Robert Downey, Jr. did a little press for The Soloist over the weekend, and Frosty from Collider was at one of the roundtables. There’s no chance you’ll put Downey in front of a bunch of web guys (even international web guys) for twenty minutes without the conversation turning to Iron Man 2, so naturally there was a lot of sorta-information tossed around. For example, jumping off from a question about the new armor: “Everything is ergonomic and the story is incredibly risky and artistic for a big genre movie.”
Risky? Let’s have it.
“The set pieces have to do with things that aren’t your typical like bad guy conflict. The relationships are very complex and hilarious. The motivations Tony has and why he turns around and does things has completely to do with his own internal processes and it really is, I think, as much as we tried to in the first one really see behind the façade of this kind of storytelling. We really, I think, leaving ourselves open to…we’re kind of trying to tell a story about how a dysfunctional family saves life on Earth as we know it.”
Which is great, but that’s pretty much been the party line on the movie so far. Downey has said over and over again how this will be a seriously different action movie, and how they’re trying to do something more daring and unusual. I hope he’s right; Iron Man was fun, but if they can use this one to break the mold without doing ridiculously dark and serious, I’ll be very impressed.
Oh, and that Gary Shandling cameo? He’s part of a bit where Stark is “doing a Senate hearing where the government is saying the Iron Man tech needs to be turned over to the Senator and the Senator is Gary Shandling. And we had this fantastic day that was somehow this controlled chaos of a Senate hearing where I keep interrupting them and dah dah dah.”
Read a bit more at Collider, including Downey’s typically self-aware comments about how taking Iron Man 2 very seriously is “appropriately ridiculous”.