We’ve been going on several times about Jon Favreau and company shooting “Iron Man” and its sequel with no script whatsoever, but it’s taken The Dude to confirm this interesting nugget, in spectacular detail. In a pretty engaging interview with In Contention about his Oscar vehicle “Crazy Heart,” Jeff Bridges opens up about the studio’s lackadaisical filmmaking methods.
Bridges says, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?’ Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on… You’ve got the suits from Marvel in the trailer with us saying, ‘No, you wouldn’t say that. You would think with a $200 million movie you’d have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script, ‘Oh, we’ll have the script before that time,’ and they don’t have their shit together.”
Bridges isn’t entirely that negative about the experience. Of Favreau, he says, “Jon dealt with it so well. It freaked me out. I was very anxious. I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines, man, that’s my school. Very prepared. That was very irritating, and then I just made this adjustment… So I said, ‘Oh, what we’re doing here, we’re making a $200 million student film. We’re all just fuckin’ around! We’re playin’. Oh, great!’ That took all the pressure off. ‘Oh, just jam, man, just play.’ And it turned out great!”
This confirms what most of us suspected about these movies, that Marvel is indeed flying by the seat of their pants. We know that the credit for the screenplay, shared by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, was tenuous, but we didn’t know it was so bad that, according to the interview, they “would literally act out sequences during primitive rehearsals, Downey taking on Bridges’s role and vice versa, to find and essentially improvise their way to full scenes.” How do you run a movie set and have no one responsible for what’s going to be coming out of Jeff Bridges’ mouth? Major movie sets are an embarrassment of excess — you should see some of the craft service set-ups we’ve seen — but how is there not a single person around who can write comic book dialogue for Iron Man and Iron Monger? Hell, if they scoured the internet, they’d find Marvel superfans who would pay Marvel for that opportunity. And they probably wouldn’t be half-bad.
At least Bridges is positive about the experience, but it really sounds like some of the handlers on these sets are imbeciles. He’s old enough to know not to badmouth the wrong people, so its hard to say if his praise for Favreau is real or not, but he does end that part of the interview by claiming Marvel execs told him, “It’s just a comic book. Maybe we’ll bring you back.” Just a comic book? We’re sorry, but are Marvel Studio executives busy producing Holocaust documentaries in their spare time? If they’re not going to view their own movies as substantial, why should we?
To end on a positive note, the interview with Bridges, which details his entire career, is really fucking great, even for an Oscar soft-sell piece. Click here to read about his thoughts on “Starman,” the possibility of reuniting with Peter Bogdanovich, and The Dude’s own pot habits.
