Iron Man 3 is released in UK cinemas tomorrow, and last week I had the pleasure of sitting down with co-screenwriter Drew Pearce. From working with writer-director Shane Black, to Marvel's Phase Two and beyond, the discussion yielded some interesting information. Its all been transcribed for your reading pleasure below. With the success of last years Avengers Assemble, Pearce perhaps known best for creating British sitcom No Heroics admits that it was a huge challenge writing Starks character in Iron Man 3:
Tony saves the world , and even in the Marvel universe, saying something in that complete and absolute a way is pretty much a full stop. But actually, that became more like the key to unlocking what we wanted to do rather than an impediment, because it just allowed us to go whats happening with the man himself? I think there is definitely a thing where, if youre a person who becomes famous, or celebrated, or even given a huge amount of responsibility, even if you manage to achieve that it doesnt tend to fix the things inside you. In other words, those things made you that person but were also the demons as well. Listening to Pearce talk about co-writer and director of Iron Man 3 Shane Black, it's clear that he was a fan of the man who penned the Lethal Weapon series and so much more long before they teamed up. However, the collaboration did not get off to the best of starts. Pearce elaborates;
Basically, I was brought on, about 4 weeks later Shane was brought on. I thought well Im out of a job then because Shane Black is coming on as a director, but hes also technically the highest paid writer of all time in Hollywood. He also wrote a ton of movies that I adore. But what was interesting is that Kevin Feige from Marvel really wanted us to work together, I obviously wanted to keep writing Iron Man 3. So there was a couple weeks of circling each other , and dont get me wrong I think if that hadnt worked out Id have been booted off in an instant! There was this one week where we sat down together to just talk ideas and by the end of it, we went in and had a meeting with Marvel and Shane was just like Id love to write with this guy. What ended up becoming really interesting is that with most modern blockbusters, theres a series of writers who come on, whether theyre credited or uncredited, and actually Shane and I are the only two people who have touched the keyboard on this movie which is pretty amazing. Fans who have been scouring the web for information on Iron Man 3 may know that the films portrayal of The Mandarin is vastly different to his comic-book counterpart. When asked about how he and Black went about reinventing the character, its clear that the writers were trying to carry over as many elements of the iconic villain as possible without making the film too outlandish;
As a character that pre-exists, certainly in his original form and even in some of the modern day versions, The Mandarin was designed to be a racist stereotype. Plus, hes completely magical, and the Iron Man universe that Shane and I wanted to get back to was much more about technology and those types of things. So we just had to reinvent the Mandarin for what we thought would be the most powerful, most interesting and most intelligent. So what I feel like weve done is that weve taken the concept he was created by in the 60s, which is the idea of a demonised bad guy and weve updated that for the modern era. Iron Man 3 features some of the most imaginative action in any superhero film to date. So how similar is the finished product to what Pearce and Black initially envisioned?
Sometimes its exactly the same, and the interesting thing about the house attack, pretty much the beats in that like the piano , are pretty much exactly how they were written. There are other ones which are more complicated and have more moving parts, and their shape is more predicated by the ideas that you put into them at the beginning and then the process they go through. So, some of the big action in the final act which again as people know from the trailers, involves a number of Iron Man suits, we chucked a ton of stuff into that on the script level, but there is so much simultaneous action going on that a lot becomes dependent on the quality of your digital artists and the directors of post-production and the quality of the venders, which are the houses you go to get that work done. Wheater, who are amazing, did the final act, and I think it really shows. More than ever before, Stark has to fight the bad guys without the aid of his expensive hardware.
Yeah. I mean, we never wanted to sound like we were bored with the idea of suit action, and the movie is called Iron Man, so you want to see Iron Man! When youve got somebody like Robert Downey Jr., hes athletic and inquisitive and mercurial. To not be able to use that in action sequences would be a terrible shame. I think Shane Black is an icon of human action heroes and so you want to tap into that as well. With Iron Man 3 kick-starting Phase Two, you mightve thought that knowledge of what was going to happen in future movies might have had an effect on the screenwriters. Surprisingly, Pearce assures us that wasnt the case;
We were actually privy to most of the information and to the script and to the rough cuts of the other movies that hadnt come out at the time. But actually just because of where we fell in the Phase One into Phase Two thing, there wasnt actually any prescriptive guidelines that we had to stick to at all, which was remarkable, we couldnt really believe it either. Im sure for other movies there is more of that, but I also think theres a thing that Kevin wants to do with Phase Two which is he generally wants them to feel like standalone movies that can work on their own. Hopefully were a good start to showing that that is doable. Finally, I asked Pearce about Runaways the script that inadvertently led to Pearce penning Iron Man 3 and whether or not we would see it on a big or small screen any time soon;
Kevin Feige and I speak a lot. The great thing is as well as him being President of Marvel, he is also my producer. The bigger question becomes is it a movie that will pull its own weight in Phase Three? I know he loves the script so I would hope that its at least in contention. I think what will be interesting for Phase Three and bear in mind were just starting on Phase Two now, so were wishing our life away a little bit, but I think it really opens up in another direction in the same way that Guardians of the Galaxy opens up one new direction for the Marvel universe, I think Runaways could do the same thing for another part of the MCU. So I would love to see it happen one day, its a script Im really proud of and its one of my favourite Marvel comic strips of all time so I would really hope that happens. Selfishly, I would rather it was a movie than a TV show. I think the danger of it as a TV show is that you need a bad guy of the week, and I think the whole point of Runaways is that the bad guys are their parents. There is an epic, almost Shakespearean quality if you do Runaways right, with the idea of kids having to go up against their parents, and theres a part of me that doesnt want to see that necessarily chopped up into 120 episodes. Again it all depends on a number of factors. If it was a cable show I think it would be amazing, it would be ground-breaking. What Id rather not have is it turn into something overly cute. Iron Man 3 is released in UK cinemas on 25th April, 2013. http://youtu.be/Ke1Y3P9D0Bc