Marc Webb on making Spider-Man swing

MANILA, Philippines - Given his surname, you might think that it’s inevitable that Marc Webb would end up directing a Spider-Man movie. But the 37-year-old would be the first to admit that he’s something of a leftfield choice to oversee the latest iteration of the friendly neighborhood web-slinger, with The Amazing Spider-Man representing only his second film, following 2009’s hit romantic comedy, (500) Days Of Summer.

That movie’s wry humor, flashy set pieces and focus on characters, though, persuaded The Amazing Spider-Man producers, Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach and the late Laura Ziskin that Webb was their Spider director. And Webb has risen to the challenge, with an earthy, grounded aesthetic that sees the web-slinger’s legendary story take place in a very recognizable universe — ours.

Webb talks about his decision to get involved with the project, the challenges of making Spider-Man swing and finding Andrew Garfield in the interview below:

How did you get involved with The Amazing Spider-Man?

“I was meeting with these guys (Arad and Tolmach) and they brought up the idea. I was meeting with them on something else and I thought it was totally ridiculous. I said, I don’t make movies like that. They said, that’s why you should do it.”

This is a new version of the Spider-Man story. How different is it?

“There’s so much to tell in terms of who this kid is. My favorite thing about Spider-Man, is Peter Parker, the fact that he’s a kid from Queens who’s not a billionaire and he’s not an alien. He’s a kid who has the same problems we all do and that makes him intensely relatable. Spider-Man becomes wish fulfillment for that, flying through the air and beating up bad guys, but that all emanates from what Peter Parker would dream of, whether or not he was Spider-Man. To me, I wanted to start from a place where it felt like, if you walked into the theater, that it was the same universe you lived in, and ground that both aesthetically and emotionally, which is difficult when you have a giant lizard running down the street.”

How did you approach the scenes where Spidey is swinging through the city?

“It was important for me to not just see Spider-Man swinging away from afar, but to be with him and feel that. We went to New York, near Columbia and Harlem and built a traveling rig system. We have motion capture elements that are there to create a sense of realism, weight and physical realism that we’re still working on and will be working on until the day before the movie comes out. It’s about expanding the universe, where you earn the spectacle of Spider-Man’s abilities.”

Let’s talk about Andrew Garfield. What made you cast him as Peter?

“He was just the right guy. In his screen-test, he killed it. He moved like a kid, his elbows were flying all over the place, and even though he’s a little bit older, he had the humor, the awkwardness but also an ability to go deep in a way that very few actors can do. He’s a highly-trained actor, he’s very thoughtful about that and that grabbed me. The editors we’re working with, they didn’t know he was British (laughs)!”

What can we expect from his Spider-Man?

“We start off with a different kind of Peter Parker, without subverting the iconography of what Peter Parker and Spider-Man is. There are certain mythological obligations people have in any story, but it’s so radically different in terms of tone and what he experiences and back-story and the mystery about his father that I’m very comfortable with the movie occupying a different space. What we took for the beginning of the story is Peter being left by his father and mother, and what that does for him, and the emotion ripples through the movie, and subsequent movies as well.”

Will we hear the phrase, “with great power comes great responsibility?”

“That’s ingrained in the very DNA of Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. There are different incarnations of that idea, but it doesn’t completely define his character. It’s about him growing up. Every movie is, who am I? We say that in the movie, explicitly. Being responsible for things bigger than himself is what he’s about, it’s what superheroes are all about. It’s why we love them.”

(The Amazing Spider-Man is now showing in theaters nationwide.)