It's interesting: When you're doing a massive movie like this, on a technical level, the really hard scene to write is always at the end of act two. It's the tesseract of all these agendas and plotlines, and that gets even trickier on a Marvel movie because you're often rewriting on set as you go, so it's like a weird cross between Cassavetes and a Rubik's cube. And narration is always hard, too — I literally wrote and rewrote the narration for this movie 2,000 times over the course of two and a half years. But overall, as tricky as those things both were on a prosaic level, I think the Mandarin reveal scene was the most difficult one to write, conceptually.
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, "Fuck '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!
Wow the Mandarin could have been in the first Iron Man. That would have been quite interesting to see. Iron Man 3 is out on Blu-ray and DVD now.
