Superhero Wednesday – Marvel: IRON MAN 3 – *Spoilers*

Rebecca Hall Talks Iron Man 3

At the Broadcasting Press Guild Television and Radio Awards, Rebecca Hall not only got to talk about her co-star in Parade’s End, Benedict Cumberbatch, but she also spoke briefly about working on Iron Man 3 as well as working with Ben Kingsley, who plays the Mandarin in the film. The Iron Man 3 details starts at the 1:05 mark.

TCL Exclusive Trailer

Potential spot spoiler information at ScreenRant.

Ben Kingsley on The Mandarin

“I didn’t have any template to copy. I’m undereducated as far as Marvel comics are concerned, and that can be a good thing, like coming to a Shakespeare play fresh rather than having done it 20 times… [It’s a] human portrayal of evil, on a grand scale. [Mandarin] released demonic layers in me…I did go a little crazy!”

And apparently, he may be doing some cosplay at some of the premieres:

“Ben’s designer will travel to the state soon to narrow down on the details of the dress, namely the fabric, colors and designs. Ben wants to wear something different for all the premiers and since he had a connect with Gujarat, he decided to go for a Gujarati dress.”

via TheMarySue.

IMAX 3D Poster

via Collider.

Kids Choice Awards Teaser Trailer

via Blastr.

Okay, there are potential spoilers if you continue reading. You have been warned.

TV Spot – “Save”

Gwyneth Paltrow then talks about wearing the suit:

I didn’t mind wearing the suit at all. I thought it was light and perfectly comfortable and my children thought I was extremely cool. They were here on a day where I was in it, so they were trying it on and when my son saw me in the suit, he had the biggest eyes, so it was definitely worth it.

via GeekTyrant.

Kevin Feige Explains A Lot

On Tony Stark:

“We like painting Tony into a corner and taking away all of his toys and all of the immense wealth and assets and leave him with just his mind and see how he can get out of that situation. You’ve seen in the trailers that there’s an attack on Tony’s house. So by the end of the first act of Iron Man 3, his house is gone. His technology is gone. All he has is a barely functioning, prototype suit that, soon after he escapes from the house that’s destroyed, is not functioning at all. So Tony finds himself in the middle of the United States of America, in Rose Hill, Tennessee, completely out of his element. A guy who lives in Malibu and goes to Monaco and gallivants in Manhattan in the middle of Rose Hill, Tennessee, with a suit not working, doing an investigation about the villain known as the Mandarin, to try to figure out where he is. Tony believes there are clues here that are going to lead him to find where the Mandarin is, so he drags the broken suit into a shed that he finds and takes an axe and opens it up. It turns out that he is in the little workshop of this young boy named Harley.

It is a lot of fun to see Tony out of his element, without any of his toys, with just his mind, to see how he can overcome and there are villains that come and attack him in this sequence, with no suit at all to grab. I won’t give away whether he is successful or not, but you can probably guess and it’s that ingenuity that’s fun. How is he going to get out of that cave with a box of scraps again? And that’s something that we really didn’t see in Iron Man 2. We didn’t see it in “The Avengers” either and it is something that is wholly unique to Iron Man 3.”

On writer Drew Pearce:

“Of his own accord he wrote about a 25-page treatment and outline, sort of an essay of ideas, about where he saw the character going. While we didn’t go with everything he had in that initial document, there was so much there and so much passion, that we decided we wanted him to come on board and team him up with the writer/director we were hiring, Shane Black.”

On Tony and Pepper’s Relationship:

“So they are living together and they are in a committed relationship, which again is somewhat unique to the superhero genre. That is one of the reasons we really wanted to do it. But when you live with Tony Stark there are always issues and there are always concerns and one of the concerns at the beginning of this film is the fact that he is not sleeping. He’s spending all of his time tinkering and building suits. And Tony’s been doing nothing but building suits and suits and suits and suits. It’s an obsession and, as Pepper calls it, his distraction. It’s clearly affecting their relationship.”

On Shane Black:

“Then Shane Black had an idea of making him somebody whose background is unknown; we don’t know where he’s from at first, but he seems to be some kind of military officer that has gone off the reservation. He is starting to pull all of this iconography and symbolism from other cultures to his own ends to use them as symbols to pervert the symbol of the United States. He utilizes the moniker of the Mandarin and robes with dragons on them and uses South American sort of guerrilla tactics to create this aura of fear of his terror organization. The Mandarin is sort of a very frightening, modern-day terrorist who has taken terror motifs from all over the world to use to his own ends. It was a very cool and relevant and scary idea. And the best thing about the Mandarin, always in the comics, has been how relentless he was against Tony.

When you see this film, something has happened in act one and the Mandarin is deemed responsible. On national television, Tony says, ‘I’m gonna come after you, Mandarin. I’m gonna find you.’ And within a day, the Mandarin has decimated Tony’s house. Obadiah Stane didn’t do that, Whiplash didn’t do that, Loki didn’t do that. The Mandarin does it in the first act of Iron Man 3. That is very, very serious and very big.”

“It delves into Tony Stark’s character in a great, quirky, unexpected way and one of the signatures of a Shane Black film, which Iron Man 3 has in spades, is that when you think the movie is going to go left, it suddenly goes right. That was fun to do. It’s scary sometimes but fun to do. You can probably only do it on a part three, where the audience has expectations. The audience thinks they know the way you’re going to go with something and then you totally turn it on its head and spin it. It was exciting and it was a way to not fall into the ‘threequelitis’ trap. “

via ScreenRant.

On Rhodes:

“When last we saw Jim Rhodes, played by Don Cheadle, he was flying away from Tony at the end of Iron Man 2 wearing the Mark 2 suit that he had taken from Tony’s house. What we learn in the beginning of Iron Man 3 is that they’ve made an arrangement. Tony has let Rhodey have this suit; he’s using it in conjunction with the US Government. So, at the beginning of Iron Man 3, we see that the President has asked Rhodey as War Machine to get a new paint job and take on the new moniker of the Iron Patriot in order to do American business and be the American hero as opposed to The Avengers or Iron Man himself, who is sort of a separate entity. Rhodey, being a Military man, does step into that, proudly. But he’s still best friends with Tony, so he’s always giving information to Tony behind-the-scenes and I think has been doing that since he got the suit in Iron Man 2.”

On the Iron Patriot:

“A few years ago in publishing, they created a suit called the Iron Patriot, which was an advanced Iron Man suit painted red, white and blue with a star on it. In the comics it’s a different character that wears it and utilizes it. But we really loved that image; we thought it was a striking image. And coming off of The Avengers where you have Captain America and Captain America is such a symbol for The Avengers, we thought it would be fun if the United States wanted to have their own version of that. Of course, Captain America works for the United States, but as he’s more of an Avengers hero the US Government said, ‘We want our own,’ which is why they take War Machine and rebrand him as the Iron Patriot.

Now over the course of the film we learn that there was a nefarious purpose behind that. It’s a great example of how sometimes you take and stay true to a character as pulled from the comics, and sometimes the comics can be the kernel of an idea that you then flesh out and build into something else. One of the best things about being a part of Marvel Studios is that you have the house of ideas; you have the publishing division that comes out with dozens of books a month and we flip through almost every one of those books every month and just pull things and don’t know where they could be used. But you know, a few years ago we pulled out the Iron Patriot and said, ‘That’s cool. Wouldn’t that be fun to play with that someday?’ And you’ll see it in Iron Man 3.”

Read more about Rhodes at ScreenRant.

More on Aldrich Killian, A.I.M., and Extremis

Kevin Feige on Killian:

“Killian heads a brain-trust organization called AIM that is developing Extremis, which is something that taps into human DNA and is able to reprogram it and regenerate limbs and enhance strength and cure wounds. But it also could change the whole world, which is what Killian intends to do with it.”

Drew Pearce on Killian:

“Killian is an interesting character as he’s somebody who came into this world with a number of physical disabilities. He’s never been able to accept those limitations though and has spent most of his life trying to overcome them in any way he can. His tenacity and blind determination in fighting for a better life are seen by some as irritating, as he often comes across as obnoxious. He just won’t accept the cards he was dealt, and being as intelligent as he is, has real drive to change and become a different person.

So we find him at the start of the film in a flashback and we see the ambitious, almost annoying, guy that he is. He takes opportunities to try and latch onto people like Tony Stark. So you see this very ambitious character and you see him later on in the film having made a change, and Tony and the other people that have met him early on kind of go, “How did this happen? How did he do this?” But he’s a dangerous character. He wants to become all-powerful. That’s sort of a driving force with him and Tony Stark realizes eventually what this guy is capable of.”

Feige on Extremis:

“When we were developing Iron Man 1, a comic book came out called Extremis. It was written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Adi Granov and from the cover of the first issue, we realized it was the next level of Iron Man and it worked perfectly and the timing was perfect. We felt it was tonally something we could use to build the movie off of. We actually ended up hiring Adi Granov to come on board and help in the initial designs of the Iron Man armor for the film.

The tone of the relationship between Yinsen and Tony Stark, the idea of a bigger, bulkier version of the Mark 1, all of that came from that storyline. In that storyline there is Extremis, which is a biological enhancement and sort of a biological weapon that people ingest and are able to do basically superhuman and spectacular things.

With each film, we thought, ‘Should we do Extremis?’ My gut was, it’s a part three. So, as we started developing Iron Man 3, we ended up pulling from that greatly. “

Robert Downey Jr. on Extremis:

“I remember when I was rereading some of the later Iron Man comic strands, there was this one called Extremis, and I was bringing it up from 2007 when we were shooting the first Iron Man. I said, ‘This is so cool’ and everyone was like, ‘Yeah, anyway.’ On Iron Man 2 I said again, ‘Oh, this Extremis is so cool.’ ‘Yeah, anyway” again. But Shane [Black] really latched onto the Extremis idea and thought about how could we bring it into play. So in Iron Man 3, Extremis is what brings Maya into play; it’s what brings Killian into play. It’s at its core, the idea that, okay, we don’t want to have suit on suit, so what’s the alternative? The Extremis is something that has applications outside of the military too. In fact, what Maya is attempting to do with her research, in her mind, is Nobel Prize stuff but in our world, it’s Nobel Prize stuff gone wrong.”

Shane Black on Extremis:

“In the Extremis comic book, there’s a type of thing that takes over and basically upgrades DNA. Sometimes you die. But if you live through the experience then you come out this changed thing. But the way they do it is the guy that does it is not some man chosen to be the super soldier -he’s just a militia guy. There’s an element of realism to it as well. So what we’ve tried to do is take this very science-fictiony concept of super people, and ground it in the type of people who volunteer for this being not necessarily super villains, but just people who upgrade. I love the idea of a super villain that doesn’t wear a cape, that doesn’t wear a super suit. That goes around dressed as you are right now. As for the science of it, once again we’ve gone back to the comic books, and I think pretty much lifted the Maya Hensen idea, that she met [Tony] long ago and had the germ of an idea, which now has come to fruition full circle, but she’s afraid because it’s gotten out there. And we go from there. I think you’ll be interested in the effect that we generate to demonstrate what Extremis does to a human being. It’s a pretty interesting special effect. But we’ve deliberately stayed away from defining, ‘Oh it’s nanites.’ What we do keep from the comic is the idea that there’s a slot in the brain that seems to have been dormant, but exists in human beings, almost as though it’s waiting for human beings to find a way to fill it. It’s been there forever.”

Drew Pearce on Extremis:

“I think the way Extremis works through people’s bodies. Often the visual effects guys would say, ‘At this moment, we’re going to see pulsing veins up your neck and we’re going to see that your eyes are going to sort of glow orange.’ So, they had a few different ideas about how that was going to go and they were obviously very excited about pushing the envelope and doing things they haven’t done before.”

Kevin Feige on Savin, played by James Badge Dale:

“You don’t know a lot about Savin at first but as the movie unfolds you learn more and more that he is a very frightening individual and he’s somebody that has used Maya Hansen’s technology Extremis for his own ends. He’s somebody who can walk around and seemingly be just sort of an average Joe, but who presents himself with such a cocky confidence that you’re not sure where that’s coming from or why he has it and then you see what he can do.”

Iron Man 3 Official Trailer

Feige on Maya Hansen, played by Rebecca Hall:

“Rebecca is just spectacular at those scenes and at showing how torn her character is between knowing she’s invented something that can do such amazing things, but seeing how wrong it’s gone and how dangerous it’s become.”

via ScreenRant.