Marc Webb Won't Direct THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 4

Much of the success of your first Spider-Man film hinged on the chemistry between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, who are now a real-life couple. How did you know they’d pop onscreen?

With Andrew and Emma, we screen tested them together, and it was obvious. There was a sense of vibe and chemistry. Emma’s great power, and I think why she’s so beloved, is because she’s accessible, and that comes from being very aware and present in a scene. Emma had this great experience with comedy, and Andrew had such emotional depth from drama, and they complemented each other perfectly. It’s just magic.


In Raimi’s second Spider-Man flick, the toll becomes too much and Peter Parker quits being Spidey. Where’s your Parker’s head at in The Amazing Spider-Man 2?

He knows he has to be Spider-Man and he’s contemplating the sacrifices Peter Parker has to make. His relationship with Gwen is the central engine of the film, but just from a dramaturgical standpoint, you’ve got to come up with villains and obstacles bigger than any he’s had to face, and he’s learning things about OsCorp that are more dangerous than anything he could’ve imagined. It’s just about throwing crazy shit in front of your hero and seeing how that changes him, and how he evolves.


And it looks like you’re throwing plenty of crazy shit at Spider-Man in this one. How did you land on Electro and Rhino as the villains?

Electro’s really the main villain in the movie. Rhino makes a brief appearance. With Electro, he has enormous cinematic potential—the way he looks is cool—and how do you stop that guy? I thought it was a worthy adversary for Peter Parker, and it was always something I was fascinated by in the comic books, about how you’d render that visually. But I thought there was enormous potential in exploring the character of Max Dillon before he becomes Electro, and enormous pathos. You feel for this guy who’s been pushed into the shadows and whom no one listens to. He’s humiliated and feels shame and emerges, through his transformation, in a darker and more destructive way. Feelings of shame and unworthiness are universal precursors to one of two things: an act of destruction and an act of heroism. Heroes and villains have so much in common. Peter caused the death of his uncle and has been abandoned by his parents, but he approaches that in a positive, more constructive way.


I imagine one of the toughest tasks was rendering Electro’s powers. The images I have in my head of people shooting bolts of energy are pretty cheesy from an effects standpoint—The Emperor in Jedi or even the ridiculous Opera Man in The Running Man.

Yeah, lightning bolts! We knew that was one of the tricky things. We did a lot of R&D, and came up with a cool, plasma-like energy field that shot out of his hands. It has a St. Elmo’s Fire-y, colorful texture to it and looks pretty great in 3-D. For Electro, we had to build 3-D models of that character and apply it to every single shot. There’s a nervous system—many, many layers of tissue, veins, and electrodes on his head which come to fruition in 3-D—as well as how he moves, shoots, and walks. We shot Jamie on set performing and merged those elements in.

You got Bridesmaids director Paul Feig to write some jokes for the first one. Did you employ anyone else to lend a helping hand in No. 2?

We did a comedy table and got a bunch of comedians to talk out joke suggestions, because Spider-Man is known for his quips. I’m not allowed to say who it was, but really wonderful comedians. We wanted that wit and humor to come across.


Dane DeHaan’s an impressive young talent. How does his Harry Osborne differentiate from Franco’s?

I wanted him to be as smart as Peter Parker. James Franco is a very intelligent man, but his Harry Osborne was a little bit dopey. This Harry Osborne is incredibly sharp. Harry and Peter are bound by the loss of their fathers and their abandonment issues. In Raimi’s film, Harry is trying to protect Peter from getting bullied or whatever, and in this one, they’re more like brothers.

And we’re going to see your Harry go all Green Goblin, right?

Yeah. There will be some "creature of the night" popping up.

Do you want to see more cross-pollination between Spidey and the other characters in the Marvel universe, like The Avengers?

We’re building out a more complicated Spider-Man universe with characters that people haven’t seen in other Spider-Man movies—The Sinister Six, Venom, and more. We’d all love to overlap with other studios, but it’s beyond my pay grade.