Jeff Bridges Recalls His Experience Working on IRON MAN as Wonderful, But Also Incredibly Frustrating
A lot has gone down between Marvel’s first major film project and this year’s slate of films and shows, but we will always looks back fondly on Iron Man as the movie that started it all. For us, it was the beginning of an exciting new world of superhero movies, but for the people in the cast and crew, it had a lot of growing pains to work through in getting it to the screen.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair (via CB), Academy Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges sat down to talk about his expansive career including films like The Big Lebowski, The Last Picture Show, Tron, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Contender, Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water, The Old Man, and of course, Iron Man. He looks back on the film fondly, but says the production wasn’t without its major setbacks.
He explained:
"It was Marvel's first adventure into making movies. It was so lucky to have Jon on there and Downey, because both of them are terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn't like the original script and we thought, 'Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.' And then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, 'No, that's no good. It's got to be this and that.' And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say, you know? And we'd spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines, and saying, 'Oh, you play my part or I'll play your part,' exploring how we were going to do it."
He said Favreau also reached out during this time to his peers to get help in developing the script:
"Jon would say, 'Oh, I know a writer. Let me see he may have some ideas...' Meanwhile, the crew is in the sound stage, tapping their feet saying, 'When are we going to get this thing going?'"
Bridges went on to talk about how he had to change his own mental approach to the project in order to work on this movie, which was different than any other he’d done before:
"It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain. And that adjustment was, 'Jeff, just relax. You're making a $200-million student film. Just relax and have fun.' And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that's what we ended up doing. For my money, that's the best Marvel movie ... I know I'm biased, of course. But man, I thought it was a wonderful experience."
We agree, Jeff Bridges. I love that first Iron Man movie. It was the perfect film to show fans what Marvel was capable of, and we will forever look back on it fondly.