Jon Favreau
Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com
Jon Favreau is inarguably proof of just how unpredictable a Hollywood career can be. Starting out as a comedic actor, he has quickly proved himself adept at not only dramatic acting, but writing and directing.
After writing Swingers and both writing and directing Made, Favreau has finally made his greatest mark in Hollywood as the latter, directing films as diverse as the comedy Elf and the children’s adventure Zathura. Now he hopes to make his most idiosyncratic mark yet on film with the most unlikeliest career turn yet, directing the Hollywood film adaptation of Iron Man.
When we first asked Jon to discuss how he was approached to direct Iron Man, he told us of how much his whole career has been just as much unexpected.
“I honestly don’t know,” he replies, “I think there was maybe, in the back of my mind, some sense of a career path when I moved to Chicago and wanted to join up with Second City that I wanted to do comedic roles. And then, all of a sudden in Chicago, I got cast in Rudy and then leapfrogged doing everything I thought I’d spend years doing where I was in a supporting role in a dramatic movie. And then, a few years later, I made Swingers, which was sort of a Woody Allen-type personal film that I got to star in.”
“I don’t know if there was a life plan to end up with Iron Man,” Favreau continues, “But it just that I love movies and I just sort of went with whatever opportunities or whatever doors open and didn’t force it when I felt things weren’t going the way I thought they should. So I just went with where the flow was going and ended up only picking projects that I was excited about and sometimes they flopped like Zathura or they hit like Elf. But all the time, I was doing stuff that I was proud of, so here I am, somehow.”
Jon says his more simplistic, loose, and basic approach to directing he acquired from his early years on the comedy circuit may have played into his ease into the role.
“There are movies where the director doesn’t need to know anything and the
“But fact of the matter is now, it’s like being a president,” he adds, “You have a cabinet around you of people who are experts in their field, that if you have the right assembly of talent, that you listen to them and manage them right, you could make a great movie without having to have any experience or background in any of those areas.”
He also claims that this democratic approach in working with actors what brought him to Iron Man.
“It’s all about managing people and managing talent,” Favreau believes, “And in the case of this film, and in the case of the superhero genre, what they found is they do best when they hire storytellers, people who know how to work with actors and tell stories. And the special effects and that whole area and the division of the film staff is just hundreds or sometimes thousands of people working on the film, if you count all the vendors, you’re better hiring a Chris Nolan or a Sam Raimi or a Bryan Singer then a guy who comes out of commercials and action movies or music videos.”
“They tried every different path,” he continues, “But the superhero genre seems to react best to small filmmakers who are doing small films because that’s was their way into Hollywood, but don’t resent the genre of a larger movie, but are actually movie geeks and embrace the genre and they love it and don’t see it as a pay day, but as a golden opportunity that they’ve been working towards. And that’s when you get The Matrix, that’s when you get X-Men, and I sort of fit that profile because of my background, because I was knocking around the festival circuit with all of those guys before any of them got into the big movies.”
The film has an impressive array of talent that the 41 year-old director has assembled to work with, including Robert Downey, Jr.,
“For the way that I direct, casting was the most important part,” he claims, “Because I see myself, coming out of improvisation, I feel more like the coach of a team, where for me the biggest part of putting my team together is drafting the right players and signing the right talent. And then, as a good coach, I’m able to draw plays for my talent, for what I have. And in this case, we had Robert Downey, Jr. and that was my star draft pick.”
“And then, the whole movie fell in around him and the tone of the film and my approach,” Jon continues, “But once I drafted Robert, I knew, just to beat the analogy, how to win the Super Bowl with him. I knew the offense and I knew what I had to do and I try to give my actors a lot of freedom within those parameters. So it’s really very much like coaching, where I sort of set them up in a way that I think they can win. And based on their talents, their each unique talents and chemistry between them and then sit back and let them do their thing and then jump in and make adjustments the things that I see fit.”
Favreau also adds that his experience as an actor himself enables him to really understand the psyche of an actor, providing a harmonious environment for his cast.
“I’m not the type of director that micromanages them and wants to have a hand in every single decision or acting choice,” he says, “I could, because I’m an actor, puppet them through choices, if they’re completely backed up against the wall or if I’m working with kids or a new performer who’s having trouble. And that’s where my background is as an actor and a writer. That really helps, but in a perfect world, I love people who get to make their own choices and their own decisions and I just sort of combine them, alter them, than ultimately, in the editing, really craft the movie.”
The director also says that what he particularly brings to
“Well, that’s my wheelhouse,” Favreau explains, “The improvised conversations, especially between men and women, are best friends. If you look at my work, it’s always been when I gravitated towards and that’s been the stuff that I can just scribble out. Like the scene between Robert and Gwenyth, when she’s putting his heart in something. I just looked at the props, looked at the set, looked at the scenes shot, went home, banged it out, and in an hour in a half, brought it in the next day and we shot it and it was fun and funny and resonant and emotional.”
“And then, I set up two cameras so that they could improvise and play off of that,” he adds, “So every time I had Gwenyth and Robert, I would give them ideas, there would be some ideas that would be from the script, there would be some that would be that I would write, there were some that they would bring to the table. But I always would set up two cameras, let them do a lot of takes, and guide them between each take and push them in a different direction and there was this spontaneous, nice feeling to it, and with Terrence as well.”
What enables Jon’s confidence in using improvisation and humor is his belief that the same sort of natural looseness in smaller, more character-driven films can also apply in some ways to a more higher-profile project.
“The buddy relationship of that is not that different from me and Vince [Vaughn] on the plane in Made or us in Swingers or the brothers in Zathura,” Favreau believes, “There is something, a style of humor or conversational scene work that I’m compelled by and I find easy to bring truth and humor to.”
While most Hollywood insiders tend to believe big-budget films like Iron Man come from purely commercial inclinations, Favreau believes, to the contrary, that there are many artistic fringe benefits unseen in working on a superhero film.
“One of the reasons why I gravitated towards the genre that it’s one of the few genres that
“This is the type of movie where so much is in the director’s head because the dirty little secret about superhero films is there’s never a script, there’s never a final, complete script that is ready to go before the movie is going. It’s constantly evolving and changing because of the action, the facts on the ground, discoveries made on the set, and so we’re always playing catch up with the script.”
Jon also notes that the superhero genre just as much a director-driven genre, because of the enormous amount of physical visualizing that goes into setting up each scene.
“It requires that a lot of it is kept in the director’s mind, because you’re the one that’s going to connect these visual effects you’re working on for two years with the performance that you’re seeing right in front of you and you have to explain to the actor what’s happening off-screen or what was just happening in the scene before,” he says, “A lot of it only exists in your mind and it’s a tremendous undertaking to be able to keep a whole movie in your head.”
“Because really, the only script that exists, for this type of movie, is in your brainpan. And even if the writing is there and the script is completed, it’s only half of it,” Favreau adds, “The other half is storyboards. And then, you have production art that’s inspiring to see and you have what you’re talking to the vendors about and the visual effects supervisor. So it’s this incredible plate spinning act that has its own name. It shouldn’t even be called directing because it’s so different from directing a comedy or smaller film.”
Despite the attention to comedy, pace, visual effects, and casting that Favreau brings to film, the director claims there is no aspect more important for a film of such a large scope as Iron Man as its most basic of ingredients, the story.
“Nothing, comedy or visual effects, is important enough to undermine the story,” Jon insists, “It has to be
“The more you stick to the old stories, the mythic way of telling a story, the rise of the hero, the emotional reinvention of somebody as they develop and come of age, the more you’re going to engage a world audience,” he continues, “And the visual effects help you tell those same stories in a way that you don’t felt you’ve seen them before, but ultimately, it’s window dressing and comedy and dialogue and everything we’ve been talking about is completely secondary to story.”
Most modern big-budget films emphasize more on time-saving and flashy CGI for their visual effects. However, Jon claims he set a particularly higher bar for his staff in regards to the film’s effects.
“I had gone on record to saying that I don’t like CGI,” he recalls, “When we hired ILM, I walked in there. They assembled 300 people in the audience, but the first thing that I said is, ‘I hate CGI, but I’m going to be holding you to a different standard of photo realism.’ And that means I’m sacrificing making dynamic shots. I’m not doing it like Sam Raimi, when the camera’s flying around and the animation’s crazy and it’s exciting in its own right.”
“I really was restrained,” Jon adds, “I shot the aerial stuff from real planes, like you would in Top Gun, and we painted out the planes and painted in Iron Man. I wanted everything to tell you that you’re looking at something real, so that it did feel like you were cutting in from one movie to the other. And then to try to integrate tone to the suit, that was another challenge, too, so you weren’t always cutting to a mask from Robert. It had to really feel like he was Iron Man.”
As we ended our interview, we jokingly asked Jon whether he found working on a big-budget film as a form of “professional masochism.” The answer he gave
“It was probably oddly the least frustrating movie I ever worked on,” Favreau believes, “I knew what my job was. I know how to make my days. I know not how to go over. I have enough experience directing on small movies just to clock where the sun is and how many shots I need to tell a story. So there was the ease of knowing that I’m a director.”
“Once it was Robert, I got the comedy, I got the relationships,” he continues, “I’m doing Made, I’m doing Swingers, I’m right in my comfort zone with that. With the comedy, I got Elf, so I know how to set a gag up. I kind of get the visual effects from the end of Elf and also from working on Zathura, so I get how to work with those people. So there’s no real learning curve.
Favreau also adds that on the contrary, the experience proved to be surprisingly more freeing than any he would have gotten on a much smaller film.
“Marvel is a very small operation,” Jon states, “A couple of guys, they’re on the set, they’re rubbing their hands together, laughing at the monitor tube, so I have partners and not people handing down dictums to me. And it felt like a really big indie and I had more creative freedom on this than I ever had. They just said, ‘Get the action right. We need to get enough action. It’s a Marvel movie and we don’t let people down.’”
“But beyond that, once we hired Robert and we got past down that speed bump, we were just all facing the challenges of logistics back to back,” he adds, “It was a marathon. It was two years relentlessly and I’m exhausted. But I still sleep with a smile on my face.”
