[Movies] Shane Black And Kevin Feige Talk Iron Man 3 Posted by Joseph Lee on 03.05.2013
It's coming in May...
Coming Soon spoke with both Kevin Feige and Iron Man 3 director Shane Black about the film, which will be released on May 3. Here are highlights:
Feige on how the story came together: "Well, we first started meeting with Shane in spring of 2011 maybe because you came in on the mix day, I think we were mixing "Captain America" at Fox and we were having meetings with him there. We knew a few of the elements that have remained. We had pillars of we want it to be a Tony Stark centric story, we want to blow up his life and see how he deals with a nemesis without his suits working - get him back metaphorically to the cave with box of scraps, like the first movie. That has remained and carried on through, and it was one of the reasons we connected with Shane. Because if we wanted to do a big "It connects to 'The Avengers' and then Nick Fury comes in and stuff," I don't think Shane would have been interested in that and I don't I don't think he would have been the right guy for it. But to take a Tony Stark journey and explore his character deeper than we had since the first act of the first film, he was the man. It evolved over the next eight or nine months after that into basically what it is now."
Black on the Mandarin: "From the very beginning we were all about that, yeah. The idea of just a real world interpretation of this guy who, I hate to break it to you, but he's not from space in this. The rings are rings. They're showmanship. They're accoutrements. They're paraphernalia of warfare that he sort of drapes himself with. He studies Sun Tzu. He studies insurgency tactics. He surrounds himself with dragons and symbols of warlords and Chinese iconography because he wants to represent this sort of prototypical terrorist. We use as the example Colonel Kurtz from "Apocalypse Now," this guys who may have been an American, may have been a British National, someone who is out there doing field work, supervising atrocities for the intelligence community who went nuts in the field and became this sort of devotee of war tactics, and now has surrounded himself with a group of people over which he presides, and the only thing that unifies them is this hatred of America. So he's the ultimate terrorist, but he's also savvy. He's been in the intelligence world. He knows how to use the media. And taking it to a real world level like that was a lot fun for us."
Feige on Iron Man's new suits: "Yeah, you know we've seen, through Avengers, seven or eight suits and we wanted to progress that in this one. It's part of, again, the effect "The Avengers" had on him is that he's tinkering even more than he did before and he's building much more than he ever did before. The Iron Patriot is also kind of a response to Avengers. It's a government rebrand of War Machine, frankly because the US government felt that they were slightly embarrassed by the events of Avengers. These crazy heroes known as The Avengers were the ones that saved the day, saved New York City, saved United States; not the government. The government felt they needed a hero of their own, they have a military officer that has one of these suits, and they paint it red, white, and blue. They pose it next to the president and Tony sort of rolls his eyes you saw a little bit of that today. They want a hero of their own. And Tony's like, "What do you mean, I'm a hero?" And they say "Well you've been spending a lot of time in your work shop. We want somebody we can rely on." So that's sort of how the Iron Patriot came about. And, again, it's a thing from the comics, we just thought the Iron Patriot suit looked equal parts cool and slightly goofy in the comics, it's not Norman Osborn or any of that stuff obviously, but it gave us a place to go with Rhodey. We wanted to take Rhodey and his sort of split loyalties between his friend and his duty and keep carrying that storyline through."
