After all the time he's spent on the Iron Man franchise, Jon Favreau is a Comic-Con mainstay, but his new sci-fi western Cowboys and Aliens presented a problem: He's only a few weeks into shooting it, so how could he possibly pull together yesterday's panel (and some effects-laden first footage) in time? He told Movieline how he managed it, and why.
"When they hired me, I said, 'We have to be ready for Comic-Con.' It's tricky, because we've been shooting for not many weeks, about a month. Our big Comic-Con is going to be two weeks before we come out next year, because we're coming out July 29, 2011, but I said, 'We have to come out to [Comic-Con] the year before [because] nobody knows about Cowboys and Aliens. We have a great cast, let's put something great together! Universal and DreamWorks were great partners, and ILM pulled together some visual effects shots, Skywalker Sound mixed it together, and we put together ten minutes of footage."
Still, if Favreau is planning to have another big panel at the Con next year to promote the film, did he have any concerns that by throwing a glitzy panel this year with stars like Harrison Ford in attendance, he might be showing too much too soon?
"I've never shown that much film before," he admitted, "but I felt for Cowboys and Aliens, because the source material was not well-known -- it's really based on an original script by the guys who did Star Trek, [Alex] Kurtzman and [Roberto] Orci and [Damon] Lindelof -- that we really wanted to show what tone of the piece was and we really wanted to highlight our great cast. So we hustled. We adjusted our shooting schedule -- we started with some heavy-duty stuff that you wouldn't normally start with, just so we could be ready for this."