Downey Jr. and Favreau Talk to Movieline About Their Biggest Problem with Iron Man 1

A little concerned about the surplus of new villains in Iron Man 2? Don't worry -- as the filmmakers told Movieline at Comic-Con, they are, too. Still, they argued, it was essential to introduce those new characters to fix the one niggling issue they had with their original film: the villain.

"[The first Iron Man] was well-received, but there were certainly things we thought we could improve," explained Kevin Feige, Marvel's president of production. "I think our end battle this time will be slightly more epic in scale. It's that balance between delivering a character -- and all we really care about in these movies is character -- and delivering a spectacle. You know, [the battle] on the highway and on the rooftop in the last movie was great, and the connection between Jeff [Bridges] and Robert [Downey Jr] was great, but we wanted to give it a little more spectacle this time around for the finale."

"You put yourself in the seat of the audience and you say, what do they want to see?" said director Jon Favreau. "And I think they want to see more -- you want to go bigger, like from Alien to Aliens -- and then you want to show them the characters they've invested in and how they've changed. We've changed those dynamics by introducing new characters that don't just add to the action, but throw the relationships into a little bit of a curveball."

Thus, Favreau argued, each of the new villains tweaks an already existing character: Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) is a direct antagonist to Tony Stark, while Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) test Stark's relationships with Rhodey and Pepper, respectively. Still, casting those three additions posed a whole new set of questions, said Downey Jr.

"What does everybody best offer, how do we make sure that all these insanely gifted [actors] -- people who are used to being number-one on their own call sheet who have come to join us to play -- how do we give them a beginning, middle and end?" he told us. "How do we make them pertinent to a story that actually could have easily been told along the same lines we were: bringing in another nondescript bad guy and kicking ass?"

"We had to walk a fine line," admitted Favreau. "I think you're good for [sequel] number two -- two seems to be the charm -- because you've got your origin story out of the way and you can add some complexity to it...When you get to number three, you could get hidebound. You're like a beached whale sometimes, because you collapse under the weight of the complexity you've created.

"We looked at the successful sequels that we liked -- I'm not talking about Two Towers, or films that are chapters based on novels like Harry Potter -- I'm talking about true sequels. The ones we liked the most, and this is me and Kevin Feige talking, were Wrath of Khan and Empire Strikes Back. Those are the two where we said, 'They did it right -- now, let's look at what they did right.'"

From those two films, Favreau said, the filmmakers were able to find the right balance for Iron Man 2. "What we found was that they really gave room to explore the characters, and the villain plotlines were very simple but the stakes were very high. The less you get bogged down in complexity, the more you can let audiences enjoy what they really enjoy, which are the relationships."