Bridges on Iron Man

Superhero movies have been dominating the cinema. They blew up so fast, that it wasn’t even important to have a script.

Well, that’s what Jeff Bridges said happened with IRON MAN. Right after principal photography for TRON: LEGACY, Bridges was supposed to easily jump right into being Obadiah Stane. Unfortunately, that’s not at all what happened.

He basically arrived to a blank drawing board, “They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn’t know what we were going to say. We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, ‘You got any ideas?’ Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on.” Director Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr, and Bridges would just improvise during rehearsals. The entire production was probably saved due to the exceptional improv from Downey and Favreau, says Bridges.

Apparently, there was a date before a script ever arrived, “You’ve got the suits from Marvel in the trailer with us saying, ‘No, you wouldn’t say that. You would think with a $200 million movie you’d have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script, ‘Oh, we’ll have the script before that time,’ and they don’t have their shit together.” This is not at all surprising. Once the bandwagon starts, everyone’s eager to get on it.

It must have been really irritating though, but what can you really do? You’ve got Favs, and if he’s involved there’s some sort of payoff. Even when Bridges was discouraged, Favreau kept his cool, “Jon dealt with it so well. It freaked me out. I was very anxious. I like to be prepared. I like to know my lines, man, that’s my school. Very prepared. That was very irritating, and then I just made this adjustment. It happens in movies a lot where something’s rubbing against your fur and it’s not feeling right, but it’s just the way it is. You can spend a lot of energy bitching about that or you can figure out how you’re going to do it, how you’re going to play this hand you’ve been dealt. What you can control is how you perceive things and your thinking about it. So I said, ‘Oh, what we’re doing here, we’re making a $200 million student film. We’re all just fuckin’ around! We’re playin’. Oh, great!’ That took all the pressure off. ‘Oh, just jam, man, just play.’ And it turned out great!”