SNEAK PEEK : "Iron Man 3" Spoilers Revealed

Director Shane Black and Marvel Studios' President of Production Kevin Feige revealed spoilers from "Iron Man 3", following a 15-minute press screening:

"We want it to be a 'Tony Stark'-centric story," said Feige about "Iron Man 3"."We want to blow up his life and see how he deals with a nemesis without his suits working, get him back metaphorically to the cave with a box of scraps, like the first movie. That has remained and carried on through, and it was one of the reasons we connected with Shane (Black). Because if we wanted to do a big 'It connects to The Avengers and then Nick Fury comes in and stuff,' I don’t think Shane would have been interested in that and I don’t think he would have been the right guy for it. But to take a Tony Stark journey and explore his character deeper than we had since the first act of the first film, he was the man. It evolved over the next 8 or 9 months after that into basically what it is now.

"...one of the joys for me has always been seeing how you take a villain from the comic book and realize him in a slightly more realistic way for the movie, render him for movies in a way that’s recognizable, but different," said Black. "And that’s fun. Like the 'Joker' in 'The Dark Knight' is not the Joker from the comic book, but there’s just enough of him that you recognize him and go, 'Wow, what a creative way of interpreting the Joker for motion pictures'. So that was our task here too.

"The fans love this character 'The Mandarin' and we just said, 'Well, what we don’t want is this potentially racist, stereotype of a 'Fu Manchu' villain just waving his fist'. But we found a way, I think, to get an iteration of The Mandarin that we like.

"We got very excited about having cracked this story when we found out that we could include The Mandarin and give him a character that would be a perfect match, the ultimate 'Iron Man' villain, but without relying too heavily on what the comic book stereotype was...

"The rings are rings. They’re showmanship. They’re accoutrements. They’re paraphernalia of warfare that he sort of drapes himself with. He studies 'Sun Tzu'.

"He studies insurgency tactics. He surrounds himself with dragons and symbols of warlords and Chinese iconography because he wants to represent this sort of prototypical terrorist who – we use as the example 'Colonel Kurtz' from 'Apocalypse Now' - this guy who may have been an American, may have been a British National, someone who is out there doing field work, supervising atrocities for the intelligence community, who went nuts in the field and became this sort of devotee of war tactics, and now has surrounded himself with a group of people over which he presides, and the only thing that unifies them is this hatred of America.

"So he’s the ultimate terrorist, but he’s also savvy. He’s been in the intelligence world. He knows how to use the media. And taking it to a real world level like that was a lot fun for us.

"The only real connective tissue we wanted from 'Avengers' in this movie was the Avengers’ effect on Tony’s psyche," said Feige about Robert Downey's portryal of Iron Man. "This man who comes from this grounded universe – I always say it’s grounded enough although he builds an iron suit and flies around – the notion that Tony Stark, who is the shit and always thought of himself as top dog, now has been to outer space, nearly got killed by freaking aliens, has encountered a god that can smash him across the forest with a hammer and has encountered a guy that his father used to talk about from 1945.

"It’s no mistake that we meet Tony at the beginning of this movie and he’s just building suits, putting himself in the suit, and he’s much more comfortable when he’s in the suit. And a lot of this movie is about Tony learning to become Tony Stark again outside the armor, and he has a little help in that his house is completely destroyed.

"He’s in a world where all of a sudden, without this armor, there’s elements with which he cannot hope to compete," said Black. "So his comfort in his own skin has diminished at the start of this movie by the fact that he feels like, unless he can build the perfect man, he’s going to be outdone and outshone by these people who are literally gods. So how he can then have those suits taken away from him until he’s just a man and he can’t possibly compete, that was the impetus for this movie, rip everything off him and say, 'Yes, you’re alone with these incredible forces aligned against you, and you don’t even have your armor.'

"And in all of our films, particularly this one ...you can have heightened elements", said Feige. Look at 'Avengers', you can have these crazy otherworldly things as long as the way the characters are responding to those things…the emotional response of the characters, that’s where grounding it in reality is most important. Even in the comics, by the way, that’s the difference between caring about a comic book character and not, is if their emotional response is believable and is appropriate. Certainly what Tony is going through based on the events of Avengers is very real and, is not quite as dire as this, but is a form of post-traumatic stress. He is actually dealing with it in a way you don’t see superheroes deal with it much.

"...the effect Avengers had on him is that he’s tinkering even more than he did before and he’s building much more than he ever did before," said Feige about Tony Stark's armor. "'The Iron Patriot' is also kind of a response to Avengers. It’s a government rebrand of 'War Machine', frankly because the US government felt that they were slightly embarrassed by the events of Avengers. These crazy heroes known as 'The Avengers' were the ones that saved the day, saved New York City, saved United States...not the government.

"The government felt they needed a hero of their own, they have a military officer that has one of these suits, and they paint it red, white, and blue. They pose it next to the president and Tony sort of rolls his eyes...they want a hero of their own. And Tony’s like, 'What do you mean, I’m a hero?' And they say 'Well you’ve been spending a lot of time in your workshop. We want somebody we can rely on'. So that’s sort of how the Iron Patriot came about. nd, again, it’s a thing from the comics, we just thought the Iron Patriot suit looked equal parts cool and slightly goofy in the comics....it gave us a place to go with 'Rhodey'. We wanted to take Rhodey and his sort of split loyalties between his friend and his duty and keep carrying that storyline through.

Talking about a sequence in the film with the jet 'Air Force One' Feige said , "I wanted to have people in the sky, just falling, and Iron Man is confronted with that image and he’s got to get them out of it somehow. The challenge was on the days we said, 'Well we’d really love to do this, but we don’t want to do just green screen, can we just toss people out of a plane?' and they said, 'Well that would probably be unethical'.

"But we found the 'Redbull' skydiving team that was willing to jump out of a plane and have their backpacks erased digitally. It’s kind of compelling, the first images you see of people falling in clothes, because people are always in jumpsuits, orange or yellow jumpsuits, and when you just see some girl in a skirt and a guy in a business suit falling it’s pretty scary....Over the course of almost a week, we did 8 to 10 jumps a day, for a week. It was amazing, amazing footage."