Producer Kevin Feige spoke with MTV about character development and The Mandarin in the Iron Man 3 movie, and it all sounds very, very good.  Either that, or at least very, very confident.

“So much of the journey of ‘Iron Man 3’ is informed by Tony’s experiences in ‘The Avengers.’ It’s almost like post-traumatic stress: he really has retreated after the events of ‘The Avengers’ into his workshop, where he’s building advanced versions of his suits. He has [designed] a version of the suit that can latch onto him in individual pieces … anytime, anywhere. As he starts to realize, it’s basically because he doesn’t want to be out of the suit: he’s seen a lot of things in ‘Avengers’ and has encountered a lot of powerful people, much more powerful than he is.

“It brings us back to the Tony we met in the first part of ‘Iron Man’ where he’s removed from that convoy and brought to the cave with nothing but a box of scraps. It’s fun for all of us to watch Tony try to figure out how to get out of that scenario. Much of the movie is Tony in the middle of the country without his tools and a fairly broken suit to help him. But that’s his superpower: he wasn’t born on Asgard, he wasn’t hit by gamma rays, and he doesn’t have the super soldier serum. His power is his brain. It’s fun to put Tony Stark in a corner with nothing and see how he can get out of it.”

In the paragraph below, he spoke of Ben Kingsley‘s character, The Mandarin, and the type of bad guy he plays.

“We felt there was leeway to explore the Mandarin in a way that hasn’t been explored before. We found we couldn’t point to any sort of definitive Mandarin story in the comics— but if you print this, I’m sure a million fans will point to a specific story — so as we’ve done with many of the films, we did an amalgamation. The Mandarin is relentless: he’s a non-stop threat, and you’ve seen that in the first teaser trailer when Tony Stark’s house tumbles into the sea. He doesn’t mess around, this guy.”

And finally, he spoke highly about the director, Shane Black, and his approach to the film.

“No one has been shy — myself, Robert and [original ‘Iron Man’ director Jon] Favreau — about how Shane worked in the shadows of the first ‘Iron Man’ film, helping with certain scenes and helping with tonal things,This film, it’s much less the culmination of the previous ‘Iron Man’ movies in part three: this is ‘Iron Man: A Shane Black Film.’ That, to me, is by far the most unique thing about this movie.”

via GeekTyrant.