The climax of Avengers: Endgame featured the death of a legend — but as perfectly heroic
as the moment was, it could have gone dozens of different ways.
In a recent conversation with Collider, the film's editor, Jeff Ford, went in-depth about
how the scene where Tony Stark sacrifices himself to snap Thanos and his invading army
out of existence came to be.
It's a fascinating deep dive into the genesis of an unforgettable scene — and also an
interesting and humorous look at Downey's process.
Ford is the longtime editor for Endgame co-directors Joe and Anthony Russo, and he's made himself
a Marvel icon with one contribution to the Infinity Saga-culminating film: it was he
who put Stark's last words into his mouth, when he suggested that the Armored Avenger's
retort to Thanos' declaration …
"I am inevitable!"
… should mirror the statement he made to the world at the conclusion of the inaugural
entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
"And I... am Iron Man."
It was perhaps the single greatest moment in the MCU up to this point, but according
to Ford, nobody was exactly sure how it should play out when the time came to actually shoot
the scene.
Since they were working with a gifted actor and brilliant improviser in Downey, the filmmakers
basically decided to let him off the chain and see what would happen.
Ford told Collider:
"When we were putting together the end of the movie, when we shot Tony's last moment...
we shot a bunch of different options.
Robert had different ideas...We give him space to do that.
Joe and Anthony are great about improv.
We shot a run of different performances for that last moment.
Some of them were crazy.
Some of them we would never have used."
Of course, like everyone else, the interviewer wanted to know more about those crazy, left-field
takes that never could have made it into the movie — but Ford declined to get too specific,
citing a desire not to, quote, "peel back the curtain" on Downey's process too much.
But what he did have to say sounds on brand for RDJ, and of course, it makes us love the
actor even more.
Ford dished:
"Some of them were jokes.
Some of them were obscenities.
Some of them were completely emotional, raw, insane things that he was doing.
And then some of them were combinations of all three of those things."
That is so easy to picture from Downey that we're actually perfectly content to let our
imaginations run wild.
We're sure some of these takes were even crazy enough to have worked, but we're glad that
we got the iconic moment that we did — and it was all thanks to the filmmakers wanting
a sense of "symmetry," paralleling Stark's line with Thanos' "I am inevitable" line.
Interestingly, the only other version of the scene that the filmmakers liked nearly as
much as the final one didn't involve any alternate versions of the dialogue.
It actually featured no dialogue at all.
Ford explained:
"In [one] version, Thanos [and Stark] didn't say anything...
[Thanos] had the gauntlet.
He looked at him like, 'I got you.'
Snapped.
Looked.
Couldn't believe it.
Turned to Tony.
Tony raised his hand and snapped.
It was beautiful.
It worked really, really well."
The filmmakers realized, however, that they had an opportunity to cement the themes of
their film and the arcs of the two characters involved in the climactic showdown when they
landed on the final exchange.
Ford said:
"What we found... was Thanos needed an arc in Endgame.
That arc was his sense of inevitability.
The story we'd been telling was that Thanos' pitch in that movie is 'no matter how many
times you try and stop me, you can travel in time, you can do all these things, you're
never going to win.'
It's a sense of destiny, of 'I will always be the one who wins.'"
Ford went on to say that by having Thanos invoke that sense of destiny at the crucial
moment only to meet his defeat, the filmmakers drove home the true theme of Endgame: that
destiny will always land on the side of right.
"This is the fight of our lives.
And we're gonna win — whatever it takes."
It's interesting to think about how many ways the climax of Endgame could have played out,
and if we had gotten a different version, it's just possible that we would be hailing
that choice as the only one the filmmakers could possibly have made.
But we think pretty much every Marvel fan agrees that the scene we got was utterly perfect
— due in no small part to the fact that it's tough to imagine a more fitting parting
shot for an actor who completely embodied his character for nine films and 11 years.
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