"I adore him,” Downey Jr. said of the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director, “ I’ve been a fan of Shane Black since I saw Lethal Weapon. When we were doing the first Iron Man, Jon Favreau and I used to call up Shane Black. We had two lifeline calls; one was to J.J. Abrams, which was about the third act. And for the other call, we went to Shane’s house. We couldn’t afford him, so in exchange for helping us with a few key scenes, he asked for a piece of Salmon and fresh blueberries… in the Iron Man scene where Tony Stark comes back from captivity and calls a press conference, and then asked everybody to sit down, the speech Stark gives all came from Shane Black. So to get him to do Iron Man 3, it has just been this awesome experience and one of my favourite working experiences.” He continues by saying that “Iron Man 3 is going to be a very, very bold genre film, from the storytelling.”
He also talks about Jon Favreau returning as Happy Hogan despite not having the creative control as director and gives us a glimpse in to what we can expect, “Happy has an amazing arc in this movie. In fact, probably the best two bits of acting in the movie, so far from what I can tell... which sucks because I’m in every frame, are Favreau as Happy Hogan... I can’t give away much, but it’s ridiculous.”
But who is the second? Perhaps unsurprisingly given the news that Downey Jr. gave him a standing ovation when he filmed his last scene, it’s Sir Ben Kingsley as the Mandarin. “Kingsley is amazing. And a lot of that had to do with the way that Shane crafted the role for Sir Ben. I think that people are gonna be not totally surprised, but they’re gonna be just reinvested in what a brilliant actor Kingsley is.”
Just in case he hadn’t hyped the movie or its components enough, Downey Jr. lastly added that “Shane Black really knows the superhero genre, but I think the main thing that’s great about him is that he’s always looking at complexities within complexities and so on. And he always likes it when a film kinda stops for a reason you can’t understand and then kinda picks up and goes in a direction you’ve never imagined.”
Are you as excited to see Iron Man 3 as much as Downey Jr. is?