THE AMAZING
SPIDER-MAN 2 INTERVIEWS - DIRECTOR MARC WEBB
Much has been made of Marc Webb’s aptronym – just like
the guy named “Otto Octavius” ended up with robot arms welded to his person,
the guy named “Webb” was handed the directorial reins to the Spider-Man movie franchise.
By Jedd Jong
A music
video director (working with the likes of Incubus, 3 Doors Down, Maroon 5,
Green Day and My Chemical Romance) who made his feature film debut with the
critically-acclaimed and much beloved romantic comedy-drama (500) Days of Summer, Webb didn’t seem
like an obvious choice to helm a tent pole summer blockbuster. According to him
though, there are more similarities than differences between making a small
indie romance and a big comic book movie. Speaking to us at the Fuse bar in the
Marina Bay Sands hotel, Singapore, Webb touched on the dynamics between Peter
Parker and his pal-turned-nemesis Harry Osborn, the big names making the music
of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the
rationale behind the design of the Rhino and the chemistry between his two
leads.
Do you feel
that it’s difficult to balance the physical and emotional sides of a movie like
The Amazing Spider-Man 2?
In terms of the action, my favourite kind of action
sequences are the ones that have an emotional core, where you understand and
feel what Spider-Man is fighting for. Unless it has that, the action doesn’t
really mean anything. The action is fun because there’s spectacle and there’s
some technique and there’s physical virtuosity, but you also need to have an
emotional layer. So, I like to think of them as working together and I try not
to separate them too much. Of course, there are the romantic elements too but
sometimes the romance emerges into the action as well.
What was it
like maintaining the dynamic between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, when it
comes to their chemistry?
Andrew and Emma are so professional and so good at
acting – a certain kind of acting which involves an awareness and spontaneity
which I really value and I think when people are watching the movie, they can
detect an authenticity there. That just comes from…we all pick up on each
other’s cues, when you lean forwards or when you laugh, all of these little
things so when someone is trying to read lines and is just thinking about lines
and not connecting with you, seeing when you laugh and building on those things
then it’s not real and people understand that, so Andrew and Emma are able to
live in a very real way with each other on screen and that makes it come alive
for people. People recognise it as being something familiar and they attach
themselves to it so for the movie as a whole, you need to care about it deeply.
What is the
most challenging aspect of making The
Amazing Spider-Man 2, compared to the first go-round?
You want to keep the stakes up. I think the most
challenging thing is in the midst of all the chaos, in the midst of the battles
and the fights and the deep, high drama, keeping an emotional core, something
that’s small and intimate a part of the spectacle. It is fun, there are times
when the kid in me wakes up and it’s a blast but keeping in mind that people
are here to have a social experience and to care about the character, to
protect the emotional journey of that character is really the trickiest part, I
think.
Is the movie
more humanistic?
That depends on your definition of that but…of course
it’s…“humanistic” can mean so many different things. Is it more emotional? Yes,
it’s more emotional but I think we push the characters in really extreme
directions. There’s great comedy and humour and a really vibrant, joyful
quality at the beginning of the movie. But we also challenge the characters, we
provoke them in a way that I think is intensely dramatic and Spider-Man after
this movie will never ever, ever be the same. That’s something that’s entirely
a human journey, it’s not completely spectacle.
How is the
relationship between Peter and Harry in this film different than in the
previous trilogy? Is there a concern that Harry is being introduced in this movie
and then becomes a full-fledged villain in the same one?
I think there’s a long relationship that’s…to answer
the first question first, Harry is smart. He is earning the empire of Oscorp
and an incredibly shrewd guy. They’re more like brothers, more like equals, on
an even footing. They are bound by two things: one is their understanding of
science, their love of science, but also they’re left behind by their fathers.
They were abandoned, and they feel a bond because of that, they know what it
feels like to be left behind. And that relationship and how much he values
Harry is really important in creating the drama in the second part of the movie
and I’m not going to reveal what exactly that is, but the fact that he cares
about this person is very important.
How do you
keep the balance between the hero and the villains? In this movie, you have
Spider-Man and you have all these new villains…
You have to think of it in terms of the protagonist at
all times, at least I do. There is an operatic quality, meaning we do invest in
a lot of different characters as we’re going, but I’m always trying to think of
where Spider-Man is emotionally – what’s he feeling, how does this impact him,
how does this challenge parts of his personality or parts of his physicality…because
it’s a certain kind of movie that we’re making, which is Peter Parker as the
emissary for the audience. He’s the vessel for the audience, that means you
have to…he’s the everyman. He’s the Greek chorus all rolled into one. Ideally,
you’re trying to track and feel everything that he feels and when there’s a
villain that’s emerging, you want to understand that villain, understand that
character so you feel when they start to compete, when they start to conflict
you understand the nature of that conflict and feel the drama that Peter feels.
It’s a little bit tricky because you don’t want to get too far ahead of them,
but sometimes you have to do a little expository information just to get the
depth of emotion, the depth of understanding an audience requires for that
villain.
You’ve
handled both (500) Days of Summer, a
smaller comedy-drama, and The Amazing
Spider-Man, a huge movie, very well. How is it different doing these two
different genres?
I think what strikes me is that there are more
similarities than there are differences. I’m attracted to cinematic romance,
it’s just compelling to me. It’s confounding in real life I find it; you’re
always looking for answers on the screen. But that is of course one of the
reasons I think I got involved with Spider-Man,
because it had that at its heart. But I also like action movies, I also like to
fly through the air and have that sort of wish-fulfilment, that sort of drama
and that sort of storytelling which is so great with Spider-Man. I think in terms of…the difference really is almost a
superficial one in that it just takes longer. There’s way more layers, there’s
way more scrutiny…this never happened with (500)
Days of Summer, we were never in Singapore, people never heard of Tom
Hansen from Margate, New Jersey, there were no associations with them. In Spider-Man, there is a public perception
and a desire to protect the character, which is I think is at the heart of a
lot of the scrutiny that you see and there’s a lot of responsibility, there’s
lot of obligation in what you see, in protecting that and in keeping that
symbol elevated. The public perception of it is actually the trickiest, newest
part of it.
Did you feel
the pressure of taking on the Spider-Man
brand?
There’s definitely a little pressure, especially the
first time around. This time, there’s not quite as much. It’s definitely more
fun! Everybody was really on the same page, everybody puts pressure on
themselves, but I think that we really believed in the script. We’ve got great
writers, we’ve got great actors, great producers, and that team, we were all
part of a tribe. We could go out to the world and feel a little bit braver than
the first time around.
Speaking of
the public perception, there have been some pretty extreme reactions to how
Rhino looks in this movie. How did you arrive at that concept and design for
the character?
Well, when there’s an illustrated…I want everything to
feel real, you know? Or have a realistic foundation. You’re dealing in this
kind of absurd, fantasy world of creatures that disappear into electricity,
goblins and mechanized rhinoceroses so it’s a little bit crazy. But I needed
all this to have a story and for Electro, a green and yellow suit; I just
couldn’t understand where that came from whereas I could understand the story
of the more Ultimate Electro, the black suit which is more of a thick rubber
insulated suit which allows him to channel his energy in a little bit more
specific a way. In terms of the Rhino, his suit in the comics it just looks buffoonish and that’s part of the fun of
it but I needed him to be a threat. I needed it to be a little bit scarier,
when you’re translating an illustrated character, illustrators don’t have the
same obligations that I do as a live-action filmmaker. He has to function in
space, he has to be able to move, he has to be intimidating. If you look at a
lot of those early Rhino things, they’re funny but I don’t understand why he
would do that, why that would happen and I needed to come up in my own head
with an origin story that made it seem like the Rhino device…my production
designers and I we talked about how this “thing” would happen, who would
develop this technology. We thought about maybe it was used in mining, maybe it
was a weaponised device, but that horn which is that iconic thing is something
that we protected and I wanted it to work within our world, within our story
and that’s why I changed that.
In terms of
music, you’ve had experience directing music videos. Did you apply that skill
to this movie?
Oh, absolutely. In (500)
Days of Summer, we used a lot of what is called “needle drop”, which is
pre-existing music like Regina Spektor and The Smiths and I would orchestrate
the sequences in my head before we shot them with the music. For Spider-Man, I was like “I don’t want to
do that” – we used James Horner for the score which was completely fantastic,
completely brilliant composer, but on this movie, I wanted to mix them up. I
wanted to create a pop music texture because Peter Parker is a kid who’s gotten
out of high school, he’s going to be listening the radio all the time, he’s
gonna be listening to internet music all the time and we wanted something that
feels contemporary but I also needed that classic big, huge textural drive that
a big score could provide. So Hans Zimmer, I talked to Hans and I was like “we
need a collaborator, we need somebody else to come in that feels contemporary.”
He knew Pharrell and we worked with Pharrell, so we came in and Pharrell and
Hans started to work together and then Johnny Marr who’s the guitarist for The
Smiths came in and we developed a score that would float up into contemporary
pop music and then go back down into this deep, throbbing, villain cacophony.
It was an extraordinary experience with many many layers. I could do a whole
interview on just the music in Times Square which I think is really elaborate
and Mike Einzinger from Incubus, he was just playing in this part of the world
not too long ago, but Hans allowed us to take the music really to the next
level.
In the
trailer, we see the Vulture’s wings and Doc Ock’s robotic arms. What led to the
decision that the Sinister Six seems to originate completely from Oscorp?
When I was thinking about the movie at the beginning
of the situation before the first movie, I was fascinated by Oscorp. Oscorp to
me was symbolic of such a much deeper…it’s sort of like a Tower of Babel, all
crazy things flowed from this tower that is emerging over the horizon when we
were shooting the skyline of New York City. It seemed to make sense that Norman
Osborn, by virtue of his desperate need to stay alive and his inability to
sacrifice himself that there was a rupture in the universe and there was a
hubris that emerged from it. There was something mythological in this Oscorp
thing and I wanted Oscorp to be central to this whole idea.
Before Spider-Man, we hadn’t really seen Andrew
Garfield as a very physical actor, in these two movies has he ever surprised
you?
Absolutely. I didn’t know this, but he used to be a
gymnast and he is able to give life to the suit in a way that you can’t just
sub in a stuntman. He’s so good and so specific with the way he dramatizes it
that he’s able to…(Jamie Foxx drops by) ‘Sup Jamie? (Returning to the question)
He always can make you laugh by the way he moves his body, he can make you feel
things by the way he shrugs his shoulders, you can feel him under the suit, you
can feel him under the mask even though you can’t see him. I’m always surprised
by him. He’s surprised by himself too.
Will you be
directing the third instalment?
I hope so!
