Not only is a big part of the upcoming ‘Iron Man’ dialog and script improvised, Robert Downey Jr. was also not considered suitable for such an expensive movie. In an in depth interview with SSH!, director Jon Favreau touched upon the making of the new Marvel project. And how the independent aspect of the movie helped him to take the movie above average.

“Well, these movies don’t really have scripts which are locked in a traditional sense. [...] Sometimes Robert and I would scribble it down on a piece of poster board between takes if we had a different idea. Sometimes we would just give it three takes for him to try different things, or we’d have two cameras and him and Gwyneth then would improvise different versions of the scenes.“

While a representative had to sign off on big changes, the lack of a big studio breathing down Favreau’s neck got him a lot of “latitude and leeway.”

Initially however, Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t approved for the big budget movie. “[...] they didn’t like the idea of Robert–they were scared of him, they told me ‘no, I couldn’t hire him’ and it felt like too big of a risk,” Favreau said. But he pushed trough and when everybody saw the screen test Downey Jr. did, they stopped asking questions. “They wanted me to go with somebody younger and somebody with less of a reputation, and I was like this could be like casting Johnny Depp in ‘Pirates.’ This could define the movie and bring it out of obscurity and out of this sort of ’second-rate Spider-Man’ status that it’s in.“

The missing studio aspect of this movie is interesting. Del Toro recently said making a studio movie was like “having five hands holding your hand while you’re drawing a comic book.” And it looks like there was only one hand holding Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. down while making this movie.