'Avengers' Director Joss Whedon on Robert Downey Jr.: 'He Is Not Trying to Steamroller Over Me'

Robert Downey Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. has quietly made a reputation for being loosey-goosey with his scripts and taking charge of his sets, something that came to the fore with the rewrites that emerged on Iron Man 2.

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Joss Whedon today gave a glimpse into the working process between himself, an established showrunner and writer directing only his second studio movie, and Downey on Marvel's The Avengers in an interview on Yahoo!.

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Acknowledging that both have “very different methods,” Whedon said “We worked specifically towards both of our processes, so that we would beat out a scene so that he was very comfortable with where it was going or what was being said and very aware of where it would fit in the whole. And I would give him stuff to say, and by and large, he would say it.”

Whedon credited his sitcom experience where he learned to improvise and come up with ideas on the spot as a helping hand in the making of Avengers and then went a bit overboard to say Downey isn’t a diva without using the word “diva.”

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“He is very collaborative,” Whedon says. “He loves notes. He loves to be guided and worked with. He is not trying to steamroller over me. He is really trying to create it side-by-side with me.”

In other parts of the interview, Whedon revealed he and Mark Ruffalo, who plays Bruce Banner/Hulk, went to the Hulk template of the TV series than the characterization of the recent movies; the TV show Banner was busy helping other people. “That was more interesting to us than the Banner in the first two movies who was always fixated on curing himself,” he said.