Jeff Bridges: 'Iron Man' "Had No Script"

Now that the money's counted, why not come out and spill secrets about Iron Man? If you're Jeff Bridges and you have better-than-longshot odds at your first Oscar for Crazy Heart, double the why not. Bridges sat down to talk to In Contention - one of my absolute favorite awards season hubs - and the subject of Iron Man came up. Despite what you read at the beginning, Bridges isn't really complaining. I don't think. "They had no script, man. They had an outline. We would show up for big scenes every day and we wouldn't know what we were going to say," Bridges remembers. "We would have to go into our trailer and work on this scene and call up writers on the phone, 'You got any ideas?' Meanwhile the crew is tapping their foot on the stage waiting for us to come on." That may sound negative, but Bridges still maintains Iron Man works in spite of the unusual working conditions. "You would think with a $200 million movie you'd have the shit together, but it was just the opposite. And the reason for that is because they get ahead of themselves. They have a release date before the script." I don't need any other reason to like Jeff Bridges, but if I had a nickel for every time I've discussed that very thing here at The Big Picture and in conversations, I could probably buy a pretty decent meal. The model for blockbusters, if it's not broken, is certainly warped a little. We have release dates for movies three years in the future. Those aren't really the issue so much as a by-product of the central problem: Movies like New Moon that speed into production because there's one opening they think they need to converge upon. Hard to make a classic with a gun to your head. Then again, Orson Welles adapted Touch of Evil in three weeks and shot it in less than a month. Still, that kind of hurried pace impacts everyone, including the cast and the crew. "What you can control is how you perceive things and your thinking about it," adds The Dude. "So I said, 'Oh, what we're doing here, we're making a $200 million student film. We're all just fucking around! We're playing. Oh, great!' That took all the pressure off. And it turned out great!" I love happy endings, don't you?

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[Honz Brix]

The Dude abides!