street from there.
"Get up to the roof."
I lived on the 1 2th floor. It's a 1 5-storey building.
So, this was essentially the view that I had my whole childhood.
That's what I grew up looking at.
And here they are.
I like what ILM did with the suit.
That's a digital suit. Completely digital suit there.
This was the last day of photography.
And we finally get the kiss for real.
Not like the fake kiss in the first trailer, that we cut out,
but everybody thought was in.
And I like how they're going at it, getting mad at each other.
And she quits for all the right reasons.
And he apologises and says, "Hey, thank you."
And he finally...
He grew up a little bit in this movie. I like it.
And here, look how they play the chemistry.
They have such good chemistry together, these two.
I love that kiss. I love the music Debney's playing here.
It's like Shrek\. I think. I don't know. I'm not a musician.
It sounds like... In a good way.
I like that music.
"It's not weird. It's not weird."
And we pull the rug good, 'cause you can't...
There's the Empire State Building back there.
I like...
Hopefully, in future movies,
this is the vibe between Tony and Rhodey.
I like this relationship, and Cheadle's great at this stuff.
His rhythm is very entertaining to me,
his cadence, and he's owning it.
Man, I like it. It's like, "Yeah, we got War Machine now."
And there's my view from my room.
And he doesn't let her resign. That's ADR. That wasn't in there.
And here is our... Look what's on there! It's The Hulk.
Yeah, that's from The Hulk,
which means this movie took place before The Hulk.
I said to Kevin Feige, when I saw The Hulk,
I said, "What the... How am I gonna...
"You can't have Tony Stark walking at the end of the thing.
"What? Do I ignore..." He says,
"No, it doesn't have to happen in the right time frame.
"Comic books jump around." I said, "Oh, okay."
So, we put it at the end.
And if you look, you'll see there's a crater on the other monitor.
That's the Thor thing.
That's where the hammer was recovered.
There's your S.H.I.E.L.D. logo. I mean, this is just geek heaven, here.
And if you think anything on those monitors
is not something we didn't talk about for hours, you're crazy.
Every one of them.
This is Marvel. One movie goes down, all of them go down.
It's a lot of responsibility.
And if you look at that one, you see there's a map up there?
So if you look at those maps, each one of those locations
corresponds to something in the Marvel Universe.
I don't know if I'm supposed to say that.
As long as I don't tweet it. I guess I could say it here.
I can't tweet it.
There. If you look at each one, and I know what they mean,
but I'm not gonna say what each one of them are.
But I will say that one of them relates to...
I think two of them relate to Captain America,
one of them relates to Thor.
The one in Africa, I think, relates to Black Panther.
Oh, here we go. And there's the funny...
"Please, Garry, come back for one more scene."
He did.
Good pay-off. This was additional photography.
It's good stuff.
And, oh, my God, to get to use AC/DC.
So many movies I've wanted to use AC/DC.
I've been in movies where they wanted to use AC/DC.
You can't.
I met with Angus Young and his brother
and their managers and Sony Music, and they liked how we used...
They liked how we used Back\ in Black\ in the first one.
They didn't even know that they had granted the rights.
The band didn't, but their management did.
And they went to see the movie, and saw Back\ in Black\ and they liked it
at the beginning of lron Man 1. And so they were into it.
I met them. I love them.
I've seen them since I was in high school.
For Those About to Rock Tour.
And there's our funny ending. We had three endings. Always hard.
I'd done it before in Elf.
I said, "Trust me, we'll make it work." I think we did.
And now I will talk about other things.
Because I like, when I'm watching a commentary,
when they keep talking over this part.
So I'll try to talk about things that come up from this,
from what we're looking at. So, that's the AC/DC story.
I went to see them. There's Adam Goldstein's credit.
And you'll see at the end, the film is in memory of him.
It'll say, "In memory ofAdam Goldstein."
He was a special, special guy, and very proud to have him in the film.
And very beloved by all the people who knew him,
and a good dude.
And hopefully his family likes this, and his friends, what we did here.
There you go. We got Jack Kirby, Don Heck, Stan Lee.
They get their credits. There's Adi Granov.
He did some designs for us on this one here.
And Peter Mavromates deserves a medal
for all the logistical issues we had on this in post-production.
He did a great job.
There's Genndy and Bryan. Great, great...
I cannot overstate their contribution and how creatively great they are.
And I can't wait for Genndy to be directing a feature.
I know he does mostly animated stuff in television.
But he's got quite an eye, and he's very creative.
He's a fountainhead of ideas. He's great.
And so part of the... We got the scene at the end of the credits here.
We got the Thorscene. I don't think I'm ruining anything.
You've all seen the movie if you're watching this.
If you're watching this for the first time,
watch it without the commentary, please.
And then come back and watch this.
A lot of these credits are, like, four-abreast or double credits.
We had six minutes of credits. It was a lot to make people sit through.
We were pulling our hair out.
And you're realising as you're watching this,
the economy got...
The time this film was done
was sort of the time that the economy took a nasty hit,
with the banks failing and bailouts.
And the business model shifted,
and piracy is really hurting the industry so much,
'cause DVD money was relied upon to make movies like this.
And that's disappearing quickly.
Thank you for buying this, if in fact you did.
If you pirated it, you should be ashamed of yourself.
But if you bought this, and you're supporting some...
And I think that's all gonna change anyway. I don't know that DVDs...
DVDs are gonna be for collectors and film enthusiasts,
but the mainstream will download films in the future.
Exclusively. Like music.
And so you look at these credits going for six minutes,
and it's like, "Oh, my God, how are we gonna make them shorter?
"How can we make it go faster?"
You realise all these people worked... I mean, these people...
For two years, these people worked.
It's a lot of...
And it makes me very proud, this part of it.
It's like all these people who are all very capable and hardworking,
a lot of these people, especially as we get into the digital effects stuff,
those people did not sleep for a long time.
And then the crews worked very hard.
There's a lot of pride in the film industry.
Everybody loves what they do, and they struggle hard to work in it.
And it's nice to have all these people working,
and it's paying a lot of good, talented people and creating good jobs,
and that's something that, sometimes, I think, gets lost.
You don't think about it, but you look at these credits,
it's like the ridiculousness of how long it is,
now I actually take pride in it. So, sorry if you have to sit through it
to get to your scene at the end and you did in the theatre,
but these people all worked very hard,
especially this whole crowd here, this vis effects crowd.
Some of those people, it's like working in salt mines, man.
It's a lot of thankless jobs,
a lot of thankless gigs in that end of the credit roll.
We just passed by Make Way For Tomorrow Today.
That's Dick Sherman.
He's the guy who wrote all the music for the Disney pavilions,
and Kevin Feige put me in contact with him.
He had contacted him to write a theme for not just this film,
because the Stark Expo was gonna be something in history
and that goes back to Capta in America.
So, we wanted to come up with something that felt authentic.
I think the lyrics are great.
Hewrote lt's a Small World.
He wrote all the lyrics to a lot of the movies you saw,
Mary Poppins and stuff, and he's a great dude.
And I think there's a featurette about him.
But he added so much authenticity to the whole Disney spirit of the...
And this is all before Disney bought the movie, by the way.
I didn't even know Disney was looking into the company.
This all came long before Disney.
And so it all sort of felt really cool that it all came together in that way.
There's Tom Morello.
Tom Morello, guitar player, Rage Against the Machine,
Audioslave.
Iron Man fan from way back.
Played on the first soundtrack, and here he is.
This part of the music is from Black Widow fighting in the hallways.
Once you peel the sound effects back, you hear this.
There it goes, "In memory of Adam Goldstein" with the little "AM."
I like the little AC/DC thing in there, lightning bolt.
And here we go.
This is called "the graveyard."
They call this part "the graveyard," for you film fans.
When you get up to this part where they have all the logos,
it means the credits are almost done.
The cemetery.
And there it is. That's the insider's...
Now here we go into the bonus scene
that was not included in the pre-release film
as to take the fanboys off the scent for yet another week,
'cause it's so hard to keep a secret.
This was actually shot... This was from the set of Thor.
This is from Thor. Am I supposed to say that? I think I can.
Not this shot, but there you go, Land of Enchantment, New Mexico.
This is actually part... You're actually not just seeing a teaser,
you are seeing part of the next movie.
And it is shot... Because they're artists over there on Thor.
This is shot with anamorphic lenses.
And there is where the hammer lands in the desert.
There's Coulson.
And there it is, baby.
All right? What more do you want?
What more do you want?
You got your money's worth. And goodbye.