Are you doing SPIDER-MAN 4 and 5 back to back? Or are you just doing them one at a time or do you know yet?
Sam Raimi: No one’s talked to me about making part 5 at this moment. Right now I’m hoping to make part 4.
I just heard that everybody had signed a three picture deal, so I guess that’s all misinformation. People just assuming maybe, because you see MARVEL signing all of these people to nine picture deals and stuff now…
Sam Raimi: Did they really?
Yeah, they just signed Sam Jackson into a nine picture deal, but that’s to appear in the next HULK movie, the next IRON MAN movie, AVENGERS…
Sam Raimi: For me it’s just making the nextSpider-Man picture, that’s all I know right now.
That’s cool. When do you guys start on that?
Sam Raimi: Well, it’s a never-ending process. Basically we are talking about the story right now, shortly artists will come on and I’ll start giving them shots to draw. We are supposed to start talking to a production designer soon, so it will just keep getting larger and larger.
Is it easier starting a movie like this when you already have so much that you have done in three different movies, where you can go back and say “OK, well we know the main suit is going to look like this and now we need to design this new stuff,” or is it like going back to square one every time you do it?
Sam Raimi: Some of it is like going back to square one. For instance in the beginning Jim Achenson, our costume designer had to design the Spider-Man suit completely from scratch, but in the second one, we went to probably 25 redesign elements of the Spider-Man suit, so a lot of it had to be redone just because I didn’t like that the bottom of the boots were black, there were particular webbing issues that could have been improved that Jim didn’t have time to improve himself and on and on.
He found a better way to overlay some of the print designs on top of themselves versus a very slow and ultra costly system, so sometimes it was about great clarity of image, sometimes it was about artistic changes, sometimes it’s about greater symmetry of imagery within the costume, but there were about 20 to 25 changes and they were much easier, because we were starting from source material that we thought was working.
In the third picture, we felt that the technology had changed enough that it was time to skin Spider-Man and start him over again, so we actually had to start from the ground up again, but it wasn’t so much exterior skin design as much as it was the armature that drove him, so we are going to evaluate when the team comes together, I don’t have a visual effects supervisor yet, “what were we unsatisfied with? What aspects?” But certainly it won’t be… we will have to start over again, because we want in 2011, if that’s when the picture comes out, because I’m not sure. I get so confused by these dates… I don’t want somebody to say “What did you do? You advanced the date!”
But whenever the picture comes out we want to make sure we were shooting above the bar as it currently stands as far as visual effects go and we may or may not make that, but that will be my team’s goal when we start.