French TV sta­tion Canal have posted an extended 7 minute behind the scenes look at Iron Man 2. The video starts off in French but the inter­view with direc­tor Jon Favreau is in Eng­lish; you’ll here him talk about Stark’s home made par­ti­cle accel­er­a­tor. There’s also an inter­view with Robert Downey Jr., talk­ing about the chal­lenges of film­ing a sequel. An insight­ful look at the Iron Man sequel and def­i­nitely worth the watch.

The sixth video from Enter­tain­ment Tonight’s exclu­sive Iron Man 2 set visit is now up. This time Don Chea­dle talks about his roles in the sequel, namely as Rhodey and the already infa­mous War Machine. Video after the break…
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ET keep pimp­ing their Iron Man 2 exclu­sives, and why shouldn’t they? Next up are two video inter­views with Gwyneth Pal­trow and new­comer Scar­lett Johans­son. Again, videos embed­ded after the break because of the awful player.

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Jon Favreau pre­miered the first Iron Man 2 footage at this years Comic Con. Many descrip­tions have appeared online, I’ve included two in-depth descrip­tions in the full post and sum­ma­rized below.

- The footage opens in the giant donut and a con­ver­sa­tion between Tony Stark and Nick Fury — Stark doesn’t want to join the team.
– It then cuts to a court­room scene that sees the gov­ern­ment attempt­ing to strip Stark of his Iron Man suit
– Rhodey enters to tes­tify against Stark.
– Whiplash is out to get Tony as revenge for the Stark fam­i­lies’ atroc­i­ties, explained by a voiceover whilst Rourke con­structs a suit of his own.
– There’s a quick shot of Black Widow in action and then Whiplash flick­ing his two great electro-whips.
– Justin Ham­mer (Sam Rock­well) is now seen, talk­ing about Iron Man suit mod­i­fi­ca­tions “fire­power” — retro­fitting guns and armor. Rhodey says he’ll take it.
– Then there’s a quick shot of the com­plete War Machine suit.

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Speak­ing with The Guardian, Rourke men­tions how he learned a lit­tle Russ­ian for his role:

And Iron Man 2, in which he plays Tony Stark’s tat­tooed Russ­ian neme­sis, Ivan, is pos­si­bly the biggest movie yet in Rourke’s new career. For Rourke this means going to Rus­sia, drink­ing vodka and vis­it­ing jails to study prison tat­toos and find his character’s tics. “I decided to do half my role in Russ­ian,” he beams, “and that’s hard because the Russ­ian lan­guage doesn’t roll off the English-speaking tongue very eas­ily. I spent three hours a day with a teacher, and after two weeks I know four sen­tences! Let me see, it’s sort of like… ‘Yez­za­mee menya… Yez­za­mee manya obott… Er, nema­boootty menya…’”

This goes on for quite some time. “It means,” he says, finally, “If some­one kills me, don’t wake me up, because I’d rather be dead than live in your world.”

But the land of block­buster movies is not some­where Rourke plans to stay long. “I’m not gonna rush out and see the next Bat­man, I’m not big on for­mula movies. I don’t like all that Spider-Man shit.”

As announced via Twit­ter, Jon Favreau appeared on the Jimmy Fal­lon show last night. Favreau was at “Ham­mer Indus­tries”, a rival firm to Tony Stark’s — Sam Rock­well plays Justin Ham­mer. Not a lot of news, he ‘can’t say much’, but it’s quite a fun video:

Empire recently spoke with Jon Favreau and Mickey Rourke about Iron Man 2. Favreau gave some back­ground to the Tony Stark char­ac­ter in the sequel before giv­ing cryp­tic clues when quizzed on ‘Rhodesy’ and War Machine.

“Tony’s expected to be a role model and I don’t think he’s ready to be one. He’s under a great deal of pres­sure and when you’re under pres­sure, I think you find out­lets for that. That’s one of the ten­sions of the film: it’s one thing to say you’re Iron Man, and another thing to actu­ally become Iron Man.”

“Rhodesy is def­i­nitely step­ping up in this film. Let me put it this way: Tony’s not the only per­son with tech­nol­ogy in the film.”

Mean­while, Mickey Rourke com­ments on his Whiplash suit (we’ve already seen a pos­si­ble con­cept piece for this)

“I’m hav­ing the time of my life! […] It’s been really bru­tal, because my Iron Man suit weighs 23lb. It’s sort of a half-suit, with half my skin show­ing, with lots of Russ­ian tat­toos, because [Whiplash is just] out of a Russian-zone prison.”

Robert Downey Jr. says that he is tak­ing Iron Man 2, his first ever sequel, more seri­ously that any film pre­vi­ous (which is “appro­pri­ately ridicu­lous”). The movie itself shall be more artis­tic and dar­ing com­pared to other films in the same genre whilst the Iron Man suit will be bet­ter fit­ted and more ergonomic. The open­ing day’s film­ing (with Garry Shan­dling) was a Sen­ate hear­ing wherein the unnamed Sen­a­tor, played by Shan­dling, wishes that the Iron Man tech­nol­ogy be turned over to the government.

Excerpts from Collider’s interview:

Remem­ber when film­ing began and word leaked that Gary Shan­dling was in the film and no one was really sure what part he played? Robert told us about the first day of film­ing and how Gary plays a Sen­a­tor:
Robert: Day one I’m doing a Sen­ate hear­ing where the gov­ern­ment is say­ing the Iron Man tech needs to be turned over to the Sen­a­tor and the Sen­a­tor is Gary Shan­dling. And we had this fan­tas­tic day that was some­how this con­trolled chaos of a Sen­ate hear­ing where I keep inter­rupt­ing them and dah dah dah.

Another bit that Robert told us was how he is tak­ing “Iron Man 2” more seri­ously than any movie he has ever done:
Robert: And I’ve never been in a sequel and it’s very daunt­ing because I feel the expec­ta­tion of the mil­lions of peo­ple who watched it and enjoyed it and told me that it was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than your usual genre pic­ture and that they expected us to not screw it up. So I actu­ally have taken “Iron Man 2” prob­a­bly more seri­ously than any movie I’ve ever done, which is appro­pri­ately ridicu­lous for Hollywood.

On Jon Favreau post­ing Twit­ter updates from the set:
Jon is my brother and he is the keeper of the “Iron Man” flame and what­ever he wants to do, within rea­son, to keep his anx­i­eties at bay is absolutely fine with me.

On the way the suit has been improved from the first film:
Every­thing has been improved. Every­thing is ergonomic and the story is incred­i­bly risky and artis­tic for a big genre movie.

In which way risky?
The set pieces have to do with things that aren’t your typ­i­cal like bad guy con­flict. The rela­tion­ships are very com­plex and hilar­i­ous. The moti­va­tions Tony has and why he turns around and does things has com­pletely to do with his own inter­nal processes and it really is, I think, as much as we tried to in the first one really see behind the façade of this kind of sto­ry­telling. We really, I think, leav­ing our­selves open to…we’re kind of try­ing to tell a story about how a dys­func­tional fam­ily saves life on Earth as we know it.

For this film you have Mickey Rourke, Sam Rock­well. You have an insane cast.
It’s huge.

Could you talk about work­ing with Mickey?
I could if we shot together. I’ve seen his stuff and it is lit­er­ally remark­able. Lit­er­ally remark­able. He’s so good. And he’s for­mi­da­ble and he’s very much remind­ing me of that kind of charm­ing, con­fi­dent guy that we know. Sam Rock­well, on the first day of shoot­ing I was like “if this guy thinks he’s going to be fun­nier and cooler than me (laugh­ter) and it was a photo-finish. Scar­lett Johans­son, amaz­ing. Don Chea­dle is just rock­ing it.