Avi Arad & Matt Tolmach Discuss THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2; "It's A Q&A Movie"

Matt Tolmach: New York is beautiful. It’s the home of Spider-Man, so it’s great. There’s a lot of traffic, and a lot of angry people, which we have to navigate. There’s a lot of people. But it’s the home of Peter Parker.

We’re from California, so it’s a long way to come, but on a day like today, we realise that it’s a gift to be able to be here, and give the movie that authenticity that comes right out of the comic book.

Avi Arad: New York is actually a character. If we have Peter Parker, New York is a character. The Daily Bugle. The Empire State Building. Everything about New York has been adopted for the character of our movie. That makes it all worth it, right?

Matt Tolmach: Without giving away the story, it literally starts with an enormous... thing. And that’s one of the things we wanted to do with this movie, is just... bigger, brighter, more. We’re taking it to heights you’ve never seen before in a Spider-Man movie, and we do that right from the opening gun.

Avi Arad: This is a Q and A movie. So you saw the first one, and it worked really well establishing the characters. But the second movie allows us to hear your questions, and to take them into consideration as the script is being developed. I think the main thing in the original movie was that Peter Parker wasn’t given enough choices.

In this movie, we had the opportunity to challenge say, “Okay, you are who you are now. Can you handle it? Do you own it?” And because he does own it, it becomes not only an incredible adventure, and bigger as Michael was saying, but also [full of] humour. You’re going to be laughing. We have people like Paul Giamatti in the movie.

Matt Tolmach: Let me just pick up on something he just said, which is spot on. We felt a real obligation in the last movie to tell the origin story of this new Peter Parker. We’re sort of free of that, in some ways. This is a Spider-Man story.

We left you, in the last movie, to answer your question: Peter had decided to be all things. He was going to be Spider-Man and he was going to have that girl [Gwen Stacy]. That’s the territory this movie delves into.

Avi Arad: No one can be all things, as we all know.

Matt Tolmach: Every movie is about a main character and the complexities they face. But this is a Peter Parker story, and as we were just saying, when we left you in the last movie, Peter said, “You know what? I’m going to break the promise. I’m going to be Spider-Man, and I’m going to have the girl”. And I think, as we all know, and as Avi said, life doesn’t always work that way. You can’t always have all things.

So immediately, Peter’s going to be faced with some massive choices in this movie. So yeah, it’s another Peter Parker story, about what he faces when he tries to have everything.

Avi Arad: It’s also like real life. We all run into problems. Some of them get solved immediately, some don’t. Nothing is taken care of forever. You get hungry, you eat something. Four hours later, you’re hungry again. So for someone like Peter, he’s unique, but he shares with the world something we all go through, that’s what makes it such an incredible family, action, romantic... it’s about normal decisions. Decisions we all have to make at one time or another. And for a kid, these decisions are really tough. So there are no resolutions, but making inroads.

Avi Arad: Three times the size. No, half the size. [Laughs] Here’s what the major difference is between the first film and this one: we have much more complex and interesting and funny action scenes. They’re huge. I think we discovered as we were working with the team and the director, we can push the envelope, and do action scenes that... every movie is trying to raise the ante. We have some stuff that is very unique, tense, and it’s all in the story.

So you don’t have two cars crashing because it’s fun, let’s blow up some stuff. It’s all about the story, and it’s big from the moment it opens, as we say.

Matt Tolmach: It’s also funny. We felt the need and the desire to really go to the tone of Spider-Man. It’s all things. It’s intense and funny. He’s always so funny and self-deprecating.

Avi Arad: Well, when you choose a villain, you need something visually exciting. And when you have someone like Jamie Foxx... you want to make sure the guy with the mask and the guy without the mask are delivering two different performances. So when you have a guy like that, who’s really unique and can play havoc with our lives, it’s this that gives us the idea for the things you see in our movie.

Matt Tolmach: We started talking about Electro before we made the first Spider-Man movie with Sam Raimi. Jim Cameron had written a treatment all the way back then, and he’d chosen Electro. Andwe flirted with it, with these guys, on Spider-Man One. He’s such a visual character, yet at the same time, as Avi said, you want to choose a character who is visually exciting, powerful and a foil for Spider-Man, and at the same time, has a real crisis of morality, that makes him a good character.

Max Dillon is the flipside of that, andhe’s also a great character in his own right. It’s something we’ve been dreaming about for a long time.

Avi Arad: It was an opportunity to make Max Dillon the villain!

Avi Arad: Uh... I’d rather not answer that at this point. This is what the word ‘spoiler’ means. We want to always leave the audience with a couple of surprises. All of a sudden, you feel like, yeah, there’s a continuity. So if we say today how we go about it, we’d take away from the surprise of the movie.

Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield), life is busy – between taking out the bad guys as Spider-Man and spending time with the person he loves, Gwen (Emma Stone), high school graduation can’t come quickly enough. Peter hasn’t forgotten about the promise he made to Gwen’s father to protect her by staying away – but that’s a promise he just can’t keep. Things will change for Peter when a new villain, Electro (Jamie Foxx), emerges, an old friend, Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan), returns, and Peter uncovers new clues about his past.