ET have been speak­ing with Robert Downey Jr. about The Soloist and Iron Man 2. He reveals,

“The film is almost entirely about char­ac­ter, and yet we still have twice as much action as we did last time, so it’s going to be nuts. […] Essen­tially ‘Iron Man 2′ is about look­ing behind the armor, or the arma­ture, of a super­hero. It’s one thing to say you’re Iron Man, it’s another thing to be fully ready to do that.”

As for Scar­lett Johansson,

“We’ve been rehears­ing and she’s in insane shape. She’s get­ting lean and mean.”

RDJ has also been speak­ing to MTV about poten­tial Iron Man 2 storylines:

“I think [Demon in a Bot­tle is] prob­a­bly best saved, because it’s such its own sto­ry­line,” Downey told MTV. “We’re going for the interim space [between the ori­gin and Demon], which is more a look behind the mask of some­one who says he’s Iron Man and what it really is to become a superhero.”

Video after the break
Read the rest of this entry »

UGO caught up with Justin Ther­oux recently and quizzed him about the progress of the Iron Man 2 script and the ongo­ing development:

JT: We’ve kind of got a first draft around. You know what I mean? I just got back from Lon­don where I was work­ing with Robert and Kevin Feige. He was out there. We were talk­ing with Robert, who’s out there doing Sher­lock Holmes, he was giv­ing his input and his notes. We’re sort of there. It’s just sort of chug­ging along. The crews, I think, are now start­ing to see what they need to make, and the places that we might be going and all the rest within the story. That’s sort of one of the more excit­ing times.

UGO: So you weren’t involved in the whole Don Cheadle/Terrence Howard…or were and you want to tell me something…

JT: No, I wasn’t. I gen­uinely wasn’t. (laughs)

UGO: There have been reports that the role of War Machine was scaled back and then beefed up.

JT: No, that’s all non­sense. What­ever their rea­son is, I’ll leave that up to Mar­vel. We’re writ­ing the thing, vir­tu­ally the same for Rhodey that we would for any actor. We’re really tak­ing what’s going to be the most inter­est­ing story for the fans, and what are they going to enjoy watch­ing. And who ever’s in that part is going to have to play that part and make it work for Jon (Favreau) and the fans who are watch­ing the movie.

UGO: So the size of the role wasn’t ever changed?

JT: No. God, no.

UGO: So did you have to, or did you try to accom­mo­date Don Cheadle’s act­ing style?

JT: I think that will prob­a­bly be some­thing that comes up…I haven’t met Don, and I think I’m going to in a lit­tle bit and I think once I get a bet­ter sense of his voice and also hear what he has to say about what he likes about the char­ac­ter and just pick his brain a lit­tle bit, then we’ll obvi­ously start to tai­lor it to him. Once he sort of gets more involved in the process then we’ll start taper­ing the length of his character…making it fit just right.

UGO: Everyone’s spec­u­lat­ing about the vil­lain. Are we talk­ing Man­darin? Or Evil DJ?

JT: (laughs) I think it’s Evil DJ. He could be the vil­lain in this movie. I don’t know. I mean, I do know but I’m not going to let that cat out. I’ll let Jon start dis­cussing when he thinks it’s the right time.

UGO: Con­sid­er­ing that everyone’s com­ing together for the Avengers movie, were you ever told that cer­tain things had to be in the story or that things had to go a cer­tain way?

JT: No. I mean, I think we’re all sort of con­scious of the fact that all these people…it is the Mar­vel uni­verse, but that’s really about as far as we’ve been made…they haven’t given us any instruc­tion as far as we want you to do this or we want you to do that. And really it’s not really a they/us kind of envi­ron­ment, the way they work. It’s just a bunch of guys and girls sit­ting in a room, try­ing to come up with stuff and doing what’s right for the movie and what, at the end of the day, is going to be the most inter­est­ing film that can be made. Kind of a fun film. I think once we’re sort of locked on that we’ll be able to think about how we can thread things through. There’s a cou­ple lit­tle things that we’ve been work­ing on, but it’s not that we’ve been tak­ing meet­ings with Avengers peo­ple. It’s not like we’re six screen­writ­ers sit­ting in a room from each movie and think­ing about how we’re gonna work on each other’s things.

UGO: Have you writ­ten Stan Lee’s cameo yet?

JT: No, I don’t think so. (laughs) I don’t know, I don’t know. Jon will anoint him with that cameo, I’m sure.

UGO: Gwyneth Pal­trow is still listed as “rumored”. Is she confirmed?

JT: I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s con­firmed or not…I’m plan­ning like she is there but I have no idea.

UGO: Finally, what voice do you think you bring to the script, to make it dif­fer­ent from the last one?

JT: I’m not really try­ing to bring a dif­fer­ent voice. I’m try­ing to mimic and sing in the same key as the script that was there before. If any­thing, I think I bring a knowl­edge of the way Robert’s mind works. I’ve worked with him once before. Hope­fully I’ve proven I have some mod­icum of cre­ative rela­tion­ship with Jon and Mar­vel. So I really think my job is to work with them and not try and strike any new chords. Of course we want to make the story dif­fer­ent and inter­est­ing. We want the action to be really good. But I think my job is really just to…serve the ulti­mate guy, which is Iron Man.

Well, Los Ange­les Times, hosted a live chat with Jon Favreau.  Click the link for the tran­script.