Andrew Garfield on almost suffocating in a particular scene:
“I had to get wet, and I just kind of dove in and didn’t realize that water on the mask made it impossible to breathe.”
“So I was kind of, like, suffocating,” he says, getting wide-eyed and wheezing to act out the scene. “I couldn’t get any oxygen! I water-boarded myself.”
He was helped by fight coordinator Andy Armstrong to free himself.
Andrew Garfield has expressed on numerous occassions his passion for the character and admitted to being a huge Spider-Man fan and this is again evident when he says:
“Since Stan Lee wrote the first panel and Steve Ditko drew the first drawing, that’s what you want to be true to: the core of the character and the story,” Garfield says. “I think the symbol of Spider-Man hangs over all of us.”
Martin Sheen spoke highly of the movie’s star:
"Garfield is also grittier. “He had to do some very heavy emotional work, and boy, the set was on fire when he went to those places.”
Emma Stone, although speaking before on her character Gwen Stacy's death in the comic books, reiterated how it influenced her to be part the movie:
“Any story that causes people to burn their comic books and cancel their subscriptions is a story that I want to be a part of,” quips Stone. “But I thought Gwen’s story was really incredible. Who knows if it will play out in that way, but I hope it will.”
Rhys Ifans on the villainy of The Lizard / Doctor Connors
“He’s a very human villain, even though he does become a 9-foot reptile,” says Ifans. “He isn’t your run-of-the-mill stock villain. He doesn’t want to take over the world from the beginning — he wants to benefit it.”
According to the NY Daily News, Ifans started to get into his character by spending weeks training himself to tie a necktie and make a cup of coffee with one hand.
Ifans also expressed his excitement of working on The Amazing Spider-Man:
“On many an occasion, Andrew and I would go, ‘We’re in ‘Spider-Man!’
“We would respond to it like a fan would. ‘Can you believe we’re in this film? It’s amazing!"
Producer Matt Tolmach on Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies and rebooting the franchise:
“There was a lot of good plot, there were a lot of twists, but you couldn’t answer the question we had asked for 12 years, which was, ‘What’s Peter feeling ?’ ” says “Amazing Spider-Man” producer Matt Tolmach. “So, Sam being the incredibly elegant character he always was, said, ‘Guys, I’m done. I told this story."
“We weren’t standing at a fork in the road, we were standing in a dead end on that road,” he says. “So we turned around.”
Director Marc Webb on the casting of Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker / Spider-Man:
“It was terrifying,” “Because [we] have this idea of who this character is, and [the actor] needs to have the emotional capacity to express tragedy and gravitas. He needs to be funny and sort of sarcastic. He needs to respond to the physical demands of the character, which are pretty intense.
“And then he has to be somebody who could be convincing playing a teenager.”
Webb
stated a few months ago that he knew that Andrew Garfield was right for the role by the way he ate a cheeseburger during a screen test. While speaking with NY Daily News, he again mentions this moment when saying how he knew Garfield (28) would be perfect as the teenage Peter Parker:
“He was eating this cheeseburger and his elbows were flopping all over the place, and he was slumping down,” says Webb. “He just felt like a teenager. “That was a tremendous relief because there was a level of certainty in that moment that it was going to be okay.”