REVEALED! How Russo brothers made last-minute changes to Iron Man's tear-jerker farewell
Russo brothers are known for directing four iconic films within the MCU namely, ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ ‘Captain America: Civil War,’ ‘Avengers: Infinity War,’ and ‘Avengers: Endgame.’ Talking about ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ this film became the second highest grossing film of all times that garnered almost $2.7 billion at the global box office. In a recent conversational interview, Russo Brothers spoke about the making of the final scene for Iron Man in the film.
In a Vanity Fair interview, Joe and Anthony opened up on the most important scene in ‘Avengers: Endgame’ -- Iron Man’s (Robert Downey Jr) last minute death scene reshoots. They shared it was very important for them to nail down the final scene of the film where Iron Man uses his infinity stones in a war of defeating Thanos and ends up sacrificing his own life. Tony Stark’s valiant heroic sacrifice has not been forgotten by ardent ‘Iron Man’ fans even today.
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Opening up on their favorite scenes from ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ Joe shared “You do not want to f*** up Tony Stark's last line,” before going on to explain in details how Downey Jr wanted to improvise lines for his final scene in the film. He revealed how they all did multiple takes and still didn’t feel satisfied before ultimately landing on the only one that made it into the final cut, and surprisingly though this line had been suggested by the movie’s editor to them.
Giving details on Downey wanting to improvise his scene in the interview, Joe said, “So Downey actually asked to improvise a few lines here. We tried some alternate versions of it. And they were sort of more in this snarky, Tony Stark vein. He wasn't playing it with enough pain of the...the power of the stones surging through his body.”
Talking about the final version of the last scene which made the cut after plenty of retakes, Anthony Russo added, “In fact, the edit that we ended up settling on in that version was a version where he said nothing.” In this conversation, Joe also chipped in saying, “We redid this three times. Third time's the charm.”
Opening up on how the movie’s editor suggested them a line which they used and eventually created the final nailing scene for Iron Man, Anthony shared, “Our editor, Jeff Ford, who is one of the most amazing filmmakers we've ever collaborated with, edited the first Iron Man movie. So he had been on the journey with the character since the original Jon Favreau-directed Iron Man.”
In this conversation, giving more detailed insight on what went down in making that scene so memorable and impactful, Joe said, “He hit play and Thanos says, "I am inevitable." And then beat-beat-beat. And Jeff went, "I am Iron Man." And we were like, "Stop! Stop the Avid!.”