Ain’t it cool have just released an inter­view with key artist Christo­pher Swift and model shop super­vi­sor David Mer­ritt from a visit to Stan Win­ston Stu­dio.  It is quite a tech-heavy dis­cus­sion but really gets down to the nitty gritty of how the suit we see in the film came into being.  If thats your thing enjoy.…

Jon Favreau’s IRON MAN, called upon Swift and Mer­ritt to build fully func­tional Mark I, II, III and IV out­fits into which stunt­men could fit and in which they could achieve some range of move­ment. Eas­ier requested than built. Though they’re more than happy to boast about their accom­plish­ment now, you can still hear the residue of many stress­ful nights in Swift’s voice when he describes how a seem­ingly suc­cess­ful test con­cluded with pieces of the suit clat­ter­ing off onto the ground. Swift can laugh about Favreau’s sternly encour­ag­ing response now (“Guys, you did an amaz­ing job, but… those parts are going to stay on in the movie.”), but I doubt he was laugh­ing back in March of 2007.

Jon Favreau has been a pro­po­nent of prac­ti­cal f/x. He was really into it on ZATHURA, so, obvi­ously, he turned to you guys on IRON MAN. But I heard you say­ing ear­lier that the Mark III was not always going to be a prac­ti­cal suit?

Swift: Not orig­i­nally. Due to the expec­ta­tions of what they were look­ing for, I don’t think it made sense for them at that point to think of it as a prac­ti­cal suit, whether we could actu­ally get a per­son in it, can he move… being the fact that it’s such a slick design, it’s almost like a car body that has to have joints in there. It’s not like an armored suit in the knight days, where you have a lot of pieces that you could see the move­ment hap­pen within those. This was a slick suit. It was like, “How can you make all of that stuff move, and make it prac­ti­cal.” So I think the idea was that it was going to be dig­i­tal, and that we would get insert shots from the suit that we made as well as ref­er­ence points for light­ing, for dig­i­tal, and all of that. Again, except for the Mark I, which was always… that one does make sense; that’s more built like an iron suit from the knight days.

How did you do it?

Swift: (Pauses. We laugh.) We’re ask­ing the same ques­tion our­selves. At the end of the movie, we were like, “How did we do that?” It really did seem like an impos­si­ble task.Merritt: The direc­tive from Mar­vel and pro­duc­tion was really to put the empha­sis on it being a super­hero. The idea of fit­ting some­one in there wasn’t as impor­tant. So once we nailed down that design from [illus­tra­tor] Phil Saun­ders and moved on to build­ing a 3-D model, we were able to then start tak­ing scans of the body, and start­ing to… see how things were going to work. Through that process, we were able to kind of get an idea that this might work. Mean­while, as they were work­ing out their bud­gets for dig­i­tal, I think they came to the real­iza­tion that what­ever we could get prac­ti­cally would only help the movie. So they really started embrac­ing that.Swift: I would love to say that — being that the major­ity of us who worked on it are pretty sea­soned as far as doing a lot of suit work and things like that — it was like, “Oh, we’ll just make this and go on our exper­tise and our tal­ent.” But there were many, many nights where we were here late pulling our hair out going, “How are we going to do this!?!?””

Mer­ritt: It was so tight.

Swift: It really was tight. We didn’t know that from the very begin­ning, so we didn’t… move over to that ide­ol­ogy until well into the build­ing part of it. We had very lit­tle time to actu­ally do this. There was a lot of engi­neer­ing as we went along. We lit­er­ally built it piece-by-piece and part-by-part. We would solve problem-by-problem instead of look­ing at it as a whole, like “How do we solve the leg prob­lem?” So we would lit­er­ally get a guy in here and put the legs on him, and let him walk around. “He can walk. Can he run?” We lit­er­ally built it up piece-by-piece the same way you’d engi­neer the suit for real — although we didn’t have the robots weld­ing it all together. That was all of us as the taskmasters.

Mer­ritt: But we did start out using robots in a way. We uti­lize a lot of rapid pro­to­type process machines here as a tool for us to get our job done. And when we started get­ting into actu­ally fab­ri­cat­ing for the Mark III, we were able to… start refin­ing the sur­faces and really treat­ing it like an auto­mo­tive body, mak­ing sure the lines were clean.

I have a col­league at work who has this incred­i­ble Iron Man t-shirt of the thirty or forty dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of the char­ac­ter. How did you set­tle on a vari­a­tion for the final design of the suit?

Swift: I would have to say the major­ity of that was done between Phil Saun­ders and Adi Gra­nov with the pro­duc­ers and Mar­vel themelves. They were very par­tic­u­lar about not only stay­ing in tra­di­tion with the actual design of Iron Man, but mak­ing it also a new spin­off ver­sion — but not chang­ing it so much that you wouldn’t rec­og­nize it. Not only that, but they really paid atten­tion to the fans and their think­ing. I’m a big comic book fan, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a comic book turned into a movie where I’m like, “Well, that doesn’t look like the cos­tume! You changed it! It’s an estab­lished char­ac­ter!” They were really par­tic­u­lar about stay­ing hon­est to that, and being true to the fans to make sure they weren’t dis­ap­pointed when they saw the suit.Merritt: Once we got ahold of it and made our 3-D model, we worked with Phil to make some mod­i­fi­ca­tions so we could start to real­ize how joints were going to truly move, how plates were going to open up, how the hips were going to work so they wouldn’t crash into each other. We’d make those mod­i­fi­ca­tions and run them by Phil, and he would make lit­tle changes. We went through that process for two or three weeks until we came up with some­thing they were happy with.

Do those prac­ti­cal logis­tics make sub­stan­tial changes to the visu­als, or were they just small tweaks?

Mer­ritt: They were small enough tweaks that you really wouldn’t notice. The only real change was that Shane [Mahan] and Chris adjusted the head a lit­tle bit. That was about it.Swift: The back of the neck, yeah.

How do you think the fans would’ve reacted if it was an all-digital suit?

Swift: That’s really hard to say with­out see­ing it and know­ing it. Let me answer that by say­ing this: when the movie came out, and they were show­ing it down at the Arclight The­ater, the Arclight asked us to send down our Mark III suit. It was sit­ting there in the lobby, and I went down there to see a dif­fer­ent movie, and I could barely get through the crowd that was stand­ing around the Mark III suit. Regard­less of how it plays onscreen, the fact that some­body could sit there and see a real Iron Man suit in front of them — look­ing at the suit, and then going to see the movie — I think it just makes a men­tal dif­fer­ence. “Wow! There’s a real thing there! There really was a guy in this movie in a suit. No mat­ter how many shots or how few shots, we just know that there really was an Iron Man suit.” And I loved watch­ing lit­tle kids run around going, “I want to be in that suit! Can I go in that suit?” You don’t get that from just watch­ing a dig­i­tal movie.

What was it like for the stunt­men in the suits? I heard that one of them fell down and was ter­ri­fied that he’d bro­ken it.

Swift: That was the Mark I. Mike Jus­tus, I would have to say, was pretty much solely [the guy in the suit]. When you don’t see Robert Downey Jr. actu­ally lift­ing his head up, it’s pretty much Mike Justus.Merritt: Oak­ley [Lehman] also.Swift: Oak­ley was also in there, but I think Mike was the one who fell. He said he fell like a sack of pota­toes. He made one mis­step, and… he stopped, but the suit kept going.

Mer­ritt: We had to switch Mike and Oak­ley out. You could only be in the suit for three hours before you just got tired. I know this is get­ting off-track a lit­tle, but when we were talk­ing about the weight before, there’s a dif­fer­ence between hav­ing, like, an eighty-pound back­pack on and… eighty pounds just wrapped around you, it’s just totally different.

Swift: It really worked out to our advan­tage that… at the point in the movie where the Mark III suit comes out, and he’s going out doing all of these things, Jon’s very good about keep­ing things very organic and real­is­tic. He never came to us, like on a lot of movies, and said, “I want this to always be pris­tine and shiny.” So if it gets a nick, and it gets a scratch, and it falls down, keep­ing con­ti­nu­ity might be a prob­lem, but if it gets a nick, it’s okay. Let the suit be an iron suit; it does get nicks, and it not only shows real­ity, but vul­ner­a­bil­ity — which is impor­tant to the sto­ry­line. If you think he’s invin­ci­ble, then what’s the point? That really helped us out: the fact that we could expand upon when suits would get nicked up and bro­ken and things like that, we ran with that. We allowed it to be part of the suit and the look of the suit.

Fol­low­ing up on the dif­fer­ent looks for Iron Man over the years, have you guys began talk­ing about what to do new in the next one?

Mer­ritt: I don’t think we’re there yet.Swift: We’ve got­ten very lit­tle infor­ma­tion. The most I’ve heard is the pos­si­bil­ity of the War Machine, and that it’s Ter­rence Howard in this one. I have to say, I talked a lot with Ter­ence on the set, and I said, “Get ready. Because in the comic books, you end up in the suit.” And he said, “Really!?!? I love the idea! I want to be in that suit!” And you know what? He’ll prob­a­bly get his oppor­tu­nity. He’s got a great build; he’s very skinny, so we wouldn’t have a hard time fit­ting him in the suit.

In the ‘70s, Iron Man had roller skates. Can you put roller skates on him for the next one? (Laugh­ter)

Swift: No, but there is talk of an Iron Chimp that roller skates and smokes cig­ars. I don’t know if that’s going to hap­pen, but I, for one, am look­ing for­ward to that.

You talked about the dif­fi­culty of build­ing the suits. I don’t know if it was the time frame specif­i­cally, but in terms of what you’ve done before, where does [IRON MAN] rank in terms of a challenge?

Swift: As far as build­ing time and all of that? I would say up to par with every­thing we get nowa­days. What would you say?Merritt: For me, it was right up there among the top three. Just in hav­ing to get him into the suit, the logis­tics of it all was really chal­leng­ing. The time frame was pretty stan­dard for a lot of films these days. But what we ended up hav­ing to do over the long run, that’s what made it challenging.

When you say “top three”, what are the other two you’re think­ing of?

Swift: Prob­a­bly the last two movies we worked on.

AVATAR?

Mer­ritt: Yes, AVATAR. The TERMINATOR movies. It just was hard.

Is that how it always is in this busi­ness? The next movie is always the hard­est project?

Swift: It can be. It usu­ally depends on how much are we doing for the movie. Some­times we just get one small char­ac­ter that we can focus on; other things, like IRON MAN, we just have to do much more. We have to build not only one Iron Man suit, but three types of suits. And we had to build the Iron Mon­ger. I give all the credit to Dave. To expand on what he was say­ing, these suits were built piece-by-piece, so opposed to when we do open organic suits such as a mon­ster, we’ll sculpt the whole thing; hands might be sep­a­rate, head will be sep­a­rate… we’ll break it down in that sense. For the most part we have a large major­ity of it that’s all one part; once we get it molded and sculpted, we run it as such and paint it as such. These were almost sep­a­rate parts and pieces; putting the whole suit together, it really had to be built that way. It was a big effort.Merritt: With the Mark II and the Mark III, there were well over eighty pieces to the indi­vid­ual suits. We had to fig­ure out how it was going to move, how it was going to fit, and how he was going to move within it. And then there was the under­suit, and fill­ing in the joints in between.Swift: There were two fac­tors that I looked at, espe­cially with the Mark II and the Mark III — basi­cally they’re the same suit — which is Dave’s team did such an awe­some job of tak­ing all those pieces and mak­ing them so pris­tine and beau­ti­ful. To the eye, they’re just per­fect pieces. At the same time… the aes­thetic part is one thing, but on the other hand, how do we make it all work. There was engi­neer­ing that, tak­ing those parts of those beau­ti­ful pieces and try­ing to fig­ure it out. Even when we had the pieces, there would be re-cutting and re-engineering, and Dave’s team would have to go back and re-work another thing and make it beau­ti­ful again after we had to cut out a cer­tain part because it wouldn’t bend right or whatever.

There’s been an obvi­ous trend in the way these sto­ries are told: even the most fan­tas­ti­cal thing has to be sort of grounded in some kind of prac­ti­cal real­ism. What is more of a chal­lenge for you guys: some­thing like [IRON MAN], where there is a layer of real­ism to it, or is it when you have com­plete free­dom to do what­ever you want?

Swift: As in mak­ing it, or as in lik­ing it as a fan?

Both.

Swift: Because to me, I’m a big fan of ground­ing things in real­ity. I think one of the things that makes IRON MAN work as a movie, and I’ve heard this from so many peo­ple, not only my own, is the fact that peo­ple go, “That really could be. That really could hap­pen. Some­body could really bulid a suit.” With tech­nol­ogy, we don’t even know half the stuff that’s going out there military-wise, but it seems plau­si­ble to make a suit. It’s basi­cally an air­craft fighter built around a guy, as opposed to actu­ally get­ting in a machine. So in that sense, as a fan, I think that real­ity grounds the movie to where I can go through it and believe it. That makes it work for me as a fan­tasy comic book movie. As far as build­ing it, there’s always a chal­lenge to mak­ing some­thing look real and not silly and stu­pid if it has to be such.Merritt: A lot of that is in the film­ing too. In the cam­era angles, and how the approach it.Swift: This par­tic­u­lar suit… I’m very proud that it came out of the stu­dio. When you see it in per­son, it works from every angle, from every shot; it just looks like the real thing. I don’t look at any part of it and go, “You know what? We could’ve done bet­ter. We failed in this part. It didn’t look so good from this angle.”

Mer­ritt: The first cam­era test we went to, every­body was there: Mar­vel, pro­duc­tion and so on. The first five-minute flight was at [unin­tel­li­gi­ble]. So we took him down there, and we had the green-screen suit on, so we had holes in it and every­thing. We put it on, they do the cam­era test, and when every­one saw him they were just kind of blow away by… for the first time ever, see­ing Iron Man walk­ing. The next day, we went down for the screen­ing; we all took our notepads, and we’re all ready [to take notes]. And the first time they saw Iron Man, I remem­ber Favreau goes, “That’s our guy!” And we walked out of that screen­ing room with­out a sin­gle note.

Swift: The funny part was that… Shane is a really good show­man, so we put the guy in the suit in a tent. And when he walked out, he walked out [in the full suit]. I remem­ber… we were so not ready for this test. He walked out of that tent, and every­body just went, “Oh, that’s it!” Then he took ten steps, and, like, eight pieces fell off of him. Jon was like, “Guys, you did an amaz­ing job, but… those parts are going to stay on in the movie.”

When was that in the pro­duc­tion process?

Swift: Prob­a­bly around March [2007].Merritt: It was before we started shooting.

They’re talk­ing about a release date of 2010 for IRON MAN 2. Are you guys wor­ried about being on another tight schedule?

Mer­ritt: No. These days, we just have to approach it fast and furi­ous, and jump right in.Swift: We always know it’s going to be tight, and that’s just the way it is. The things that become a worry are… we do this as artists, so we want to do things that we’re proud of. Not only do we do it for the fans… we do it for ourselves.

With the pass­ing of Stan this year, there was a lot of talk about this being the pass­ing of an era — which it was in a way. Some peo­ple think prac­ti­cal f/x are on their way out. Do you guys think prac­ti­cal f/x will be strong in the 21st century?

Mer­ritt: Oh yeah, I think so. I mean, dig­i­tal is a great tool. It makes our jobs eas­ier. It’s one of the rea­sons we’re able to build things as quickly as we do, because we know that we’ll be able to get away with cer­tain things. You know… every­body loves prac­ti­cal. I mean, it just looks right and looks real. Even dig­i­tal loves it because it makes their job eas­ier. I think it’ll be around for a while.