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 Like Being in the Coolest Halloween Costume Ever...For Mahan and his team at Stan Winston Studies, the next challenge was making sure Robert Downey Jr. and the various stuntmen would be able to fit and function in the suit they were constructing.
“For Robert to be in the Mark III suit was a culmination of a great many steps because we had to take a design that is non-human in some of its proportions and fit actors and stuntmen into it,” says Mahan. “We were forced to reverse-engineer the suit because we didn't have Robert's body cast to build the suit over - joint-for-joint, measurement-for-measurement. The digital build and design of the suit was 95 percent complete before Robert was even cast in the film. We actually built the structures in the computer so that they're mathematically perfect and grew those parts in a process of rapid prototyping. Then we made the pieces and fit them around him and made them work and actually move. I was very happy with the results because the suits are quite athletic.”
The finished Mark III armor was the culmination of a truly collaborative effort of many talented designers, technicians, craftsmen and filmmakers. “The Mark III suit is a life-size, three-dimensional prototype of something that you've only seen in a comic book until now,” says executive producer D'Esposito. “It is the comic book character come to life, which really is a testament to Marvel, Jon Favreau, Stan Winston Studios and all of the incredibly talented people on the production team that helped conceive, design and build this iconic Iron Man armor.”
“Shane Mahan likes to build behind a curtain generally, so it's a pretty magical experience when the suit's completed and rolled out,” says Billingsley. “When you see and touch it for the first time, you feel a combination of excitement and fear because it's very real and you hope all the research was right and the textures, colors and proportions are on the money.”
Any fears were laid to rest when Robert Downey Jr. slipped into the Mark III suit for the first time on-set. “Seeing Robert in the suit for the first time was like watching a kid in a candy store,” says Feige. “He looked amazing and had all of the enthusiasm of a little boy. Then, he suddenly stood up and you could see the hero forming within him.”
“The first half hour of being in the Iron Man suit is like being in the coolest Halloween costume ever,” smiles Downey. “You're putting the suit on and you catch a glimpse in the mirror and you go, `That's right, Grandma would be proud.'”
The process of putting the full suit on Downey would take Mahan and his two assistants approximately 30 to 40 minutes. As shooting progressed, Mahan and his team modified the suit and also created a rubber stunt suit to free Downey from the physical restrictions of the more cumbersome full suit.
“The great part about the stunt suit was that it was built to be able to move around and look the same as it does when it's in a computer-generated form doing more acrobatic movements,” says stunt coordinator Harper. “The difficult part was that for close-ups, we had to have a suit that held up in the camera. The hero suit we used for these shots was very heavy and restrictive, which made it a bit torturous to wear for extended periods of time, so we had to rotate several performers in the suit, with Robert being one of them."
“As we got into the meat of the shooting schedule, I realized I could wear the full suit all the time, but that I couldn't always wear the full suit and be an effective actor at the same time,” says Downey. “You only have so much charge in your batteries every day, so I would wear a half-version of the suit or one of the stuntmen would jump into the fray when it wasn't critical for me to be in the full suit.”
“From my point-of-view Robert was essential to the suit performance because he instructed me or any other member of the suit crew as to what he needed to make his performance better,” explains Mahan. “We were happy to take a bicep or the lower legs off so that he had more freedom of movement, because in the end it's all about performance and if we needed to do something to make the actor more comfortable, that's what we did.”
Whether playing Tony Stark or his alter ego Iron Man, Downey was up to performing as many of his stunts as he could, which also impressed Harper. “Robert kept wanting to do more and more of his stunts and I had to keep reining him in,” laughs Harper. “He had taken the baby steps in preparation for one of the bigger pulls and one night we pulled him out so hard his feet went above his head. He flew into the pad pretty hard and got up and was like `pull me as hard as you want.' My job was a give and take of `you can do this, but you can't do that,' and from the get-go he was nothing but a gentleman and a class act.”
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