When you came to make Iron Man 3, there’d already been two movies as well as The Avengers. How did you place your own stamp on the established Iron Man world?

To Marvel’s credit, the producer Kevin Feige said to me, “That Avengers just made a tonne of money. But let’s not just do that again. Let’s not impose a template or try to recreate The Avengers. Let’s make a standalone movie. Stylistically, it doesn’t have to be the same as The Avengers.“

I made the point, when we were sitting around the table, that when Tony Stark was trapped in that cave in Afghanistan in the first Iron Man – hammering away and sweating – and Thor walked in, it would have been silly. People would have walked out and said, “We don’t get it. This is a totally different movie.”

Now, the universe has evolved since then to include figures like Thor, but at the same time, we really liked Iron Man one, and the idea of getting back to that, tonally. That was what I liked.

So putting my stamp on it meant making it into a thriller – here’s the good news – which was already the template Jon Favreau had established. So in order to be true to the movie I wanted to make, all I had to do was get together with [co-writer] Drew Pierce and concoct something that was pretty much in keeping with what Favreau had already done and established: a thriller that would succeed on a personal level and not just a level of this guy puts on a big suit, and then another guy puts on a big suit.