The Marvel Cinematic Universe, despite many people feeling it has recently stumbled, is still the biggest thing in movies, and that’s due, in no small part to the initial success of Iron Man. The movie took a lot of big chances, not the least of which included hiring Jon Favreau to direct and casting Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role as Tony Stark. Both men would go on to do big things for Marvel, but one early scene in Iron Man seemingly foreshadowed Favreau’s work with Star Wars.
In a video for Vanity Fair, Robert Downey Jr. talks about several of the major film roles of his career, including, of course, his star-making turn in Iron Man. It turns out that the scene early in the film where Tony escapes his captivity in his rudimentary Iron Man suit and crashes into the desert coincided with a pretty severe windstorm; one that seemingly reminded Downey of something out of Star Wars, the franchise where Jon Favreau is now focusing most of his efforts. Downey said…
There’s another moment where Tony has escaped the cave and essentially become Iron Man. And he lands in this kind of crater outside the cave where he’s being held. There was a windstorm that day and we were trying to get this take and it was very Star Wars-Esque in a way, very reminiscent of what Jon has wound up doing since with Mandalorian. And it was just this moment where this storm kind of settled. Everyone looked at everyone like, ‘Let’s get one more take.’ And that’s the one that’s in the film.
Looking at the scene, it’s easy to see why it made Robert Downey Jr. think of something out of Star Wars. He could just as easily be on Tatooine in the shot where he finds himself mostly buried in the sand surrounded by the wreckage of his first Iron Man suit. Of course, the original Star Wars used North Africa for its desert planet, while Iron Man was filmed in the Alhambra Hills of California.
Downey talks about the fact that a lot of Iron Man was written while they were filming it, so there must have been moments when they were trying footage they weren’t sure would work. In this case, they were trying to get a shot and the weather wasn’t cooperating until it was. Downey seems to feel this was a sign they were all on the right track. He continued…
It even felt sometimes like the elements themselves were conspiring to help us do our job.
Certainly, in much the same way that people weren’t sure if Robert Downey Jr. was the right choice to lead a superhero movie, Jon Favreau had never directed anything of that scale before either. There’s no way he could have imagined that not only would he become a big part of the MCU both behind and in front of the camera, but his success there would lead to him becoming one of the key architects of Star Wars’ first live-action series.
Of course, it should be said that Jon Favreau hasn’t exactly been spending a lot of time in the sand making The Mandalorian. The show uses The Volume, digital screens to create most of its settings, so the series isn’t going out on location like the old says. Still, if Iron Man hadn’t worked out, Favreau might not have ended up where he did.