The New York magazine Vulture is conducting interviews with several screenwriters behind this year's most successful films and inquiring about scenes they had the toughest time scripting. For Marvel's Iron Man 3, co-writer Drew Pearce says the scene where Sir Ben Kingsley's Mandarin outs himself as Trevor Slattery to Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark was certainly the most difficult.
"Hopefully, the movie's done well enough by now that this doesn't count as a spoiler, but we obviously chose to take a direction with Sir Ben Kingsley's version of the Mandarin that has a huge surprise. He turns out not to be the thing that the movie — and the marketing of the movie — purports him to be, which is this canon-based archnemesis to Iron Man. It gets to the trickiest thing of all the superhero movies out at the moment, which is: What makes for an interesting villain? Often, they're just there as a dark reflection of the hero, but Shane Black, who directed Iron Man 3 and who I co-wrote the movie with, told me that the key to making massive movies in this machine that will try to sand the edges off of what you write is to go into it with bold strokes. For the Mandarin, I'd been kicking around lots of ideas about false faces and terrorist pop stars and I was really worried about telling Marvel — I thought we'd get strung up — but Shane said, "[frick] 'em, this idea is kind of indelible. We should run towards it." And to both of our surprise, when we pitched it to Kevin Feige, who's the president of Marvel Studios, he took it in and said, "I love it." He'd been trying to crack the Mandarin concept since the first Iron Man. The Mandarin was actually in the first Iron Man up until six weeks before they shot it!" For Drew Pearce's full response, head over to Vulture. He also provided them with an excerpt from his and co-writer/director Shane Black's Iron Man 3 screenplay highlighting the controversial scene, which you can read below! What do you think?