Along Came A Spidey

Q: Apparently the meeting went well.

A: It was about an hour and a half long and I thought it had gone well, yes. About a day later, I read another article in Variety that said Sony had it down to three directors and I wasn't listed. I thought to myself, "Maybe it's a blessing in disguise. It's such a difficult project, I wouldn't really have known how to make the movie anyway. I almost pity the poor guy who gets it."

Q: How did you feel when you got the call that you won the job?

A: I thought, "I'm screwed. I have no idea how to make Spider-Man." But I put on my best directors voice and said, "Well, when do we begin?" It was a process of sheer panic figuring out how to do it all.

Q: For years James Cameron was interested in directing Spider-Man and he had already done extensive work on a script. Did you read any of what he'd done?

A: I knew that James Cameron had written what we call a "scriptment"--a treatment, approximately 80 pages long. David Koepp, whom Columbia had hired, had read it and based his first draft screenplay upon that. Even to this day--although the film has gone through an incredible amount of drafts and iterations--elements of the Cameron scriptment are to be found in it.

Q: The fan base for Spider-Man is enormous and apparently a number of them knew plenty of details of Cameron's scriptment.

A: I became aware of that through thousands upon thousands of people on the Internet who made their points of view known. They didn't actually write to me, though one group wrote a letter to the studio petitioning John Calley to not allow me to make a particular story choice in the screenplay. They wrote that fans would rise up against the picture. It began as an original idea of James Cameron's. In the comic book, Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider and later he builds these web-shooters and develops this fluid that shoots out of them, hardens and becomes his web. That was fine in 1964 but Cameron changed it to a genetically altered spider, a super-spider, and Parker has been bitten by it, takes on some of the DNA and mutates. Besides becoming part spider, he shoots a web out of a new gland that forms in his body. I thought it was a great change and I kept it in the screenplay.

Q: Is there anything a director can possibly listen to, watch, read or absorb to prepare to direct something as huge as Spider-Man?

A: Gee, should I have prepared? [Laughs] I feel terrible now. I didn't do much preparation. I did a lot of preproduction planning with a great team of artists.

Q: We've had our superhero movies over the years, for better or worse--the Superman films, the Batman movies, The Phantom, X-Men. How inspiring did you find them? A: It was daunting because Richard Donner's Superman is such a blast--big, uplifting, funny, exciting. Some people didn't like Batman but I did. It was stylish and cool. I love Danny Elfman's music and Tim Burton's directing. Your readers may be thinking, "What's he talking about? This or that movie is terrible." Look, I wouldn't make a good critic because I love most movies I see. I almost always have a great time. The movie I'm in love with now is A.I. Artificial Intelligence. There's some negative backlash toward it, but that's my favorite superhero picture. That kid, played by Haley Joel Osment, is my favorite superhero.

Q: Fantasy movies often rise or fall by how well or badly their "worlds" are realized. How did you envision Spider-Man looking and sounding?

A: That was very difficult. [Spider-Man production designer] Neil Spisak, myself and Don Burgess, my director of photography, worked on that quite a bit with our costume designer James Acheson. For me, the most important part of the Spider-Man story was that something extraordinary happened to an ordinary person. We felt the movie couldn't take place in a comic book world. But at the same time, we knew that if we photographed Spider-Man against a straight, unfiltered Manhattan buildingscape, that backdrop would vomit him out. It would not hold him in the same frame. We had to find something that would be perceived as real by the audience but was tweaked just enough so that it could hold characters like Spidey and the Green Goblin.

Q: What did you come up with?

A: Neil did things like densely populating city blocks with the coolest of real buildings that could possibly be in Manhattan. In real life, you might find one every two or three blocks but, in this city, they're of a greater concentration. It's like Manhattan squared.

Q: What aspects of making Spider-Man most kicked your butt?

A: What was really hard was the incredible amount of planning that had to go into almost every shot. They either had a stunt element, a CGI element or a wire-rig element. Plus, it was somewhat of a complex love story.

Q: How was the studio toward you? Did you feel your shoulder was being looked over? A: I thought they were going to be all over me. I've never had more freedom. It turned out to be the opposite of what I thought it would be. They didn't interfere. Not that we didn't have our disagreements; we did. But they were very helpful.

Q: Danny Elfman, who scored the movie, told me months ago that certain changes were going to be made in Spider-Man because of 9/11. What happened?

A: Columbia made a trailer with criminals robbing a bank who escape in a helicopter and suddenly, they're ensnared in midair and find themselves in a giant web that's spun between the Trade Towers. I don't think anyone knew how to react, but out of respect for the victims and families of that disaster, they pulled the trailer. Likewise, Columbia pulled a teaser poster in which the Twin Towers were reflected in Spider-Man's eyes.

Q: What about in the movie itself? Isn't there a scene or sequence that features the Towers?

A: I've read that there is a featured scene of the Twin Towers in the picture, but there isn't. The scene in the trailer was shot just for the trailer by another director, a commercials director, although they did use footage of Spider-Man swinging that is from our movie. In our movie, the Twin Towers are seen in the background of some scenes. Probably people won't see them but we had decided--and I thank, again, out of respect for the victims--not to take them out. The consensus now is to not pretend they never existed.

Q: What do you think of the movie?

A: It feels fun. I hope it will be fun for the audience. It's a fine comic book story.

Q: There are people in the movie business who claim that you're one or two movies away from joining the inner circle of big boy directors. What do you want?

A: I've never heard that. I'm thrilled to be working in the movie business, which is such a great collection of nutballs, artists and fakers. I love educating people. I'd love the opportunity to continue to practice the craft. That's all I'm after.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Eric Bana for the Feb./Mar. issue of Movieline.

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