The summer’s blockbuster movie event swung into theaters this past weekend.
The Source sat down with the film’s star Andrew Garfield and director Marc Webb to discuss the sequel.
Can you speak about Peter Parker’s emotional journey? He has a lot to deal with.
Andrew: Yeah, there is. I think that’s inevitable with this character. I think if it was a coast, if it was too easy, we wouldn’t want to watch him, because the wonderful thing about Peter is that he is all of us, and he goes through all the same troubles that we go through, but he just goes through them in the course of two hours as opposed to two years. And that’s compelling because we’re seeing our own lives, our own small difficulties and large difficulties played out on screen. All the while we have a responsibility to the gifts we’ve been given, you know, whatever our Spider-Man gifts are personally, whether that’s for journalism or acting or jewelry making or tablecloth setting or whatever that is. And that’s an amazing thing to be able to play all these obstacles and the ridiculousness actually of this happens and then that happens and then that happens. That can’t happen all in the course of one movie, but it does for Peter, and I think that’s why he’s so compelling and we feel for him so much.
Marc: At the beginning of the film he really is enjoying being Spider-Man. He is fully embracing that gift. And he kinda thinks he can have it all, and that of course leads to a deep, deep conflict. And I think what’s interesting about the dynamic is it’s also—Gwen is now starting to realize that she has her own destiny, her own thing, and that independent spirit that makes them so interesting to watch together, the kind of—I love lovers as rivals … people who are strong and thoughtful expressing their love through something that’s competitive and playful and fun and that kind of banter. But that thing that draws them together is also the thing that’s going to separate them ultimately first in ways you don’t conceive of initially for them at the beginning of the film. So, her progression I think is as interesting as his.
Q: A lot of people said that the last “Spider-Man” was a rom-com secretly dressed as a summer blockbuster movie. Do you think that applied and do you think that still applies to this one?
Marc: Hopefully it’s not so secretly in there. I love those kinds of movies sometimes. Listen, Spider-Man has always in the comics had a very strong romantic component to it, and that part of his personality is something that we all hopefully go through, you know. And for me it’s one of the big things that makes Peter Parker relatable and interesting is that tenderness and the type of relationships that he has around him, which are very human and very relatable, very real, kind of ordinary in their foundations.
Q: As you’re approaching material, how do you modernize the character of Peter Parker while still staying true to these core eternal aspects of the story?
Marc: Well, that’s the thing. Like, there is some eternal, universal, mythological, archetypal parts of the Spider-Man character that he’s a trickster, he is a protector, and that kid has a heroic impulse that we can all identify with. I think you just put him into a context that feels more realistic. He listens to music that we hear on the radio. You incorporate the sites and locations that are not as stylized as you might see in some other movies, and part of that was shooting in New York City on the actual streets, and part of it is the wardrobe and in making those a huge part of the contemporary nature of it is aesthetic. Then there’s also the music, which I think informs that attitude a lot. And then there’s simple inflections of Peter Parker in the comics back in the day was more of a nerd, but a nerd was a shorthand for an outsider. And really the archetypal component of Peter Parker is that he’s an outsider. He’s the guy who’s on the outside looking in and has been abandoned and is not sort of as loved and as paid attention to as we would all like to be.
Q: After the “Batman” reboot from Christopher Nolan, it looked like the superheroes were turning very dark, very spiritual. And I’m glad that you have retaken the light and funny part of the superhero, even though you still have the emotional texture. Were you tempted to be more epic or were you preserving the funny part of the superhero?
Marc: Yeah. Well, both. I had a very specific intention at the beginning of the film to embrace the spectacle, which is not just a statement of … “I want to make it bigger than ever,” but that comes from a feeling. It comes from being a kid and reading comic books and leaning back in between panels and imagining yourself doing the things that Spider-Man was doing, and the fantasy of that and how amazing that felt, trying to embrace that childlike sense of wonder that you got when you’re reading the comics. And then in terms of the humor, I think that’s something that we really worked on in so many ways: in the physicality, in the joke telling, in just the bright, vibrant opening sequence, just the attitude of that was quite different.
Q: Spider-Man is so iconic. Either one of you have any reservations about taking this project on?
Marc: No. [LAUGHTER]
Andrew: Yeah. Of course, yeah. I have reservations about getting out of bed every morning, ’cause what the hell is going on. What is this weird rock that we’re on and floating through the universe? It’s scary. It’s scary out there … Well, then of course you kinda go, “Well, I may as well do something. so we may as well tell the Spider-Man story.”
No, we get lucky in the sense that we have the opportunity to be a part of storytelling. You know, I love being able to be an actor, I love being able to be a part of telling stories … And this is where it gets tricky for me, because I’ve been a Spider-Man fan since I was three. He was my first ever Halloween costume and then it grew to being a real kind of deep friendship that I have with the character. So, in getting the offer to even screen test was a very overwhelming moment because l thought, well, suddenly a thousand different voices rise up inside me. Luckily, the most overpowering one was my inner three-year-old jumping up and down and screaming yes, but then there were all these other voices, these internalized voices going “How dare you even think you could attempt something so tremendous and big? And you’re gonna mess it up and everyone’s gonna hate you.” And then the three-year-old’s like, “But I want to play Spider-Man. I want to play at being Spider-Man … they might want me to do it.” … There is no accident that I’m an incredibly existential, neurotic, terrified person, and I think that you probably witnessed that and thought that maybe Peter Parker would be an appropriate character I need to play. But of course ultimately you gotta get out of bed and you gotta give yourself to something greater than yourself, and for me right now and for us right now it’s Spider-Man.
Marc: I think in life, just to get deep for a second, like, you know, you can kinda go on autopilot, you can drift through things, and then occasionally it can be quite rare where you just get a feeling, something vibrates in you and you’re moved, you’re inspired, and those moments are so rare and it’s so easy to just let go, but I think in Spider-Man there was something very profound about our relationship with Spider-Man growing up where you just sense something bigger, you’re contributing yourself to something bigger than yourself. And those opportunities, when they do present themselves, you gotta hold on. You gotta, like, try to massage that and open and stay alive. Otherwise, you know, what’s the point?
Q: How did you prepare physically for the role since there’s so much going on.
Andrew: I don’t have all that interesting an answer to that. I had to go to the gym a lot and I had to create the superhero aesthetic on the outside of the body, and also on the inside I needed to feel as flexible and as open as possible. You know, the boring answer is I went to the gym. The more interesting answer is I studied Bugs Bunny and Charlie Chaplin and Muhammad Ali and Usain Bolt and—
Marc: Pharrell.
Andrew: Pharrell, and also worked with a great dance choreographer, contemporary dancer—two of them, Jack Ferver and Michelle Moller, and they would come over to my apartment that I was renting and we would just do ridiculous contemporary dance and make sure that all of my extremities were as long and wide as possible, because the potentiality of a spider’s movement is it can be here and then it can be over there in a split second. And the lightness and the stillness that it can achieve is balletic and kind of so beautiful to witness. So, I hope it’s not just, like, a guy in a suit just kind of beating people up. It’s gotta be like kind of Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, spider, contemporary dancer, Buster Keaton hybrid.
Q: I think you see that in the elevator scene. Can you speak about that?
Andrew: Fun. So much fun, and scary.
Q: How many takes?
Andrew: We did a lot, but we got a very cool guy called Cal McCrystal who’s a physical comedian and a physical comedy kind of creator/director. And he did a show here called “One Man, Two Guvnors,” a Broadway show. And we went through the script with him and he was just like, “Well, you could do something here and you could do something here and you could do something here.” And then we kinda devised different ideas. Some of them we managed to shoot, others we didn’t, but that was a really fun part of the process, to give a little joyous kind of physical comedy feel.
Marc: There is a forgotten art form in physical comedy. People think it’s just falling off a ladder or walking into a wall, but there’s a much more sophisticated language and history … there was very specific Buster Keaton gags, like, references where he grabs the truck, which took us weeks to figure out how that was done. And it’s so effortless in that movie and Andy Armstrong, our stunt coordinator is a huge Buster Keaton fanatic, had to work with William Spencer and it was failure after failure after failure, which reminds you of the sophistication of that art form and how Vaudeville trained these people into something very specific, and really a different kind of pleasure happens when you’re watching that. And it’s beyond humor ’cause it involves some sort of physical virtuosity that’s really quite rare. And it’s sad ’cause that shit’s fuckin’ awesome. [LAUGHTER] And there’s a whole, I think, category of film that can be had, and Cal’s play was playing with that in a way that I think people really vibrated with.
Andrew: Go back and watch Charlie Chaplin’s globe dance from The Great Dictator and you’ll weep and you’ll be agape. It’s just like “How on Earth are you so genius?” It’s a real lost art right now.
Q: One of my favorite parts of the film was that you kept the ambient sounds of the street and the look. And I was wondering, did you do that on purpose or did you have to add that back in?
Marc: Well, it’s an interesting question because we shot on location and we actually tried to filter as much of that stuff out as we could, but what happen you want those actors to have—those actors meaning Garfie and—[LAUGHTER] Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and Sally Field—you want them to be able to act small, you want them to be able to be quiet and intimate, but there’s trucks passing by so often, what you have to do is you have to turn everything up, and that creates a sense of place, interestingly. And so, it was sort of a technical thing that became part of the palette and even became part of the score. Like in Times Square, actually we used some city sounds and made rhythms with those sounds that became part of the sonic template of the movie.
Q: What can people learn from Spider-Man?
Andrew: You kind of want them to take away what they take away. You don’t want to dictate to them what we’re trying to give them. And we’re not even aware of what we’re trying to give, but one of the things that I am taking away from playing him and the experience of being deep in playing this character is he feels like a metaphor for my life and I think for all of our lives in the sense that we are all Peter, evidently, in terms of the ordinary struggles we have go through and the ordinariness and the imperfection, the failure, the stumbling, the fumbling through life and the mystery of it all, and we are all Spider-Man in the sense that we have something to offer, we have something wonderful and extraordinary to give. And I think our only real duty is to ourselves in the sense that we need to discover what our spider powers are, whether it is tablecloth setting or bricklaying or art or business or science, whatever it is, and then you give that gift as freely as you can while you’re struggling with being a regular human being.