On The Eve Of IRON MAN's DVD Release, Mr. Beaks Reports Back From Stan Winston Studio!

A few weeks ago, I had the rather mindblowing opportunity to tour Stan Winston Studio out in Van Nuys, California. To say that I was "overwhelmed" when I entered the showroom is a gross understatement. As I stood at the entrance, the first creatures that caught my eye were the Commando Elite and the Gorgonites from Joe Dante's smart, subversive SMALL SOLDIERS. Pretty cool. Then I made my way into the room, and completely lost my ability to process visual information for a few minutes. Schwarzenegger's Terminator. The T-800 endoskeleton. A velociraptor. Edward Scissorhands. Tom Cruise's Lestat (photos forbidden). A frozen Kristen Stewart (from ZATHURA). Andy Kaufman's robotic head from HEARTBEEPS. A trio of rejected designs for HOWARD THE DUCK (which Stan evidently liked enough to keep around). And a forlorn Teddy from A.I. sitting all by his lonesome on Stan's director's chair. That last sight threatened to cast a bittersweet pall over the day, but key artist Christopher Swift and model shop supervisor David Merritt weren't about to let us dwell on the company's profound loss of a few months ago. Ever the entertainer, Stan would want the show, and the work, to go on, to continue flaunting the same degree of excellence that made the studio one of the top practical f/x outfits in the industry. For the newly-minted Legacy Studio, the edict is simple: do it better than the last one. Right now, "the last one" is Jon Favreau's IRON MAN, which called upon Swift and Merritt to build fully functional Mark I, II, III and IV outfits into which stuntmen could fit and in which they could achieve some range of movement. Easier requested than built. Though they're more than happy to boast about their accomplishment now, you can still hear the residue of many stressful nights in Swift's voice when he describes how a seemingly successful test concluded with pieces of the suit clattering off onto the ground. Swift can laugh about Favreau's sternly encouraging response now ("Guys, you did an amazing job, but... those parts are going to stay on in the movie."), but I doubt he was laughing back in March of 2007. This tour/interview opportunity was timed to the DVD/Blu-ray release of IRON MAN on September 30th. Seeing as how that's tomorrow, I thought today would be a highly appropriate time to share this interview with you. It's a tech-heavy discussion, but most of you guys are the kind of nerds who used to devour this stuff in Starlog - and if you take that as an insult, know that I'm insulting myself, too. Walking around a facility like this, and talking with artists who worked their magic into some of my all-time favorite movies, is what makes this job very easy to do.

Jon Favreau has been a proponent of practical f/x. He was really into it on ZATHURA, so, obviously, he turned to you guys on IRON MAN. But I heard you saying earlier that the Mark III was not always going to be a practical suit?

Swift: Not originally. Due to the expectations of what they were looking for, I don't think it made sense for them at that point to think of it as a practical suit, whether we could actually get a person in it, can he move... being the fact that it's such a slick design, it's almost like a car body that has to have joints in there. It's not like an armored suit in the knight days, where you have a lot of pieces that you could see the movement happen within those. This was a slick suit. It was like, "How can you make all of that stuff move, and make it practical." So I think the idea was that it was going to be digital, and that we would get insert shots from the suit that we made as well as reference points for lighting, for digital, and all of that. Again, except for the Mark I, which was always... that one does make sense; that's more built like an iron suit from the knight days.

How did you do it?

Swift: (Pauses. We laugh.) We're asking the same question ourselves. At the end of the movie, we were like, "How did we do that?" It really did seem like an impossible task. Merritt: The directive from Marvel and production was really to put the emphasis on it being a superhero. The idea of fitting someone in there wasn't as important. So once we nailed down that design from [illustrator] Phil Saunders and moved on to building a 3-D model, we were able to then start taking scans of the body, and starting to... see how things were going to work. Through that process, we were able to kind of get an idea that this might work. Meanwhile, as they were working out their budgets for digital, I think they came to the realization that whatever we could get practically would only help the movie. So they really started embracing that. Swift: I would love to say that - being that the majority of us who worked on it are pretty seasoned as far as doing a lot of suit work and things like that - it was like, "Oh, we'll just make this and go on our expertise and our talent." But there were many, many nights where we were here late pulling our hair out going, "How are we going to do this!?!?"" Merritt: It was so tight. Swift: It really was tight. We didn't know that from the very beginning, so we didn't... move over to that ideology until well into the building part of it. We had very little time to actually do this. There was a lot of engineering as we went along. We literally built it piece-by-piece and part-by-part. We would solve problem-by-problem instead of looking at it as a whole, like "How do we solve the leg problem?" So we would literally get a guy in here and put the legs on him, and let him walk around. "He can walk. Can he run?" We literally built it up piece-by-piece the same way you'd engineer the suit for real - although we didn't have the robots welding it all together. That was all of us as the taskmasters. Merritt: But we did start out using robots in a way. We utilize a lot of rapid prototype process machines here as a tool for us to get our job done. And when we started getting into actually fabricating for the Mark III, we were able to... start refining the surfaces and really treating it like an automotive body, making sure the lines were clean.

I have a colleague at work who has this incredible Iron Man t-shirt of the thirty or forty different variations of the character. How did you settle on a variation for the final design of the suit?

Swift: I would have to say the majority of that was done between Phil Saunders and Adi Granov with the producers and Marvel themelves. They were very particular about not only staying in tradition with the actual design of Iron Man, but making it also a new spinoff version - but not changing it so much that you wouldn't recognize it. Not only that, but they really paid attention to the fans and their thinking. I'm a big comic book fan, and I can't tell you how many times I've seen a comic book turned into a movie where I'm like, "Well, that doesn't look like the costume! You changed it! It's an established character!" They were really particular about staying honest to that, and being true to the fans to make sure they weren't disappointed when they saw the suit. Merritt: Once we got ahold of it and made our 3-D model, we worked with Phil to make some modifications so we could start to realize how joints were going to truly move, how plates were going to open up, how the hips were going to work so they wouldn't crash into each other. We'd make those modifications and run them by Phil, and he would make little changes. We went through that process for two or three weeks until we came up with something they were happy with.

Do those practical logistics make substantial changes to the visuals, or were they just small tweaks?

Merritt: They were small enough tweaks that you really wouldn't notice. The only real change was that Shane [Mahan] and Chris adjusted the head a little bit. That was about it. Swift: The back of the neck, yeah.

How do you think the fans would've reacted if it was an all-digital suit?

Swift: That's really hard to say without seeing it and knowing it. Let me answer that by saying this: when the movie came out, and they were showing it down at the Arclight Theater, the Arclight asked us to send down our Mark III suit. It was sitting there in the lobby, and I went down there to see a different movie, and I could barely get through the crowd that was standing around the Mark III suit. Regardless of how it plays onscreen, the fact that somebody could sit there and see a real Iron Man suit in front of them - looking at the suit, and then going to see the movie - I think it just makes a mental difference. "Wow! There's a real thing there! There really was a guy in this movie in a suit. No matter how many shots or how few shots, we just know that there really was an Iron Man suit." And I loved watching little kids run around going, "I want to be in that suit! Can I go in that suit?" You don't get that from just watching a digital movie.

What was it like for the stuntmen in the suits? I heard that one of them fell down and was terrified that he'd broken it.

Swift: That was the Mark I. Mike Justus, I would have to say, was pretty much solely [the guy in the suit]. When you don't see Robert Downey Jr. actually lifting his head up, it's pretty much Mike Justus. Merritt: Oakley [Lehman] also. Swift: Oakley was also in there, but I think Mike was the one who fell. He said he fell like a sack of potatoes. He made one misstep, and... he stopped, but the suit kept going. Merritt: We had to switch Mike and Oakley out. You could only be in the suit for three hours before you just got tired. I know this is getting off-track a little, but when we were talking about the weight before, there's a difference between having, like, an eighty-pound backpack on and... eighty pounds just wrapped around you, it's just totally different. Swift: It really worked out to our advantage that... at the point in the movie where the Mark III suit comes out, and he's going out doing all of these things, Jon's very good about keeping things very organic and realistic. He never came to us, like on a lot of movies, and said, "I want this to always be pristine and shiny." So if it gets a nick, and it gets a scratch, and it falls down, keeping continuity might be a problem, but if it gets a nick, it's okay. Let the suit be an iron suit; it does get nicks, and it not only shows reality, but vulnerability - which is important to the storyline. If you think he's invincible, then what's the point? That really helped us out: the fact that we could expand upon when suits would get nicked up and broken and things like that, we ran with that. We allowed it to be part of the suit and the look of the suit.

Following up on the different looks for Iron Man over the years, have you guys began talking about what to do new in the next one?

Merritt: I don't think we're there yet. Swift: We've gotten very little information. The most I've heard is the possibility of the War Machine, and that it's Terrence Howard in this one. I have to say, I talked a lot with Terence on the set, and I said, "Get ready. Because in the comic books, you end up in the suit." And he said, "Really!?!? I love the idea! I want to be in that suit!" And you know what? He'll probably get his opportunity. He's got a great build; he's very skinny, so we wouldn't have a hard time fitting him in the suit.

In the '70s, Iron Man had roller skates. Can you put roller skates on him for the next one? (Laughter)

Swift: No, but there is talk of an Iron Chimp that roller skates and smokes cigars. I don't know if that's going to happen, but I, for one, am looking forward to that.

You talked about the difficulty of building the suits. I don't know if it was the time frame specifically, but in terms of what you've done before, where does [IRON MAN] rank in terms of a challenge?

Swift: As far as building time and all of that? I would say up to par with everything we get nowadays. What would you say? Merritt: For me, it was right up there among the top three. Just in having to get him into the suit, the logistics of it all was really challenging. The time frame was pretty standard for a lot of films these days. But what we ended up having to do over the long run, that's what made it challenging.

When you say "top three", what are the other two you're thinking of?

Swift: Probably the last two movies we worked on.

AVATAR?

Merritt: Yes, AVATAR. The TERMINATOR movies. It just was hard.

Is that how it always is in this business? The next movie is always the hardest project?

Swift: It can be. It usually depends on how much are we doing for the movie. Sometimes we just get one small character that we can focus on; other things, like IRON MAN, we just have to do much more. We have to build not only one Iron Man suit, but three types of suits. And we had to build the Iron Monger. I give all the credit to Dave. To expand on what he was saying, these suits were built piece-by-piece, so opposed to when we do open organic suits such as a monster, we'll sculpt the whole thing; hands might be separate, head will be separate... we'll break it down in that sense. For the most part we have a large majority of it that's all one part; once we get it molded and sculpted, we run it as such and paint it as such. These were almost separate parts and pieces; putting the whole suit together, it really had to be built that way. It was a big effort. Merritt: With the Mark II and the Mark III, there were well over eighty pieces to the individual suits. We had to figure out how it was going to move, how it was going to fit, and how he was going to move within it. And then there was the undersuit, and filling in the joints in between. Swift: There were two factors that I looked at, especially with the Mark II and the Mark III - basically they're the same suit - which is Dave's team did such an awesome job of taking all those pieces and making them so pristine and beautiful. To the eye, they're just perfect pieces. At the same time... the aesthetic part is one thing, but on the other hand, how do we make it all work. There was engineering that, taking those parts of those beautiful pieces and trying to figure it out. Even when we had the pieces, there would be re-cutting and re-engineering, and Dave's team would have to go back and re-work another thing and make it beautiful again after we had to cut out a certain part because it wouldn't bend right or whatever.

There's been an obvious trend in the way these stories are told: even the most fantastical thing has to be sort of grounded in some kind of practical realism. What is more of a challenge for you guys: something like [IRON MAN], where there is a layer of realism to it, or is it when you have complete freedom to do whatever you want?

Swift: As in making it, or as in liking it as a fan?

Both.

Swift: Because to me, I'm a big fan of grounding things in reality. I think one of the things that makes IRON MAN work as a movie, and I've heard this from so many people, not only my own, is the fact that people go, "That really could be. That really could happen. Somebody could really bulid a suit." With technology, we don't even know half the stuff that's going out there military-wise, but it seems plausible to make a suit. It's basically an aircraft fighter built around a guy, as opposed to actually getting in a machine. So in that sense, as a fan, I think that reality grounds the movie to where I can go through it and believe it. That makes it work for me as a fantasy comic book movie. As far as building it, there's always a challenge to making something look real and not silly and stupid if it has to be such. Merritt: A lot of that is in the filming too. In the camera angles, and how the approach it. Swift: This particular suit... I'm very proud that it came out of the studio. When you see it in person, it works from every angle, from every shot; it just looks like the real thing. I don't look at any part of it and go, "You know what? We could've done better. We failed in this part. It didn't look so good from this angle." Merritt: The first camera test we went to, everybody was there: Marvel, production and so on. The first five-minute flight was at [unintelligible]. So we took him down there, and we had the green-screen suit on, so we had holes in it and everything. We put it on, they do the camera test, and when everyone saw him they were just kind of blow away by... for the first time ever, seeing Iron Man walking. The next day, we went down for the screening; we all took our notepads, and we're all ready [to take notes]. And the first time they saw Iron Man, I remember Favreau goes, "That's our guy!" And we walked out of that screening room without a single note. Swift: The funny part was that... Shane is a really good showman, so we put the guy in the suit in a tent. And when he walked out, he walked out [in the full suit]. I remember... we were so not ready for this test. He walked out of that tent, and everybody just went, "Oh, that's it!" Then he took ten steps, and, like, eight pieces fell off of him. Jon was like, "Guys, you did an amazing job, but... those parts are going to stay on in the movie."

When was that in the production process?

Swift: Probably around March [2007]. Merritt: It was before we started shooting.

They're talking about a release date of 2010 for IRON MAN 2. Are you guys worried about being on another tight schedule?

Merritt: No. These days, we just have to approach it fast and furious, and jump right in. Swift: We always know it's going to be tight, and that's just the way it is. The things that become a worry are... we do this as artists, so we want to do things that we're proud of. Not only do we do it for the fans... we do it for ourselves.

With the passing of Stan this year, there was a lot of talk about this being the passing of an era - which it was in a way. Some people think practical f/x are on their way out. Do you guys think practical f/x will be strong in the 21st century?

Merritt: Oh yeah, I think so. I mean, digital is a great tool. It makes our jobs easier. It's one of the reasons we're able to build things as quickly as we do, because we know that we'll be able to get away with certain things. You know... everybody loves practical. I mean, it just looks right and looks real. Even digital loves it because it makes their job easier. I think it'll be around for a while.

You read the rest of this interview, which turned into a brief AVATAR interrogation, here, so I'll just leave it at that, and figure that you'll get the rest of your IRON MAN fix when you snap up the DVD or Blu-ray tomorrow (September 30th). Faithfully submitted, Mr. Beaks