Even more than his love of gadgets, more than his appreciation of the comic-book ethos that inspired Iron Man, director Jon Favreau's success in bringing the Marvel Comics superhero to the big screen came down to his success as a mediator. Consider the creative forces he had to bring together.
There was Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr., an actor of unquestioned talent and commanding presence, but one weighed down by a personal life that hasn't always been his greatest asset.
There were the folks at Marvel Comics, gatekeepers of the Iron Man mythology since his creation in 1963, who were bankrolling their first movie (after depending on others for such mega-franchises as Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four).
And there was Gwyneth Paltrow, an Oscar-winning actress with a patrician background, not known for her star turns in superhero fantasies, but who glows with a mix of confidence and playfulness as Iron Man's unrequited love interest, Pepper Potts.
That may not seem like the most homogenous collection of talent ever assembled. But somehow, Favreau made it all work. "Your job," he says, "is to maintain a certain tone and sensibility. You try to keep all these wonderfully creative people consistent to one vision."
In Iron Man, the result is a thrilling start for a new superhero movie franchise that should keep everyone - fans, artists, financiers - happy. Not that balancing all those competing interests and philosophies was ever easy, Favreau says.
"We [would] all sit in my trailer for almost half a day and hammer things out and all negotiate," Favreau says of the collaborative process behind his fourth film as a director. "Robert was usually, `I've seen that scene a million times before,' and Marvel would be, `Oh, but if you do that, no one will know what we're talking about, and you have to fulfill certain genre demands.' And I'd be there at the hub of the wheel trying to come up with either lines or an interesting way to fulfill the genre, but we struck a really good balance. There were no histrionics, but there was a lot of negotiation."
Still, it wasn't simply Favreau's skills as a negotiator that served Iron Man so well. The movie's overriding sense of fun, a sustained levity that never gets in the way of the serious business at hand, helps separate it from the rest of the superhero pack.
