Apple cider vinegar Is Pilates for you? 'Ambient gaslighting' 'Main character energy'
MOVIES
Los Angeles

Sunday Geekersation: Pearce owns his Marvel movie twist

Brian Truitt
USA TODAY
Drew Pearce writes and directs "All Hail the King," a short film that acts as an epilogue to "Iron Man 3."
  • Drew Pearce writes and directs the Marvel Studios short %27All Hail the King%27 with Ben Kingsley
  • Pearce penned the %27Iron Man 3%27 screenplay with director Shane Black
  • He also did a screenplay based on Marvel%27s %27Runaways%27 comic

Drew Pearce has a new reveal for comic-book movie fans: He won't be judged as a film director by how many movie tickets he sells with All Hail the King.

His Marvel Studios One-Shot short film comes as an extra on the Thor: The Dark World Blu-ray and DVD (out Tuesday), yet it's just as big a bonus feature as the biceps of Chris Hemsworth's comic-book thunder god.

All Hail the King acts as an epilogue to last summer's Iron Man 3, the highest-grossing film worldwide last year with more than $1.2 billion in box office (currently No. 5 all time). In one of the subplots of the movie, actor Trevor Slattery (Oscar winner Sir Ben Kingsley) pulled a fast one on Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and the world by posing as the supervillain terrorist the Mandarin, a longtime Iron Man villain from Marvel Comics lore.

Iron Man saved the day in the end, and Trevor was sent off to Seagate Prison. He's still a celebrity, though, inside and outside jail, and a journalist (Scoot McNairy) visits the Trevor in prison for a documentary about the kooky British actor who doesn't even realize it when his life could take another bad turn.

Pearce, who co-wrote Iron Man 3 with director Shane Black and hatched Trevor's personality and modus operandi, takes on writing and directing duties with All Hail the King, and when Kingsley got the call to reprise his character, he jumped at the chance to add it to his busy schedule.

"I just trust Drew as a writer so much and admire him so much, I knew that he would look after Trevor in a very creative and inventive way," Kingsley says.

Pearce, the creator of the British superhero sitcom No Heroics and writer on the upcoming fifth Mission: Impossible film, talks to USA TODAY about revisiting Trevor in All Hail the King, how it reflects fans' response to Iron Man 3 and what unsung Marvel heroes he wants to tackle next. (Beware: Some spoilers ahead!)

The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) was revealed as British actor Trevor Slattery in a big twist in "Iron Man 3."

Q. Some movie fans liked the Iron Man 3 twist reveal, while some hardcore comic geeks didn't, especially with a beloved guy such as the Mandarin.

A. Is he really beloved, or is the idea of a villain beloved? (Laughs)

Q. There's that, too. Yet with this One Shot, you could have easily said, "Just kidding, guys. He's been the Mandarin the whole time." Instead, you really owned it.

A. Oh, I would have hated that. It's very tricky to smuggle big ideas into big movies these days.

What's amazing about (producer and Marvel Studios president) Kevin Feige is he encouraged us to do that with Iron Man 3. I'm proud of a lot of that big crazy movie, but the reveal is one of the things I'm most proud of.

Q. Was that your idea?

A. There was this long period in Shane's gigantic spooky mansion in Los Angeles at the beginning of (making Iron Man 3) where he and I got to know each other and we just kicked back and forth ideas.

It does sound kind of grandiose for a blockbuster superhero three-quel, but it did come out of he and I trying to find an enemy that mirrored the themes we wanted to do with Tony — this idea of false faces and hiding behind masks.

When we find Tony in that movie, he's essentially having an identity crisis ridden through with PTSD. He has lost the ability to a degree to differentiate between who is Iron Man and who is Tony Stark. It was through that that Shane and I came to this idea of the Mandarin being a front. Shane is brilliant and very much pushed me toward the bold ideas and broad strokes.

When we started talking about who the person behind it could be and the idea of an actor, when I was suggesting the idea of a British lovey, he just was like, "Run toward that." I gave him the first draft, he looked at it and he was like, "This is just making me laugh so much. Go harder." And I was like, "OK, if you want me to go harder, I will …"

It's interesting, Kevin Feige loved it. There was some worry from the higher-ups that the Mandarin would be revealed to be Russell Brand.

This is what's incredible about it: Sir Ben was the person we had in mind the whole way, and you never get the person you're writing to. It just doesn't happen. But Sir Ben in Sexy Beast is part of the inspiration for what we were even doing with the Mandarin himself, the Mandarin persona — somewhere between that and (Marlon) Brando in Apocalypse Now was what we wanted the front of the Mandarin to be. And we knew Sir Ben had the deftness to then carry the comedy and the ridiculousness of the reveal and pull it off.

Oddly, Shane and I never had any particular nerves about what the reaction would be, which suggests that we're a little bit naïve, but what we were nervous about was can we pull off this turn in a movie? Can we land the surprise and land it in a satisfying enough way that it's worth the journey? That's why you book Sir Ben Kingsley.

Q. This One Shot seems to be very meta in what it tackles. Some fans loved the Mandarin, others didn't. That dynamic seems to exist in the confines of this prison, too — one guy even wants him to do the Mandarin voice again because it's cool. You bring audience's feelings into the piece itself.

A. I usually try and avoid too much meta-ness, particularly when you're dealing with superheroes. Meta-ness can wrench you out of actually enjoying the characters, and to a degree, a post-modern laugh is an easy laugh. It's seldom a big cheer — it's usually a raised-eyebow "Hmm. Interesting point."

But what is interesting about short films in general is they usually work best when there's a level of allegory, as well. If you look at The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, the Oscar short from a couple of years ago, it's working on so many levels and it's only nine minutes long.

Now, this can't come close to that, and also as a function this short is about entertainment and action and kind of a character study with a character in Trevor Slattery that we just didn't get enough screen time with and we're excited to hopefully hang out with again.

But there's definitely a level in which going into this — and this is one of the joys of being a writer and director — I wanted to parallel our experience in the adaptation of a canonical character in the story itself. Sometimes that comes out in gags, but there's also a reading of the thing where Trevor is Shane and myself and the interviewer/interrogator is fandom in general.

The irony of all of this is icing on the cake. The original genesis of the short was I had been talking to Kevin Feige and Louis D'Esposito for years about writing and directing a One-Shot for them. We'd kicked about several ideas and on the first day of filming (Iron Man 3) with Sir Ben Kingsley, we were sitting around at lunch and Kevin and I turned around to each other at roughly the same time and went, "We should probably be doing a Trevor short if we can get Sir Ben to do it."

I went back to the (crappy) corporate hotel in Wilmington, N.C., that night, bought a couple of beers as would befit Trevor, and wrote a first version of the script.

Q. How far after the feature did you film the short?

A. We filmed it about a year and a half later last September. The nature of these One-Shots is that they don't exist, they don't exist, they don't exist, and then suddenly everyone leaps into action.

What's incredible is that we were able to keep it secret because that it is increasingly tough particularly with a Marvel project in the modern age, but even more incredible was the fact that Sir Ben was enduring seven movies back to back over a year and a half, and he still managed to take three days out, for no money, and come and suffer through 100-degree heat in a disused women's prison in East Los Angeles for the sake of revisiting the character.

After fooling the world, Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) is visited in the slammer by a journalist in the Marvel Studios short film "All Hail the King."

Q. There are a couple of different styles you utilize in All Hail the King. There's a 1970s crime style with the prison and the title cards, but there's the '80s Simon & Simon cop-show vibe of the Caged Heat sequence, too.

A. Hats off to Marvel. Essentially you're on a limited budget and even more limited time scale with these shorts, and at heart this really is a 10-page two-hander in a single sell. It's your job with your director hat to never really make it feel like that, and one of the ways I felt we could do that was by cutting full screen to something from Trevor's past.

Originally we would have seen some of his time in England with his mother, as well, and budget just meant that wasn't possible. But I had this idea that his one shot at fame was a CBS pilot in 1985. I wrote one line into the script that says, "Hard cut full screen to title card and Trevor bursting through a door in the style of Magnum PI or Hunter."

I did that because I just wanted to pop out of the room for a moment so we didn't get claustrophobic. I wrote that and Kevin was like, "You could have a lot more fun with that." I kind of gingerly said, "Can we have a lot more fun with that on the budget?" And he was like, "Well, you should just write it and go as crazy as you want."

So I went home that night, pulled out the computer, and thought, "OK, crazy as you want …" Which is how you then find yourself a month and a half later in a prison cell converted to look like an '80s sailor bar with a capuchin called Crystal, trying to coax her to drink a shot of vodka.

That's a good day at the office.

Q. Do you hope that this is might work as an audition piece of sorts and you'll get to direct a big Marvel feature one day?

A. The reason I got into doing all this back in England was to make stuff: as a writer and a director and a producer. I've been very lucky over the last few years coming to Los Angeles where I've mostly been writing on some gratifyingly big projects. But my first love is to make stuff and so, yeah, this short and the opportunity that Kevin and Louis have given me is absolutely hopefully a stepping stone to directing feature stuff.

The idea of directing a Marvel movie is a dream I dare not broach. Obviously it has to be the right property. There are definitely characters and comics I would love to put on screen, one of which is Runaways, which I wrote the script for a few years ago and is still for me one of the great untapped Marvel ideas.

And this obscure comic called Damage Control from the '80s that is much better known in America than it ever was in England. It's the idea of watching the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the point of view of blue-collar, working-class powered and unpowered guys whose job it is to clean up the crap after these grandiose superheroes have destroyed the cities we live in. It just seems a very original idea to approach the genre.

Feel free to petition the powers that be to make that come to life.

Q. Yeah, I'll talk to my pal Kevin …

A. Please! If you wouldn't mind getting on the blower and just saying, "Heads up, if you really want this Marvel thing to work, then you need to talk to Drew." Because otherwise, seriously, I don't see this Marvel superhero thing catching on. (Laughs)

Featured Weekly Ad