Jon Favreau spent the 1990s as an actor and screenwriter, writing Swingers as a vehicle for himself and Vince Vaughn, before moving into directing with Elf. What he brought to Iron Man in 2008 was a willingness to let Robert Downey Jr improvise inside a studio tentpole, and that decision more or less set the house tone for the fifteen years of Marvel films that followed.
He has since specialised in technically ambitious family filmmaking, using virtual production on The Jungle Book and The Lion King and building the LED volume workflow that The Mandalorian made standard. He also created and showran that series, which reoriented Star Wars toward television.
The through line is a director who trusts performers and solves technical problems in service of them, which is a less common combination than it sounds.
