Robert Downey Jr. says that he is tak­ing Iron Man 2, his first ever sequel, more seri­ously that any film pre­vi­ous (which is “appro­pri­ately ridicu­lous”). The movie itself shall be more artis­tic and dar­ing com­pared to other films in the same genre whilst the Iron Man suit will be bet­ter fit­ted and more ergonomic. The open­ing day’s film­ing (with Garry Shan­dling) was a Sen­ate hear­ing wherein the unnamed Sen­a­tor, played by Shan­dling, wishes that the Iron Man tech­nol­ogy be turned over to the government.

Excerpts from Collider’s interview:

Remem­ber when film­ing began and word leaked that Gary Shan­dling was in the film and no one was really sure what part he played? Robert told us about the first day of film­ing and how Gary plays a Sen­a­tor:
Robert: Day one I’m doing a Sen­ate hear­ing where the gov­ern­ment is say­ing the Iron Man tech needs to be turned over to the Sen­a­tor and the Sen­a­tor is Gary Shan­dling. And we had this fan­tas­tic day that was some­how this con­trolled chaos of a Sen­ate hear­ing where I keep inter­rupt­ing them and dah dah dah.

Another bit that Robert told us was how he is tak­ing “Iron Man 2” more seri­ously than any movie he has ever done:
Robert: And I’ve never been in a sequel and it’s very daunt­ing because I feel the expec­ta­tion of the mil­lions of peo­ple who watched it and enjoyed it and told me that it was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than your usual genre pic­ture and that they expected us to not screw it up. So I actu­ally have taken “Iron Man 2” prob­a­bly more seri­ously than any movie I’ve ever done, which is appro­pri­ately ridicu­lous for Hollywood.

On Jon Favreau post­ing Twit­ter updates from the set:
Jon is my brother and he is the keeper of the “Iron Man” flame and what­ever he wants to do, within rea­son, to keep his anx­i­eties at bay is absolutely fine with me.

On the way the suit has been improved from the first film:
Every­thing has been improved. Every­thing is ergonomic and the story is incred­i­bly risky and artis­tic for a big genre movie.

In which way risky?
The set pieces have to do with things that aren’t your typ­i­cal like bad guy con­flict. The rela­tion­ships are very com­plex and hilar­i­ous. The moti­va­tions Tony has and why he turns around and does things has com­pletely to do with his own inter­nal processes and it really is, I think, as much as we tried to in the first one really see behind the façade of this kind of sto­ry­telling. We really, I think, leav­ing our­selves open to…we’re kind of try­ing to tell a story about how a dys­func­tional fam­ily saves life on Earth as we know it.

For this film you have Mickey Rourke, Sam Rock­well. You have an insane cast.
It’s huge.

Could you talk about work­ing with Mickey?
I could if we shot together. I’ve seen his stuff and it is lit­er­ally remark­able. Lit­er­ally remark­able. He’s so good. And he’s for­mi­da­ble and he’s very much remind­ing me of that kind of charm­ing, con­fi­dent guy that we know. Sam Rock­well, on the first day of shoot­ing I was like “if this guy thinks he’s going to be fun­nier and cooler than me (laugh­ter) and it was a photo-finish. Scar­lett Johans­son, amaz­ing. Don Chea­dle is just rock­ing it.