JONATHAN FAVREAU made his name with movies as diverse as Swingers and Elf. It’s no surprise that his take on the superhero IRON MAN is a little bit different, as he explains to JODY MACGREGOR.

Nowadays any movie adaptation of a popular comic book has to pass a geek litmus test on the Internet, where it will be weighed and judged based on fidelity to the source material and other more arcane measurements at least as stringent as those required for entry to the afterlife, if not more so. At the same time, it has to appeal to people who only know Iron Man as that bloke from the Black Sabbath song. Director (and supporting actor) Jonathan Favreau has heard some feedback on that already from people at the world premiere, which he attended in Sydney the night before I speak to him.

“Fans seem to be reacting to how diligent we were in staying true to the source material,” he says, “which was important to me because this was the first [in-house] Marvel Studios film, so I wanted to satisfy the fans. I was happy that in the same piece of material I was able to interest people who have no interest in this genre.”

Part of that diligence involved working closely with artist Adi Granov. Granov’s redesign of the iconic red-and-yellow Iron Man suit in the pages of the comic impressed Favreau enough to put it up on the movie’s MySpace. The artist spotted it there and then got in touch, offering his services to design the suits used in the movie. The stories drawn by Granov and written by Warren Ellis became a jumping-off point for the movie.

“The way the suit operates, the physics of the suit and the retelling of the origin story was very much an inspiration and the Bob Layton stuff was also a bit of an inspiration as far as what the backstory is. We tried to borrow from all the eras to try to figure out what version of Tony Stark we wanted to present. Casting Robert Downey Jr. really tied the whole thing together.”

The billionaire industrialist and weapons-designer played by Robert Downey Jr. is a rockstar CEO who acts like a teenage boy’s dream of what it’s like to be rich and famous. He has all the coolest toys and a house full of robots and girls will drop their knickers for him at the drop of a hat. Tony Stark is everything Richard Branson thinks he is, although there’s a darker undercurrent to his wild lifestyle and the prodigious amounts of alcohol he puts away over the course of the story.

“[Robert Downey Jr.] felt a tremendous affinity for the character based on his own life experience. He saw a lot of parallels between himself and the character and felt this was really a role that he could bring to the screen in an interesting way.”

Like the actor has done, the character finds a way to return from rock bottom, reinventing himself as a protector and peacenik rather than a war-profiteer – albeit a peacenik in a flying battlesuit that can blow up a tank.

“It’s a rite of passage film and I think what’s compelling is that it’s one of those rare instances where the rite of passage isn’t coming on the heels of adolescence or young adulthood, it’s instead somebody who is in the middle of his life who has an experience that gives him an epiphany and changes him. It’s a very inspiring take for me, especially since I’m his peer. It’s a story I can relate to and one that’s much more personal for me to tell. It’s hard to find a personal in, or an area in which you can relate to the character, but it’s so important when you’re a director, especially on a movie like this where it’s so fantastic, to find something very personal that you can relate to.”

Something else Favreau found to relate to was his star’s shared preference for improvising dialogue. The way the characters talk in Iron Man has a believable edge to it that helps ground the comic-book action.

“Sometimes it was improv,” he explains, “sometimes it was writing, sometimes it was coming from me, sometimes it was coming from him, sometimes it was coming from the writers. There wasn’t a standard way of doing it, but we tried to keep it light. We wanted the scenes between the people when there weren’t costumes, superhero fights going on, we wanted to give that a naturalism and tonal consistency so that it felt like you were watching something slightly subversive with a little bit more attitude than maybe people are used to seeing in a movie like this.”

Even when the costumes come out and the flying, punching and exploding begins, Favreau wanted to help the audience maintain a connection with the actor inside the costume. To that end, we see inside the mask during some of the special-effects sequences, watching as Tony Stark struggles to control the complex piece of technology he’s built.

“It did offer us a freedom that other movies don’t have. If you notice they’re always struggling to pull off Spider-Man’s mask, they’re always struggling to reveal the faces of the villains and the heroes in this genre of film, because it’s so easy to get lost in the costume fighting the costume and it tends to separate you from the emotional connection with the characters. As exciting as Transformers was, they definitely were running into a challenge I think of finding the personality with these robots. We had real people in the suits and were trying to find a way to integrate that into the action sequences.”

As superhero movies become more common, clichés like pulling off the mask in the third act become easier to identify. If they weren’t, a parody like Superhero Movie wouldn’t exist, although admittedly that might be a blessing. Favreau says that avoiding the clichés and other similarities to other superhero movies was very important to him, “especially when you have a film like Batman Begins, and Dark Knight, where you’re dealing with basically the same premise of a billionaire, bachelor inventor who doesn’t have superpowers, who dons a suit, creates an alter-ego, who fights crime. We really wanted to distinguish ourselves from that franchise ’cause it’s such a successful one. I think Chris Nolan did a great job with it. In a lot of ways opened the door for us – the way he cast it, what he was doing.”

The Black Sabbath song of the same name has a prominent place both in the movie and its trailer, even though the impenetrably stoned Ozzy Osbourne lyrics don’t seem to have much with the plot: “He was turned to steel / in the great magnetic field / where he travelled time / for the future of mankind.” Is Favreau just a fan of Sabbath?

“I did like Sabbath, but growing up but I was more fond of AC/DC and I worked that into the film too, but I always felt that musical language is something that fit Iron Man as opposed to the more haunting musical dirge that is more the personality of the Dark Knight – the brooding, gothic hero. We wanted to keep it a little more extroverted, a little more rock & roll.”

A little bit more metal?

“Yeah, a little bit more metal. There’s definitely a heavy metal connection with Iron Man.”

IRON MAN opens nationally in cinemas on Thursday, May 1. www.ironmanmovie.com.au (Check the Win Stuff section for a special RAVE giveaway.)

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