CraveOnline: You said you wrote this early on, or at least the original draft early on in the production of Iron Man 3…
Drew Pearce: Yeah.
And that’s interesting to me, because in some respects the way that the plot goes in All Hail the King makes one wonder if it was in reaction to fan response to the way that you handled The Mandarin.
Obviously the movie literally deals with some of my reactions to the fans’ response, but as far as… it’s definitely not there as a salve. In fact, weirdly, when I was writing it, I really just think of it as a continuation of the facts as they existed in the MCU. We already knew in Iron Man 1 there was The Ten Rings, and in Iron Man 2 there was actually I think a deleted scene, and we were really explicit in both the movie of Iron Man 3 and the press around it that it was a mantle connected with The Ten Rings that had already existed, and was co-opted by Killian. So weirdly, for me, the short is just a continuation of that. There’s some joining of dots of course, but I feel like it would be a weird way to apologize for something, to make people who hated Trevor Slattery sit through 15 glorious minutes of him at his most Trevor-ish.
Yeah, I can see that. On the other hand it could be seen as a way of exorcizing those demons.
It’s a weird thing. I never felt guilty for doing the twist anyway, and I feel like if there was an about face in the short that said “Trevor Slattery is really The Mandarin after all” then I think would be cheap.
It would have been cheap. And I want to go on record as saying that I thought the twist was exceptionally clever.
I’m glad! I’m really glad. I’m super proud of it, and I think it’s kind of indelible in that movie, and I think superhero movies would do better to surprise the audience as much as possible. And though, yeah, I understand that some people feel that their feathers were ruffled by moving away from canon, I feel like it’s what people should be doing.
Whose notion was that? Or was that already in the script by the time you were brought on?
Oh no, I was the first person on to Iron Man 3, and the last person out. It was only ever Shane [Black] and I, working together, who ever got their hands on that script, which is such SUPER-rare in modern blockbuster writing practices. And again, it speaks to Marvel’s commitment to bringing different defining voices to their properties in their movies, I think, and bravery in backing them as well. But no, it was an idea that Shane and I came up with, principally because of the theme of Tony’s journey, which was…
We loved this idea of false faces, and the idea that the line between who Iron Man was as a mask and who Tony was as a person was becoming blurred. The fact that as much as he was kind of resenting the responsibility of being Iron Man, he was also hiding behind the mask. Literally. He has a form of PTSD. And we wanted something in the villain journey to mirror that, and we loved the idea of the modern media construct of demonizing terrorist leaders. And then at one point I went to the bathroom and came back and I said, “What if The Mandarin was an actor?” Because we had already been playing with the idea of Killian in there as well.
Now obviously, what I didn’t do is come back in there and say, “What if The Mandarin is a drunk British luvvy, with a voice like Withnail who has a pair of hookers in his bed and a past drug problem?” That would have been a more audacious opening pitch, and it will be no surprise at all the brilliant “Shane Black” is the person who encouraged me along that direction. But yes, so that was how it came about. It was nothing there in the beginning, but then you work with someone like Sir Ben Kingsley, who is only in that movie as Trevor for two scenes. Five minutes of screen time tops. So the chance to revisit that character was both the impetus for the short and, frankly, the reason for rocking up to either make it or watch it.
