Q: Does it ever get frustrating wearing the chest piece?

RDJ: Look, wearing a watch can be frustrating if you’re not in the right head space. There was this time a couple of days ago where they said, ‘You’ve been through a lot, and this has been a really grueling shoot, it’s also been a really magical shoot, because I shit you not, every day we’ve come in – and it reminds me of reading about Chaplin in the early days, where he’d go in without an idea in his head. It’s not like we don’t have a script and one that we approve of, but we’d go in and say, ‘How do we raise this to a level of something we want to see, or something that addresses all the different elements of these kind of films?' I'm actually starting to think that they're a really, really, really high order of art because there are so many things that you have to professionally have gone through and understood and experienced to be able to not be overwhelmed by the fact that, 'Now, in this scene, you're going through something but actually the boot is out and you're welding and the phone rings and all this other stuff and you have a relationship with your shop…' And why I'm so glad, I'm actually really comforted being here right now is we, you ever feel that that summer in that place or in that apartment creatively, we did every single thing we could, or wrote my best, I was the most honest, I was the most disciplined and we had those… back when you used to say, 'I'm not just going to go out and eat again. I'm going to look at this new menu from this cookbook I've had for five years and actually try to make a pasta that doesn't suck.' But really number six, eight minutes, not 10 or 12. We really came in and on this set in particular, because this is where so much of his work happens and creation of the mark two suit and then the armor. What was the question?

Q: The chest piece.

RDJ: Oh yeah. No, it's fine.

Q: What has you training process been like for this film?

RDJ: The funny thing is there’s some museum in Miami and I got this little key chain and it looked like Iron Man. This was like six month before I even knew this thing. For the last five years I’ve been doing martial arts and then when I got the part, they said, 'So, do you want to put on some size?' I’m not 28 or some guy like Daniel Craig who’s already got meat packed on his shoulders and they just swelled them up for that. You’ve seen me in all the movies, I’m not like Mr. Buff guy and now I'm in the over 40 crew, so it has literally been this excruciating process of working out so hard and so often just to not look like a little pot bellied pig. There's a couple scenes where we finally got together and I'm banging on the thing and I go, 'Matty, dude, do you got any?' And goes, 'Dude, I know what to do. I've done this before.' And they light it right and I'm like ugh, and rubber band sand and we do all this stuff. I was like, 'Wow, that looked great, you're really in shape.' And 20 minutes later, errr. Yoga and eating right and all the supplements and sleeping right and all the obvious stuff that is probably more important than working out. You just got to keep your head right, it’s so easy to get spun out, and you see people who have no challenges outside of their Hollywood problems come in and they regularly have meltdowns on sets, or they turn into a bitch, or they say and do things because they’re under pressure, or because they think they’re something they’re not. It’s really a trip to be number one on the call sheet and getting a movie like this, and it’s always kind of an inside game and I forget that occasionally but they keep writing the shit and the toggle switch, it's that thing. Like life is 85% maintenance and you realize at the end of your day that you spent most of the day just making sure that all that other people's energy and all your own mindtalk wasn't ruining what had started off- - like the day plans to be good and then you come in like [crash, crash, crash] trying to [vroom vroom vroom]. Can I just dot something in your eye, can I just blow some sand in your eye right before the take? Why? I don't know. I'm the head of the blow sand in your eye department. Uh, Jon? Then there's a whole thing. I look at the comic books and the guy's like… we did a photo shoot in here the other day and it wound up going great but you see this picture of Tony Stark, kind of looks like Tom Cruise except more handsome and more buff, the suit and his hair's blowing in the wind and it's curly and you go, 'Can we do a shot like that?' And the hair lady's like, 'I can try.' And I'm like, 'Let's not go Something About Mary here. This, I've got this.' So it's been a lot of that just outside issues, like, 'Hey, look, man, the suit.' You're tired and you get swayed back or it's like I'm not particularly tall and I'm surrounded by giants and I was like, 'It's a kind of weird- -' I'm not walking around like Don Adams on boards or anything but all these elements of what when I see this movie, I want to be able to believe that this guy is the guy.

Q: Do you draw on any playboys like Dean Martin, Sinatra?

RDJ: Well, I'm sorry, this might sound a little weird, but I'm not drawing on other things for him. I consider him to be a real entity for the most part. That works for me and then I come into work and there are hundreds of people around and without abusing the influence I have, it's like things are made very easy and available to me and I see $100,000 cars and things. All this stuff that regardless of how much dough I've made over the years, I've never lived a day. I've never lived four seconds like this guy's lived every day, so it's been this really kind of like amazing experience to see what it would be like if you had unimaginable resources and you had this change of heart and then you decided to pool those resources into something that became very fetishistic and obsessive but obsessive in a way that you kind of have to figure out as you go along what the moral psychology is of that. So I think it's a very human journey. But to continue not answering your question, I tended to actually go more into mythology and the real basis of mythology and how men and women are capable of, at a certain subtle level, of god making, of making themselves godlike, of clearing themselves of these earthly things and walking into a purpose or some sort of divine idea, whether it seems dark at the time or not. It's like you can see through perception and you have this heroic experience. I can say that about single mothers. I could say that about a variety of different type of folks that I've known growing up or whatever.

Q: Sorry to bring this up, but it's the natural questions given the character.

RDJ: It's funny you're just sitting dead center and that's the last question. I really wasn't expecting this. This never happens. Yeah, yeah, give me all the fuckin' preambles. Just bring it, dude.

Q: How much of your struggles have anything to do with how you're playing the role?

RDJ: Well, I think when someone has had a fundamental change and they're not just trying to backpedal and make it seem like, 'I'm goig to rehab again. Everything's fine. But I'm still clubbing tonight' or whatever. Or whatever, friends of yours or mine who are just in a different place in their own evolution. By the time you've seen the light, by the time you get out of Dodge and start doing the right thing, you really don't relate to the person that historically people still say… but it's like that thing, it's like the guy who says, 'If you Google me, all you're ever going to see is that I was accused of raping those two kids on the boat' or whatever. It's like, 'Why am I googling you anyway?' 'My life has been ruined.' That's a really nice headspace. So my thing is what else was attractive is yeah, Tony Stark is like he's been known to go bonkers and be so irresponsible that he's too hammered to put on the suit. I was like, 'Really?' and they're like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah.' I thought all these times when it seemed like in the atmosphere that there was another one of these, because you know, it's like your superhero of the week thing and there are so many. I was like, 'Green Hornet. No. But Green Hornet! No.' Or other different ones or some of the other ones that have happened where the first thought would be, 'We need you to play the bad guy in our movie like this.' I was like, 'The bad guy, yeah, bad guy, yeah, I'm a bad guy.' But the fact that Tony is so conflicted and at a certain point in the later years, Demon in the Bottle and all that stuff, there's so much stuff going on in this movie as it is, we decided not to do the Pirandello thing too. But I get it. That's why in a way it's ideally suited for me and I'm ideally suited for it.

And if this interview wasn’t enough for you…here’s some links to interviews I did at last year’s Comic-Con for “Iron Man.”

Jon Favreau Comic Con interview, Robert Downey Jr. Comic-Con interview, Kevin Feige - the President of Production at Marvel interview, Gwyneth Paltrow and Terrance Howard. Finally, if you want to see some images of the Mach 1 from Comic Con, click here.