Jeff Bridges has spoken about how he managed to move past being ‘driven crazy’ on the set of Iron Man.
The Big Lebowski star turned his talents to the superhero genre for Marvel’s breakout series, playing villain Obadiah Stane opposite Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark.
In a recent interview to Vanity Fair, Bridges said the experience was ‘wonderful’ but drove him ‘absolutely crazy’ after the script was pretty much thrown out on day one.
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Still, they managed to come out of it OK in the end.
Bridges explained: “It was Marvel’s first adventure into making movies,
“It was so lucky to have Jon [Favreau] on there and [Robert] Downey, because both of them are terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn’t like the original script and we thought, ‘Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.’”
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He continued: “Then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s got to be this and that'.
“And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say. We’d spend hours in one of our trailers going over lines and exploring how we were going to do it.”
Favreau apparently reached out to some mates in order to get screenwriting tips to move the script on, but that was the point at which Bridge decided to change his approach to the film.
He took the decision to start taking it a bit easier and enjoying himself.
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After all, it's good work, and - crucially - money in the bank.
He said: “It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain that was, ‘Jeff, just relax. You’re making a $200 million student film. Just relax and have fun.'
“And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that’s what we ended up doing.”
In the end, they created what Bridges describes as the ‘best Marvel movie’.
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To be fair, it was wildly successful.
So successful – in fact – that they made a further two movies after that, launching the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the stratosphere.
Now, it’s just about the biggest movie franchise going, starring all sorts of huge names and bringing many of the iconic Marvel comic book characters to life for a new generation of fans.
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In the end, Bridges seems to have done quite well from it, so it’s probably worth the aggravation that it might have caused him to start with.
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Topics: Film and TV, Robert Downey Jr, Celebrity, Iron Man, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Tom Wood