The movie that almost broke Jeff Bridges: “It drove me absolutely crazy”
Despite the studio’s commercial success, not one reasonably well-adjusted person has praised the artistic integrity of the Marvel movie-making machine. Everyone from Martin Scorsese to Kristen Stewart, even those who have starred in their films, criticises the meaningless slop that they churn out. With the rise of rollercoaster films, there has been a significant decline in the production of independent cinema, with producers and executives becoming less willing to take risks on projects that aren’t guaranteed to earn them millions of dollars.
Given the fact that these films are awarded such high budgets, you might presume that they are at least well-made or organised during production, but as highlighted by Jeff Bridges, they are picture-perfect behind the scenes and are, in fact, a complete mess.
Iron Man was first released in 2008, starring Robert Downey Junior, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges. The film was the first iteration of the Tony Stark character, following the hero after being held hostage in a cave and deciding to create a special suit that allows him to fight evil forces.
While the Marvel studio is now a billion-dollar industry and has found huge commercial success through countless series and comic book characters, this doesn’t necessarily mean it runs smoothly or even knows what it’s doing, with Bridges criticising its messy approach to filmmaking.
When describing the experience, Bridges said, “It was Marvel’s first adventure into making movies. It was so lucky to have Jon on there and [Robert] Downey, because both of them are terrific improvisers, and we spent a couple of weeks working on the script and rehearsing together, because we didn’t like the original script and we thought, ‘Oh yeah, we fixed this, fixed that.’”
However, things became slightly more complicated after they began shooting, with Bridges saying, “Then came the first day of shooting, and Marvel kind of threw out our script that we had been working on, said, ‘No, that’s no good. It’s got to be this and that’. And so there was a lot of confusion about what our script was, what we were gonna say… It drove me absolutely crazy until I made a slight adjustment in my brain that was, ‘Jeff, just relax. You’re making a $200 million student film. Just relax and have fun’. And that kind of did the trick because here I get to play with these two incredible artists and just jam, and that’s what we ended up doing.”
Ultimately, the description of Marvel projects as being $200m dollar student films is the perfect way to describe the studio, with no idea how to be genuinely creative and stifling artists who are trying to do their job by dismissing their ideas and suggestions on how to inject life into the script. It is sad that this kind of incompetence is normalised in the industry and something that reflects the general state of filmmaking today when these types of pictures have only grown in popularity and harmed the general state of cinema.
