Iron Man Fergus talks to AICN - Mar. 23, 2007

[the reel chris]

Quint interviews Mark Fergus on his first directorial outing, "First Snow" and also a bit about Iron Man; Fergus is a pretty busy guy these days. Sounds like the script is done, "We’re just sort of here, if they need us for the first two weeks…"

I clipped out anything not pertaining to IM; go to the source to read the rest of the interview.

Quint: Yeah, well I visited Favreau a couple months ago in the IRON MAN production offices…
Mark Fergus: Yeah, that’s where we’re sitting right now….

Quint: Oh yeah?
Mark Fergus: Yeah, we’re in the office just reworking a little bit of dialogue for the guys. We’re just sort of here, if they need us for the first two weeks…

Quint: Well, he talked very well of you.
Mark Fergus: Cool, yeah it’s off and running… and he’s just… that guy knows what he’s doing. It’s so awesome to watch a guy in total control of this massive operation and just say wow. He just sets the tone, which is intense, but really focused, calm, good humor… he just has everybody loving to come into work…

It’s his job to set that tone and its just such a fun place to be working on a film, but he’s man… There’s no surprise when I look at his career and, in 2002, when I met him, first I was like “wow, there’s no kind of mystery about why that’s happened to him, it wasn’t some kind of fluke. This guy gets it so completely…” and we’ve learned just working with him is free education in so many ways, so we’re just soaking it up… and great sort of stroke of fortune that we got to work with him.

Quint: From what he was telling me and from the art that he showed me it seemed like it’s a big movie, but it also seems so grounded in reality and you can see that as well with the casting.
Mark Fergus: Yeah. I love that balance, because it’s a simple human story bottom line, kind of like CHILDREN OF MEN when we look back at similarities between that and this. There’s so many in the character sense and he never forgets that this is a movie about a person going through something. It’s not about a suit or a bunch of technology or a bunch of cool amazing set pieces, that it’s about something going on with a person and he’s got such a grounding in that that I think is so important, because you have got to give a crap about what’s going on.

Quint: Yeah.
Mark Fergus: And I think Robert (Downey Jr.) is gonna just go crazy. He’s gonna take this to someplace really exciting, so we were over the moon when we heard again he was going it. We were so excited.

Quint: Yeah.
Mark Fergus: Think I read about it on you guys first. I mean, I don’t know if you guys ran it first, I remember just reading it (on AICN). I hadn’t gotten a word out, I just jumped out of my chair… I was not expecting that. It was such an amazing bit of news.

Quint: Well it’s a great move. Stark is such an interesting character and to have an actor of the quality and the depth of Robert Downey Jr…. It’s one of those things where once you hear about it you’re either… ya know there’s some people that are resistant to the idea of him playing Stark…
Mark Fergus: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Quint: But I personally can’t see anybody else in the role now.
Mark Fergus: Yeah, he just… absolutely. I mean physically ya know… but certainly the guy can flesh it out, all the layers that are possible with Tony, this guy’s gonna bring him out. I just didn’t realize how funny he is. He’s so funny and all this great stuff, you could play it really one note. It’s gonna be something really rich and I think all the casting so far has been fantastic and unusual, a little bit off-center, but feels totally right.

Quint: Favreau also mentioned that he actually had the first film, the casting, everything structured in such a way to tell the story like a three part story, a trilogy.
Mark Fergus: Yeah, yeah I hope so. I certainly hope they’ll invite us back to be involved in that.

Quint: You think they’re going to wait and see how it performs before they give you the go ahead to begin work on the next two?
Mark Fergus: Well… let’s just say that we’re just hired guns on this one. We hope that we get to work with these guys again. We’re all happy working together, but we don’t think too much about that ahead of time, because we just want to get through this one, but certainly I see this material as being so rich for planting seeds, for a whole bunch of conflicts to come, a whole bunch of characters to come, its all kind of a game laid out for that and really naturally.

I know the comics have such a huge history… the number of villains… the number of suits… the number of stages in Tony’s life. I think the thing is tremendously ripe to flesh it out and always have somewhere to go. I sure hope they get their shot to get involved in that. We’ll see… we’ll just have to kick ass…

 

[the reel chris]

Faraci at CHUD got a little bit out of him too. Snipped non-IM related stuff.

Jon Favreau is talking about Iron Man as a three film concept – are you and Hawk involved in future films?

We haven’t talked beyond [the first one]. We’re just really happy to have worked with Jon twice now. I would imagine – I haven’t read anything about where they want to take it, but it seems natural since there are so many facets to that story. We would love to be asked back but I have no idea what their future ambitions are, but we did feel like we were part of a unit that functioned well together. We adapted John Carter of Mars with Jon and we got on so well that he wanted to keep it going with Iron Man, and then with the Marvel guys it felt like a good team altogether. There were other guys who worked on the script and we didn’t meet them, but everybody’s best ideas [made it in]. Ultimately the idea was to come in and smooth it out with one vision, but with a comic book with that kind of history it’s hard to choose one story – you want to keep going. Focus was really the key challenge for all that.

This is the first movie Marvel is producing on their own. How does that affect you as a writer – is there more freedom because you aren’t dealing with the usual studio bean counters?

They have their priorities for it because it’s their property, and they have the history in mind. So it was a ton of freedom but also ‘Here’s where we want to go with it,’ but they were open to anything you suggested along the way. It helped to know where they wanted to take it because you look at the history of the character and you feel bowled over by all the possibilities and don’t know where to start. It was helpful to know what their general direction was for the first, and if they plan to do more, the sky’s the limit.

Traditionally, the writers are some of the most crapped on participants in these big projects; to hear him speak so well of everyone, and Jon in particular, is wonderful. I'm hoping Marcum and Holloway weren't some of the crapped-on ones.

 

[Advanced Dark]

Nice interview. I was just reading that at AICN.