If I ever had a moment of doubt that Jon Favreau was the man for Iron Man, I'll never feel that way again. After watching the flat-out fantastic footage he brought to Comic Con and listening to him discuss not only the character and his aims for him, but his working methods, I'm tremendously hopeful that this will be the next step forward for superhero films.

And the experience has obviously done Favreau good. I almost didn't recognize him -- he's lost weight and seriously toned up, as if he's the guy in the suit. I don't have a photo on hand that does the guy justice now.

Here's a little bit of background for the first question in this roundtable, since you'll read this before the Terrence Howard interview. Essentially, Howard described a process of frequent script revisions, where they'd often shoot more than one version of a scene, and where the actors had serious input into the composition of dialogue and scenes. That's not something I envisioned happening on a movie like The Fantastic Four, which leads to the first question.

We just listened to Terrence Howard describe a working process that sounds more like a $2 million indie than a big effects-based feature.

Fortunately, Marvel on all their movies is very collaborative and the story is very concrete but the specifics are…it’s not like you have to contact a studio to get approval on everything. So it’s a lot like the movies I’ve worked on in the past. I think there’s something incredible to be discovered in the moment, especially when you have actors like Robert and Terrence, who understand it and have been around and see themselves as shepherds of their roles. They often know more about their character than the filmmaker does, because that’s the kind of actor I hired. We’d often have discussions staying late into the night or showing up early where we’d lock ourselves in the trailer and talk about things. Fortunately for me, Kevin Feige was right there in the trenches with us. It was not unlike the process they went through on the [X-Men and Spider-Man movies]. There’s a lot of discovery on these movies. Fortunately I had a cast that was up for the challenge and willing to talk about it and give their opinion and the movie benefited.

Terrence and Robert both talked about the collaborative efforts on the script. Could you talk about that from your perspective?

Well, it’s a very interesting process, very opposite what I’m used to. I’m used to: you write a script, shop it around, maybe attach a star, get the resources to make the movie, you shoot it, cut it, show it, get distribution, you come up with a marketing plan and a release date. Here you get the title, a poster and the release date. Then you work your way backwards from the set pieces, because that takes the most attention since you have to work on the pre-vis, the animatics and the storyboards. So you have to break the story as a whole, and then you work your way in and start to develop character and CG assets. And as you cast people, you start to figure out the particulars of the characters that connect these dots. And in casting Robert, you have a much different version of this movie than you would if you have somebody else younger, less funny, less spontaneous, less charismatic. So with him as Tony Stark we knew we could hit the humor hard, we knew we could test the boundaries of likability because he’s so charming that you could really get to the personality Tony Stark has in the books. And then with Gwyneth, she really brings something...she’s not just a bumbling secretary. She’s an administrative assistant that has a lot of class and poise and you want to play to the dynamic they showed together in rehearsals. So she’s classy, so he’s going to play a different version. It’s not Moneypenny in this one, it’s a different thing and there’s a romantic tension there that you want to play to.

Speaking of Moneypenny, you’d mentioned that you wanted to play to an element of James Bond…

Yeah. The Bond stuff, I think…well, this last Bond was very gritty and the movie was showing that James Bond could be harsh and in your face, and they had to reinvent the franchise and I think they did a great job. The Bond we were gravitating towards is in the way that he’s the American Bond. He’s got gadgets, he’s got great cars, he’s got a certain flair and style and there’s a certain confidence that he has in the way he goes about moving through the story. And I think Iron Man has had that quality too in the book and we wanted to preserve that. But you never want the humor to be at the expense of the reality of the movie, and in Bond while you always got the sense that the bomb was never going to go off and he was going to end up sleeping with the villain, you knew there were some real life stakes and you want to walk that line to make it fun, but also make it real.

Can you describe the heroism of Iron Man?

In this movie, it’s a guy who starts off maybe not understanding the full implications of what he does for a living, of the life he lives. To him, he’s selling widgets and he’s getting very excited by his next invention. And then being injured by one of his own weapons and seeing servicemen attacked with them and seeing what happens when they fall into the wrong hands and being forced to build a super-weapon for those people, a change of heart takes place. A literal change of heart, and what he stands for and how he defines himself. That’s the journey of the first movie.

Is Jarvis in the film?

Jarvis is in the movie, let’s leave it at that. In one form or another.

With your profile rising and Vince Vaughn hot, are you still talking about doing your Western?

I’m talking to Vince about collaborating on something, and right now he’s riding high on the comedy train. Those comedies are doing very, very well and right now we have a lot of ideas of what we could do. There’s something we’re working together on now. Although The Marshall of Revelation, which was Western we were talking about, is a little bit more edgy and gritty than what we’d like to do right now, it’s certainly a script I like. We’re also getting a little old to play the roles as I wrote them, so it would take a big rewrite, but it’s a wonderful script and I’d like to make it someday.

Artists have redesigned Iron Man all the time since ’64…

They have, yeah. Which is a great thing for movies because we get to do new things in new movies if we make more, but I gravitated towards the look of the Adi Granov design of the Extremis armor but I thought the tech was too high with the way the suit went on, and I also love his reimagining of the original Mark 1 suit in the flashbacks, and so that’s the look. Very similar to the Extremis look, but the Mark 1 suit is based on the original books and also what Adi reinterpreted from the original books.

How many armors are in the film?

Three. There are three. We’ve got to save some surprises about what it looks like…maybe [there’s something in the trailer]…you can pick it apart like it’s the Zapruder film and figure it out.

What couldn’t you do this time that you’d love to do in a sequel?

I’d love to do something like Fin Fang Foom. You can’t do that in the first movie, but I’d love to do some version of that. After we’re done making the movie I’ll see how real it is and how much fun I can have with it. It’s like Batman Begins. They took a franchise and reinvented it, they did great stuff with it, and now you can expand it, because the fans are on board. This one was a matter of getting not just the fans of the books but also the general public to love Iron Man, and then I’ll see how far I can push it. So for the same reason you’re not going to see him fighting the Mandarin in the first movie, you’re just not, because you can’t have something true to the books that’s not going to put off the general public.

It’s like Star Wars. You can’t have…you had to have Darth Vader first, you can’t just have him fighting the Emperor with lightning bolts coming out of his hands. It would have felt like the wrong movie. There’s an ubervillain that’s behind the scenes, pulling all the strings and then you have to have different levels… it’s like a video game. You have different bosses that you fight and slowly reveal what’s going on. If the movie stands alone we got a great story, great villains, great fighting. If we’re lucky enough you’ll slowly see that stuff. The fans of Iron Man are going to see it clearly in this movie but people out there, it’ll go right by them. But you guys will know and if we get lucky enough to make more you’ll see more and more emerge that’s in the books.

How’s your experience been with fans?

We took a big risk. We didn’t show this trailer online. We didn’t show it in front of a movie. We took it to Hall H. First time I showed it was to a bunch of people waiting to see Indiana Jones and Star Trek. That’s a crowd that, if you have a misstep, you could be Catwoman overnight. But if they like it, they’re going to be online, they’re going to be vocal, they’re going to tell their friends. And not just you guys – the people who are posting on bulletin boards. You don’t get more grassroots than that. This is a very vocal group of people, the people who were in that hall. But we felt that there was enough response to the images that we released, the images that we didn’t release, everybody seemed to like what they saw.

So we took a chance, cut together a lot of footage, more certainly than most do, and we put it out there and now what’s nice is Paramount saw the way that the fans responded to it, and they want to get the footage out there to the general population. They’re starting to understand what this franchise is and could be. It gives us confidence. Not just Paramount, not just Marvel. Me as a filmmaker. It makes me hit the editing room feeling a little more sure of what we’re doing, that it’s working. And we’d better outdo what we showed at Comic Con because we gotta make a trailer, we gotta make the commercial and ultimately we have to make the movie and it’s all got to have new surprises. And I want people the first time they see the movie to react they way they reacted in [Hall H].

Did you pay attention to fan reactions during casting?

Very much so. It was a very tricky thing. Downey’s not a guy that you cast to put asses in seats in a huge Hollywood blockbuster. He’s a guy you put in a movie when you want a great actor and you want someone who’s going to bring a lot of integrity to a role and credibility to a project like this. They took a big chance on hiring a guy who’s not a mainstream popcorn movie star. And in casting this guy, as soon as we announced it, you know we were all looking at what the response was on all the sites. First the people who were going to write articles about it and blog about it, and then the reactions of the fans to those blogs. It gave us a tremendous sigh of relief that we knew that we had a guy that people were going to give a chance to play Tony Stark. Each casting decision was the same way, and then each image that we released. And when an image got out that we didn’t release, everybody’s scared, and then the fan response was there, and that gave us confidence to be a little more forthcoming with what we’ve done and that’s what led to what we were able to present today.

What will he sound like in the suit?

I don’t know yet.