In the new indie drama Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, Robert Downey Jr. is covered from head to toe in luscious fur, but when ComingSoon.net/Superhero Hype! spoke to Downey Jr. about the movie, we were more interested in another suit he will be wearing soon, one of armor in Jon Favreau’s Iron Man.
“The suit for ‘Iron Man’ is so complex and does so much stuff that except for once or twice or from the chest up, I’m not required to do all that much,” Downey Jr. told us when asked if he’d been fitted for the armor yet. “What I will do is a lot of motion capture so that the movement isn’t just some random stunt guy. A lot of time I look at CGI and I’m like ‘What’s the reference for this? This looks like a cartoon reference not a person.” So I said I want to do all the motion capture work, which is like eight months after finishing shooting, but as much as it as I can do, I will.”
“I went after it like a greyhound after a rabbit,” he said when asked whether Favreau approached him or whether he went after the part. “I loved Marvel and ‘Iron Man’ to me is the goods. To tell you the God’s honest truth, I’d thrown them all away for Sgt. Rock, because I really grew up on Hogan’s Heroes, Sgt. Rock. I’m still addicted to the History Channel and the Military Channel is my thing, but Tony’s the best because I could never be Sgt. Rock. He’s a little bigger and more butch and has a cigar, I don’t see it. Tony’s a perfect fit for me, and if I was ever going to do this type of thing, I thought, you know, like early ’40’s. Great, because when you hang up your ‘macho hat’ and start directing or doing other stuff, it’s not an embarrassment to be doing this in your late ’40s still if we wind up doing three of them.”
He also said that there would be some major casting announcements soon including Tony Stark’s secretary Pepper Potts and one other, but he couldn’t let the cat out of the bag despite being excited about the chance to work with the actors.
Iron Man is scheduled for May 2, 2008, but you can see Downey Jr. in Steven Shainsburg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which opens in New York and Los Angeles this week, and check out the rest of our interview with Downey Jr. over on ComingSoon.net in the next week.
Source: Edward Douglas
