Com­ing Soon had the oppor­tu­nity to speak exten­sively with Jon Favreau about the pos­si­ble plot lines in Iron Man 2. I though about para­phras­ing this, and sur­mis­ing, but it’s such a good read, chock full of infor­ma­tion and juicy good bits I have left it in full for you, with cer­tain bits highlighted:

CS/SHH!: Would you launch into another two year movie after this?
Favreau: Yeah, I would do it. Hope­fully we’ll fig­ure out how to get “Iron Man 2″ going and I’ll be involved with that. You have got to out-do what you did before. So, if the last one took two years, we would need at least that to do what we are talk­ing about, or at least think­ing about. Nobody knew about “Iron Man,” and that was a dis­ad­van­tage in some ways, but nobody expected any­thing. I think peo­ple were pleased based on the fact that they had no pre­con­cep­tions about the project. Now, we have a movie that peo­ple seem to like and you can’t give them less. You have to give them more. There are chal­lenges that come with that as well as the ben­e­fit of peo­ple already under­stand­ing who he is and the char­ac­ter. We told the ori­gin story so where do you go from here? There are plenty of story lines to explore from the 40 years of his­tory from that character.

CS/SHH!: Have you cho­sen any­thing?
Favreau: No, we haven’t. I haven’t been hired to do it yet. I know that Robert and I have talked a lot about what types of things we would like to do, and how to play into the strengths of what we dis­cov­ered last time around. I look for­ward to rolling up my sleeves. Hope­fully that won’t be too long in coming.

CS/SHH!: Kevin Feige said that he was pretty con­fi­dent that you guys would get some­thing going pretty quickly. Peter Billings­ley said the same thing as well.
Favreau: Yeah, Kevin is just a gem of a guy. He really walked the line very well of being the guy who is in charge of movies, and the stu­dio, as well as being my pro­ducer and some­body who over­saw the way that the source mate­r­ial was being dealt with. That is a lot of hats for a guy to wear. It was a fairly new posi­tion for him. I don’t think that he has ever had the respon­si­bil­ity he had on “Iron Man” before. I know that he has worked on “The Incred­i­ble Hulk” since then, but its great to have a mix of some­body who respects the source mate­r­ial and doesn’t just treat it like some­thing you can use or dis­card as you see fit, and was very sup­port­ive in get­ting us what we needed to make a good movie. The cast­ing of Robert, the visual effects bud­get, work­ing with the right ven­dors, but he had a very high stan­dard of qual­ity con­trol in the film. He was also very help­ful in help­ing me under­stand the genre, and what peo­ple expect from it, while still giv­ing Robert and I the room to have a very dif­fer­ent take on the mate­r­ial. We broke a lot of the rules that the genre nor­mally has. We have all been rewarded for tak­ing the chances that we did.

CS/SHH!: I know that Samuel L. Jack­son talked about expand­ing Nick Fury’s role for a sec­ond film.
Favreau: Oh, good.

CS/SHH!: So, it’s news to you?
Favreau: I’m not in the loop on that unfor­tu­nately. I think that Mar­vel has their hands full right now. They have another big movie com­ing out right now, with “The Incred­i­ble Hulk,” and that’s com­ing out in a cou­ple of weeks. I know from when I was in that posi­tion on “Iron Man” a lot of the heavy lift­ing for the stu­dio comes in at this stage in the game. They are part­ner­ing up with Uni­ver­sal try­ing to fig­ure out how to roll out the mar­ket­ing cam­paign for that, so a lot is rid­ing on that film. I know that they are done cre­atively work­ing on it, but that is only half the game, so I think right now it’s a small stu­dio. There are not a lot of peo­ple and I’m sure they have their hands full on that one. Hope­fully when the dust set­tles every­body will be ready to get their head in the game and try to make some more movies.

CS/SHH!: It’s obvi­ous that in “The Incred­i­ble Hulk” there is the super sol­dier serum and Cap­tain America’s shield in your film. So, is there a story there already with Cap­tain Amer­ica that you guys will put in?
Favreau: Yeah, truth be told it’s more like instinc­tively we are grav­i­tat­ing towards com­bin­ing cer­tain prop­er­ties, but you don’t really dis­cover how that hap­pens until you roll your sleeves up and get into the story telling. You do cast­ing. There are a lot of ideas float­ing around. We will have con­ver­sa­tions as we all gather and paw the ground in the park­ing lots. We’ll kick rocks around and start hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions where we let our imag­i­na­tions go wild. It’s not like we’ve sat down with a dry erase board and wrote through the whole line of sto­ries. For me I’m pretty con­fi­dent about who Iron Man is, what that char­ac­ter is, and what the rules of that world are. Maybe Mar­vel knows, but I have no idea how you relate that real­ity to the real­ity of Thor, which seems like a very dif­fer­ent set of rules to that uni­verse. Cap­tain Amer­ica I get, I under­stand how that would relate, or The Hulk. Espe­cially if you are work­ing towards the idea of doing “The Avengers,” how do you make those worlds all feel con­sis­tent with one another in the look of the film, the cast­ing of the film, and then the look of the visual effect.

CS/SHH!: I guess you will just have to direct all of them.
Favreau: [laughs] I would love to. Clearly I have stated that “The Avengers” would be fun. But I look at their release sched­ule and they have announced “Iron Man 2″ for 2010 and then “Avengers” for 2011. I know from expe­ri­ence there is no way I could. I don’t know what they have in mind, but there is no way that “The Avengers” could be done in a year. Either they are think­ing about some­body else doing it or they have some­thing up their sleeve that I don’t know. I know these movies take time to get right. I know that you have to have a good script. You have to under­stand where you are headed when you go into it, oth­er­wise you are rely­ing on blind luck and hard work. It’s good to have a game plan, espe­cially at this stage in the game, it’s impor­tant to under­stand where all of this is going. All of these prop­er­ties are work­ing together and I know Kevin has been very dili­gent about try­ing to keep a con­sis­tency. I will look for­ward to hav­ing these con­ver­sa­tions with the guys at Mar­vel, to lay­ing out all the puz­zle pieces and see­ing how they fit together.

CS/SHH!: 2010 is pretty soon if you think about it. Is it just an under­stand­ing with Robert, you, and every­one just knows it will be a five year thing and you launch into it?
Favreau: I don’t know how that works. I’ve never worked in that world before. I have never done a sequel to a film, nor have I in the past worked on any­thing where a sequel felt organic. I think it’s the nature of “Iron Man” because it comes from a seri­al­ized piece of source mate­r­ial, that it does lend itself to hav­ing sequels. It’s all new ground for me, it’s new ground for Mar­vel, although they have been part­nered up and done sequels with other stu­dios. There are a lot of dif­fer­ent approaches you could take. Hope­fully we end up going for a sequel that is going to be big­ger and bet­ter than the first one. That’s not always the case with sequels. Some­times you end up try­ing to do just rush, and hit a release date. Hope­fully this sequel will be dri­ven by the mate­r­ial and dri­ven by good ideas. I think that is what got Mar­vel the suc­cess that they have had as an inde­pen­dent stu­dio. I have no doubt that they are going to con­tinue with that phi­los­o­phy of let­ting the source mate­r­ial, and the qual­ity of the story, dic­tate all the other deci­sions. They are not shack­led down by what a nor­mal stu­dio, with a release sched­ule, has to con­tend with.

CS/SHH!: But the team is pretty much the same?
Favreau: I know that all the actors are def­i­nitely in active nego­ti­a­tions. All of that has been agreed to, which is really encour­ag­ing, because I think the cast was a big part of the suc­cess of that as much if not more than “Iron Man” the char­ac­ter. I think that as long as you got all those peo­ple together, and you have a solid take on the mate­r­ial, then I expect great things.

CS/SHH!: “Demon in a Bot­tle”?
Favreau: Yeah, I mean that one is def­i­nitely brought up a lot. How do you han­dle “Demon in a Bot­tle” and when does it come in? I think it hap­pened in the ‘80s, which was 20 years after the first “Tales of Sus­pense” so when do you play that card? When do you play the “Demon in a Bot­tle” card? We sort of tip our hat to it, and cer­tainly there is a lot to be mined there, but it’s all a puz­zle. How does it fit in? “Demon in a Bot­tle” also relates to War Machine and James Rhodes’s arc. What vil­lains are you deal­ing with and how much effort do you put into reveal­ing a whole set of char­ac­ters. We really spent most of the time deal­ing with Tony in this one, explain­ing who he is, and why he is the way that he is so that now Iron Man comes to life. You then have to reveal, I think, some heavy duty, heavy weight bad guys that you could then counter bal­ance this incred­i­bly pow­er­ful super hero.

CS/SHH!: You intro­duce The Ten Rings…
Favreau: We have The Ten Rings in there, but the Man­darin is still there. I’m glad that we didn’t try to attack the Man­darin the first time around. There is a lot that is very rel­e­vant about that char­ac­ter, in the pool of the land­scape that we find our­selves in, but there is some­thing off putting and dis­taste­ful about the way that the Man­darin had been pre­sented back in the ‘60s. I don’t think that is rel­e­vant any­more. How do you main­tain the core spirit of what makes that vil­lain so for­mi­da­ble with­out hav­ing some­thing that either seemed out of our real­ity, as far as what his abil­i­ties are, or the way he is depicted.

CS/SHH!: In “Demon in a Bot­tle” there weren’t really a lot of vil­lains. It was when Tony real­ized he wants to be Iron Man again, James was like, “I don’t think so.“
Favreau: So you have to cre­ate. I also want to see what other movies are doing. It seems that “Han­cock” is deal­ing with a lot of those issues too. The comic book fans might see “Demon in a Bot­tle” as a fresh story line but I haven’t seen “Han­cock” yet. From what I’ve seen it seems there is a lot of imagery that seems to be shared. Him fly­ing through bill­boards and things. The idea of the hero whose biggest enemy is him­self, and him fight­ing through his demons, you want to come at the audi­ence with some­thing fresh. You don’t want to feel like you are echo­ing some­thing that some­body else is doing. I think you have to look at the comics, look at what else Mar­vel is doing, but then you have to look at the land­scape of super­hero films. There are so many out there. I think that part of the rea­son that “Iron Man” was so suc­cess­ful was that we really chose to break new ground in a new area tonally, cast wise, the way we depict the hero, what his abil­i­ties are. It felt fresh in a genre that is begin­ning to feel stale if it’s not done with the proper amount of inspi­ra­tion and a strong voice or tone. I think as the sum­mer roles out, and I’m really curi­ous about “The Dark Knight” to be hon­est with you. That was this loom­ing pres­ence that we knew was going to be a great film. I have no doubt that it’s going to be phe­nom­e­nal. I think our big sav­ing grace was the fact that we had a cou­ple of months between that film and us and there was room for both of us. We weren’t fight­ing for shelf space. Even though we weren’t going head to head, it was very clear that we could not take this char­ac­ter that on paper could seem very sim­i­lar to Bat­man, and I have no doubt that just the incep­tion of “Iron Man” was a reac­tion to DC. It was def­i­nitely bor­rowed a lot from DC because here you have the bil­lion­aire bach­e­lor guy, who was strug­gling with inner con­flict, and he has no super pow­ers. He invents his own suit and his abil­i­ties come from him­self. He’s a self-made hero. We had to really steer clear of every­thing that “The Dark Knight” was doing. I have tremen­dous respect for their cast, for [Christo­pher] Nolan, and so I want to see what they do. I def­i­nitely don’t want to fight for the same ter­ri­tory as them. There is plenty of room to tell these sto­ries. As a fan I’m really look­ing for­ward to it and I have a lot of respect for the way they approach the mate­r­ial too. He has no sec­ond unit on his films. He does all the direct­ing him­self. If they are going to do some IMAX work then they shoot it in IMAX. He put together a cast in a way that broke ground for me to be able to use the cast that I did. They made sure the script was per­fect before they started shoot­ing it and that’s not typ­i­cal for all super­hero films. A lot of times they just throw them together and try to do them as inex­pen­sively as they can. They try to chase the poster and chase the date. They put a lot of care into that film. I’m look­ing for­ward to see how it pays off. From every­thing I’ve seen so far my hat is off to them. I look for­ward to check­ing that film out. I have some­thing to talk about, so that’s pretty kick ass.