It’s hard to believe it’s been 13 years since the original Iron Man came out in May 2008. To mark the occasion, we talked to Phil Saunders, the creative mind behind the Iron Man suits, which turned Robert Downey Jr. into a Marvel superhero.
Saunders, a veteran conceptual artist with 30-plus years of design experience, has worked on every cool series, franchise, and video game you’ve binged during the pandemic. Next up? Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten RingsShang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Spider-Man: No Way HomeSpider-Man: No Way Home. Below, he tells us about his inspirations, how the gig from Marvel came about, and what’s in his 2D/3D toolkit.
Phil, before we get to your background in industrial design and PC-based video game creation, can you tell us how you got the first Iron ManIron Man gig in 2008? Did you come home one night and Director Jon Favreau had left a message on your machine?[PS] I’d been working with Jon as well as Production Designer Mike Riva for a few years at that point. We had done ZathuraZathura a couple of years earlier, and the three of us had a really good rapport. I’d been working on an adaptation of John Carter of MarsJohn Carter of Mars with Jon, which had just been cancelled by Paramount, and he’d mentioned that there was something big Paramount had in mind for him to move on to and that we should stay tuned. I believe I moved on to Spider-Man 3 with Michael Riva after that, and it was at a screening we were all at that Jon said, ‘How would you like to design Iron Man?’
Awesome. What was your ideation process like? Bidding on an original Iron ManIron ManIron Man #1 (1968) #1 (1968) comic on eBay? Meeting up with Stan Lee? Sadly, the original concept artists, Don Heck and Jack Kirby, had already departed this mortal realm by then, of course, but did you get access to any of their prototypes?[PS] No, but I did immediately go out and pick up a copy of Iron Man: ExtremisIron Man: Extremis by Adi Granov, who I knew casually through online concept art forums. Jon had mentioned that his work in that book was the inspiration for what a live-action Iron Man suit could be on screen. It was really impressive work, and showed a real sense of design. Adi and I ended up collaborating on the original Mk2/3 [Mark II & Mark III] suit, and needless to say it was one of the most inspiring and fruitful collaborations of my career.
How much was in place by the time you came onboard for the first movie in that franchise? A script? Or were you handed just a ‘beatmeater’ with broad strokes of character arcs and action elements to concept to?[PS] There really wasn’t much. When we started, we were months ahead of the first draft of the script, but of course there was so much material to draw from in the comics, and we knew this was going to be an origin story, so we could get right to work on designing the suits. The storyboard artists would come up with cool sequences like the F-22 [Raptor] jet scene, and Jon would walk the writers through the boards and that would get incorporated into the script, so it was much more like an animation process at the beginning.
Now that you’ve worked on all of them, right up to Avengers: Endgame,Avengers: Endgame, is there a shorthand between all the creatives? Or do you feel like each new iteration has its own fresh challenges, requiring new design vernacular?[PS] There’s a bit of both. Obviously our core group of visual development artists have been working together for years under VP of Visual Development Ryan Meinerding, whom I’ve been working with since John Carter of Mars. And there’s a direct rapport with Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria Alonzo and the Marvel brain trust built up since the first Iron Man, so there’s a comfort level there, but each project is driven by a different director, so there’s always a fresh perspective to service.
Your Instagram feedInstagram feed has some very cool insider-track concept sketches that never made it to the screen—or only briefly. Can you talk about some of your favorites, like the Mark 40/XL armour/”Shotgun” perhaps? [PS] Shotgun is definitely one of my favorites. It’s amazing how you can design in a whole different form language and color palette, and with the addition of just a few key signature elements it still reads as an Iron Man suit. If it hadn’t exploded so spectacularly I would have loved to bring it back so some of the cooler features could be explored, like how it locks together into a seamless airfoil shape for hypersonic flight.
That would have been deeply cool. On that note, let’s talk about the specific creative challenges in working with the liquid metal/nanotech issue, rather than the earlier more industrial design.[PS] The nanotech design was a real challenge, since all previous Iron Man suits had relied on recognizable mechanical language from aircraft, sports cars, and military hardware. The believability is reinforced by cueing your subconscious into shapes that you instinctively recognize as functional. But what do you do when none of that applies? All of the panel breaks and forms of an Iron Man suit are based on a knowledge of sheet-metal stamping and CNC [computer numerical control] machining processes, for example, as well as the requirements of making something flexible out of rigid panels. And you’d never use nanotech to form something assembled with bolts and other fasteners, so all the classic details go out the window.
How did you (literally) go back to the drawing board for that iteration then?[PS] I had to come up with a form language based on a seamless surface of varying hardness and flexibility that would “accordion” at the joints rather than using overlapping plates. The weapons were also tough. I had to come up with forms that looked grown rather than assembled out of separate components, while still looking convincingly functional. Altogether I think it was a success!
Some background on you. You studied industrial design at OCAD UniversityOCAD University in Canada. What was your initial plan, if you had one? [PS] I’d been obsessed with designing for movies since I saw Star Wars at 7 years old. At the time there were no entertainment design schools like there are now, and there were maybe only a couple of dozen people doing concept design worldwide, so I just followed in the footsteps of my heroes Ralph McQuarrie, conceptual artist for Star Wars; Syd Mead, visual futurist on Blade Runner; and Joe Johnston, who did visual effects for Star Wars; and studied Industrial Design. It gave me a good grounding in how things work and are built rather than just a surface level education in image-making.
I was also lucky enough to take a few detours on the way to the movie biz. A summer job at a VFX shop in Toronto led me to a great job in theme park ride design with location-based entertainment legend Allen Yamashita that paid my way through college. And it was during a senior year spring break trip to California to interview with VFX companies that I stumbled into the job at Nissan Design. All of that experience gives me more to draw from I think than if I’d gone directly into film.
Looking at Iron ManIron Man’s suit evolution over the years, it’s clear that you’ve drawn on your multi-discipline background. [PS] Certainly without the experience with sophisticated organic surface development at Nissan, the Iron Man suit wouldn’t be what it is today. Automotive design trains you to think of surfaces not as the form underneath, but as the way it manipulates reflections and highlights. How and where a horizon reflection falls on the side of a car, for example, is really a form of graphic design in three dimensions, and if you think about how that graphic changes as you walk around a car or as it moves through space, it’s really a form of motion graphics as well. The way you increase the curvature of a surface across a form controls the speed at which streetlight reflections will dance across a fender. All of that nuance was something we felt was important to capture in an Iron Man suit to give an impression of highly sophisticated technology executed to aerospace level tolerances, something that to that time we’d never seen in a film costume.
It really is a machine-in-motion. After automotive design, you spent almost a decade as a video game creative director at Presto Studios (Myst III and The Journeyman Project series). Adding another layer entirely to your oeuvre. Tell us about that. [PS] Right. As for my game design experience, I come from the world of adventure games, so a lot of it is about storytelling. Every design element in a movie, whether it’s Tony Stark’s bedroom or his suit, has to say something about the story and character, because you only have so much real estate and time in a movie to convey a lot. So, for example, in Captain America: Civil War, a lot of the language of the Mark 46 suit was about darkening Tony’s character as he was on the oppressive side of the conflict. Edges got more aggressive than the Mark 45, and I even worked in “frown lines” into the brow ridge of the redesigned helmet to give him a more domineering demeanor.
Coming from PC-based gaming development must have given you a headstart on the toolkit required too.[PC] Yes, definitely. Coming from the games world at the beginning of the 2000s, I also found I had a lot more experience with digital tools than a lot of my contemporaries in the film design world. I’d been working with really talented digital artists at Presto who were really at the cutting-edge of desktop VFX. Almost all of them went on to greater things like ILM, Lucasfilm, Weta, Pixar, Dreamworks Animation, and every major game company.
Give us a geek level of detail on your feature film creation tool-set today. What do you use and why/how?[PS] Well, when I started in the industry we were still using markers and gouache paint for concept design illustration. I found that I was in the minority of people who were starting to use Photoshop to paint, and even then I was often drawing on paper and then scanning with a giant 11×17 UMAX SCSI scanner to paint over the line work. But in games I’d been using Photoshop since before it had layers, so I had a really solid understanding of what it was capable of. I’d also been trained on Alias Studio back in the Nissan days and 3ds Max at Presto, so I had those in my toolkit as well. Nowadays I still start everything in Photoshop, as I like to design in story and character context from the very beginning, as pose, attitude, mood, lighting, and POV are key to capturing feeling and also selling the design to a director from the beginning.
Rather than kick off in 3D at the outset?[PC] Film is an emotional medium, and I find if you can capture what a design should make the audience feel, you’ve sold it. 3D modeling divorces the design process from the storytelling process for too long. In 2D I’m starting with lighting, attitude, and emotion and the design emerges from that. That said, I find that I’m starting the 3D process earlier and earlier these days, partly because ZBrush (my primary 3D tool) is getting more and more intuitive and powerful, and partly because I find the more I can deliver in 3D, the more control I have over the final implementation of the design.
With really robust polygon tools like qmesh, the topology brush, dynamic subdivision and live boolean, ZBrush is taking over for me from Modo as my primary sub-D tool, with KeyShot as my main renderer. I’ve also started playing with MoI-3D for CAD applications, and am looking forward to playing around with some VR modeling applications, but that’s going to take a transition from Mac back to Windows, something that’s in the works for me.
That’s interesting. Talking of hardware, what are you using to run such powerful software? Still got some Indigo workstations from Silicon Graphics knocking around? [PS] Yeah, I don’t miss the Indigos. I’ve gone back and forth from Mac to PC and back again. I transitioned from PC back to Mac during production on TRON: Legacy when I switched from 3ds Max to Modo, which was cross-platform. I had a fully maxed-out Quadra Tower, which later was replaced by a series of Mac Pros. I skipped the “Trash Can” Mac, which never made sense to me as a pro platform, and when Mac abandoned the pro market completely, I limped along with my MacBook Pro, since by then it outperformed my desktop.
On Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker I finally bit the bullet and bought an iMac Pro on the promise of eGPU expandability, since there was no sign of a new tower and I didn’t want to switch over all my software just yet. Sadly, the inability to support Nvidia architecture has locked me out of a lot of future-forward applications, hence the planned move back to Windows. My key tool regardless of platform is a 27-inch Wacom Cintiq HD, which I couldn’t live without.
Finally, you’ve recently wrapped on Spider-Man: No Way HomeSpider-Man: No Way HomeSpider-Man: No Way Home and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in post-production. Obviously you’re sworn to secrecy on plot, character trajectory, and other spoilers. But is there anything you cancan share from the process?[PS] What’s been fun about the post-Iron Man days for me at Marvel has been the opportunity to redefine myself there. On Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten RingsShang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Vis-Dev Supervisor Andy Park assigned me an incredibly poignant, emotional character scene to keyframe, and it’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. I ended up doing more of them on Spidey, and now I’ve become the go-to for hard-surface costumes and sensitive character moments. I could be suffering from multiple-personality syndrome.
