Speak­ing with The Guardian, Rourke men­tions how he learned a lit­tle Russ­ian for his role:

And Iron Man 2, in which he plays Tony Stark’s tat­tooed Russ­ian neme­sis, Ivan, is pos­si­bly the biggest movie yet in Rourke’s new career. For Rourke this means going to Rus­sia, drink­ing vodka and vis­it­ing jails to study prison tat­toos and find his character’s tics. “I decided to do half my role in Russ­ian,” he beams, “and that’s hard because the Russ­ian lan­guage doesn’t roll off the English-speaking tongue very eas­ily. I spent three hours a day with a teacher, and after two weeks I know four sen­tences! Let me see, it’s sort of like… ‘Yez­za­mee menya… Yez­za­mee manya obott… Er, nema­boootty menya…’”

This goes on for quite some time. “It means,” he says, finally, “If some­one kills me, don’t wake me up, because I’d rather be dead than live in your world.”

But the land of block­buster movies is not some­where Rourke plans to stay long. “I’m not gonna rush out and see the next Bat­man, I’m not big on for­mula movies. I don’t like all that Spider-Man shit.”

Con­tin­u­ing on from the recent Kevin Feige rev­e­la­tions, First Show­ing have pro­vided a sec­ond com­men­tary of the event, which offers up some more details of these three movies.

Iron Man 2

In the first movie the film mak­ers man­aged to get the tone just right, for the sequel they are look­ing to add char­ac­ters and up the action whilst main­tain­ing this tone — keep­ing the right sense of humour. Film­ing is half way through and the major­ity of the spo­ken parts are com­plete, the next six weeks shall be ded­i­cated to action scenes!

Thor

There will be no Shake­spearean dia­logue in the Thor movie, despite its usage in the comics. Some scenes will take place in Asgard.

Cap­tain America

The first avenger movie shall be a period piece, set pre­dom­i­nantly dur­ing WWII. It is hoped that the movie can cap­ture a feel­ing sim­i­lar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the same lev­els of fun. Side­kick Bucky (wiki) will also make an appear­ance, in some capacity.

As for direc­tor Joe Johnston,

A lit­tle bit of The Rock­e­teer, lots of Octo­ber Sky, and a lit­tle bit of the ship designs that John­ston did for Star Wars, allud­ing to how this is the per­fect movie for him to direct. “It’s the movie his entire career has been lead­ing towards.”

We recently reported that the Iron Man sequel would be film­ing some big actions scenes at the Monaco Grand Prix. With this in mind, the lat­est news is that the Iron Man 2 crew are build­ing an enor­mous Monaco GP set com­plete with replica race­track at Downey Stu­dios in Downey, California.

One com­menter at SHH suggests,

This is sup­posed to be the famous car rac­ing scene where..stark is drunk as iron­man and gets pissed because he bet on a race car that is los­ing and sab­o­tages the races and blows up all the other cars..causing himm to fear is a hero or a nat­ural villain…good stuff?

As com­mented on by Jon Favreau in his twitter,

Online press vis­it­ing the set today to speak with Robert and me.

AICN and SHH were two of these. They’ve been asked to hold back their reports until Comic-con, when I’m sure we’ll get some big announce­ments. In the mean time they have pro­vided some pre­view reports which I have included below:

AICN’s Beaks

Yesterday’s trip to the set of IRON MAN 2 at Mar­vel Stu­dios’ head­quar­ters in Man­hat­tan Beach was def­i­nitely more filet than Bernsen.

How much more? I’m not at lib­erty to say. Yet. Para­mount and Mar­vel have asked that we hold our full set visit report until closer to Comic Con. And since I’d like to be invited to the sets of THOR, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE AVENGERS, etc., I’ve decided it’s worth my while to play ball.

They have, how­ever, given us clear­ance to post a brief pre­view piece in which I whip you up into a frenzy by telling you that the sets are elab­o­rate and ultra-sleek (they’re using as many as five sound­stages on the Raleigh Stu­dios lot), the cre­ative team is in a groove, and, as far as I can tell, every­one is extremely pleased with what they’re get­ting thus far. This was appar­ent from the way Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr., Matthew Liba­tique and oth­ers tweaked and tweaked this one really cool, fairly lengthy take — in which Tony Stark [redacted] — until it was utter, fluid perfection.

Most of the stuff we saw yes­ter­day was set in Stark’s work­shop, which has been mod­i­fied to include some nifty new giz­mos (this includes the floor, oddly enough). There were also a few tan­ta­liz­ing clues left strewn about just to get us worked up over what/who might or might not be appear­ing in the sequel. We were also given an unplanned peek at some­thing stashed away on another sound­stage — and I’m not sure they’re going to let us write about this in our offi­cial write-up next month. Not that my mea­ger words could do it justice.

SHH’s Ryan Rotten

Is Favreau falling into the trap of adding too many ele­ments to his once proven win­ning equa­tion? That’s just one ques­tion Super­hero Hype! had in mind when we ven­tured down to Man­hat­tan Beach where we found Favreau and com­pany back on the sound­stage and in Tony Stark’s lab for a set visit. While there, we toured the remod­eled lab, caught a few glimpses of some very interesting–and revealing–props and drooled over the new Iron Man suit. We also got a chance to speak with Favreau, Downey Jr. and Marvel’s Kevin Feige (the pro­ducer) about Stark’s lat­est adven­ture and the chal­lenges he faces.

We’d love to tell you more, how­ever, we have to remain tight-lipped for now. Sim­ply know Favreau is piec­ing together what sounds like a lay­ered, larger sequel that’s steer­ing Stark in the right emo­tional direc­tion with a few sur­prises in store for the fans. Look for a full set report next month! In the mean­time, “keep the skies clear,” more Iron Man is on the way.

Com­ing via Pit­doc, AICN and the Las Vegas licens­ing show, we have updated Iron Man, Thor, Cap­tain Amer­ica and The Avengers logos, as well as an ‘Avengers Assem­ble’ badge.

Com­ing via Pit­doc, AICN and the Las Vegas licens­ing show, we have our first look at an Iron Man 2 poster, click for super high resolution.

As announced via Twit­ter, Jon Favreau appeared on the Jimmy Fal­lon show last night. Favreau was at “Ham­mer Indus­tries”, a rival firm to Tony Stark’s — Sam Rock­well plays Justin Ham­mer. Not a lot of news, he ‘can’t say much’, but it’s quite a fun video:

Empire recently spoke with Jon Favreau and Mickey Rourke about Iron Man 2. Favreau gave some back­ground to the Tony Stark char­ac­ter in the sequel before giv­ing cryp­tic clues when quizzed on ‘Rhodesy’ and War Machine.

“Tony’s expected to be a role model and I don’t think he’s ready to be one. He’s under a great deal of pres­sure and when you’re under pres­sure, I think you find out­lets for that. That’s one of the ten­sions of the film: it’s one thing to say you’re Iron Man, and another thing to actu­ally become Iron Man.”

“Rhodesy is def­i­nitely step­ping up in this film. Let me put it this way: Tony’s not the only per­son with tech­nol­ogy in the film.”

Mean­while, Mickey Rourke com­ments on his Whiplash suit (we’ve already seen a pos­si­ble con­cept piece for this)

“I’m hav­ing the time of my life! […] It’s been really bru­tal, because my Iron Man suit weighs 23lb. It’s sort of a half-suit, with half my skin show­ing, with lots of Russ­ian tat­toos, because [Whiplash is just] out of a Russian-zone prison.”