What's Up with Iron Man II? Just Ask Jon Favreau
By Emily Christianson, Hollywood.com Staff
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Monday, September 29, 2008
HW: There have been rumors of 'War Machine' as a sequel. Can you talk about that?
JF: I want to do it. We're drawing War Machine. We're figuring it out. We're talking to Terrence [Howard]. We're seeing if he can take some time out of his new life as a musician to be War Machine, to do it…War Machine is fun and again you look for ways to up the ante. It's tough to up the ante on the villain side without going into strange territories, but what we can do is really have a lot of fun with our family, our main characters and that includes myself. I expect to have more to do in this one or I will walk [Laughs]. We certainly have Rhodey and Gwyneth [Paltrow]…I thought that she had great chemistry with Robert. Of course we'll see more of Robert and then we'll see how that basic group of four people moves forward towards the inevitable 'Avengers' that's coming and how The Mandarin, how largely he looms in this next one. These are the types of things that we're doing, but mostly from a perspective of tone, mostly from a perspective of…it's like sitting around and making a mix tape. Remember those? I guess it's a play list now, but you would make a mix tape for your friend and you'd sit there and go, 'Oh, this song. This will get the party going.' I liked to DJ. I've started DJ'ing. I actually just DJ'd Robert's son party. That was a favorite and of course I like all old rap music and stuff, all the things that I wished I could DJ when I was younger and now I get to do all of it. You know how people get Porsche's? I got turntables. That's my midlife crisis and I'm really nervous to play his son's party and whether the 15 year old is going to think I'm cool, but it is like that. You want to get the party going. There's a feeling that if you have a mix tape that your friends go, 'Oh, give us the mix tape because the party is going good –' and you pop it in and play it again, there's a buzz that I get off of that.
HW: Why do you think people are so into superhero movies right now?
JF: I think 9/11. I think that, interestingly enough today we're meeting, but I think that was a game changer. I think people were looking for emotional simplicity, escapism and if you look at it, there were superhero movies before. Spider-Man, but that first Spider Man was hitting right, I think, in May of 2002 when it was the first way that we could get to those emotions because you couldn't say anything about politics. You couldn't say anything about war. People just didn't want to deal with it, but you put people in a costume and say, 'This is the good guy. This is the bad guy –' and you either set in a fantasy world like Lord of the Rings or in the Marvel Universe, you all of a sudden allow people like kids and adults to experience those emotions in a way where they dealing with very real emotions in a very escapist way.