Swinging into theaters this weekend is Marc Webb‘s sequel The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and for the occasion, we had a chance to sit down with the director, as well as stars Andrew Garfield, Jamie Foxx, Emma Stone, and Dane DeHaan, and producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach.
During the separate roundtables, they touched on the only way we could see a potential cross-over between Spider-Man and X-Men and/or The Avengers, as well as Foxx’s inspiration from an obsessive fan to Clint Eastwood, dialing down the film for families, responding to villain overload in the Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man 3, recreating Times Square in Long Island, and much more. Check out the conversation below and read my take on the film here.
Jamie Foxx was inspired by an obsessive fan for his character of Max Dillon:
When asked why he decided to join the film he had a concise answer. “Fame fatigue.” Foxx says, “What I mean by that, any time I get a chance to disappear in some type of character is great to do, because we bombard people with our image every single day on Twitter or on Instagram. So to be the first black man with a comb-over, and to put the gap in the teeth and go back to sort of my In Living Color days, and really show Max sort of broken and really reaching out. Even though the character’s broad, he still has feelings, and when he sees Spider-Man, it does something to him, so we understand when does turn into Electro’s he’s just really hurt and let down as a fan.”
He even had a peculiar real-life experience to draw from, saying, “I understand the fanatic thing, too. I was in Philly, shooting a movie and I get a knock on my door in my condo. [* Foxx knocks on the table*] And I open it and there’s a guy there and he says, “Hey Jamie, Beyonce told me to come check on you.” I was like, “What?” “Beyonce told me to come up and just check on you. Can I just come in?” And I had to slam the door on the guy and call security, and I said, “Wow, that’s shit’s crazy.” We eventually caught him, but I wanted to take a little bit of that fanaticism in Max as well.”
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was dialed down to be more family-friendly:
While the film balances more menacing tones with the witty antics of our hero, not everything in the former section made the final cut. “Sony specifically took certain parts out of the movie, so it would be family-friendly, dial down a little bit of the violence,” Foxx says. “Because when we went on the road, what I found — I took my daughter, whose five years old. She’s completely different, she was on the set of Django [Unchained]. She’s not naive at all. [Laughs.] But for other kids, on purpose, we made sure there was things that were taken out of it, so that it could be family [friendly]. You can be safe and comfortable that they can watch something that they don’t have to go and explain too much to there kids. If anything, you explain why Spider-Man is necessary, because Spider-Man is still in high school, he’s doing the right thing. It’s about hope and he’s friendly. Those are the ingredients I think anyone can get on board with.”
On shooting guerilla-style in Times Square, and recreating the iconic location in Long Island:
If one followed any updates on the production, then they saw the reveal of Electro in the middle of Times Square, but Webb told us a bit more regarding the process. “We shot about two or three nights in Times Square. And it was like on a $200-whatever million dollar movie, we were running out of a van, guerilla-style with Jamie Foxx and like throwing the camera and shooting amongst people. It like the old days of music videos, but then we built a massive version of Times Square out in Long Island and we spent three-and-a-half weeks actually shooting on our stage that we built,” Webb says. “So it was the combination of filmmaking on the grandest scale and super guerrilla-style.”
As for Foxx’s experience in the crowd, he said, “They didn’t care. They were like, “Yo, J! What up baby? Yo, I got this mixtape, my man. Grab my mixtape, yo give ’em that mixtape.” [laughs] New York is great, because it’s real. If something was happening real crazy in New York, you get that real energy. And then when I was Max on the street. Girls were like, “Oh my God, look at Jamie Foxx. Look at his hair, something is off with him today.” So it was all good. New York is actually a character in the movie, which I think is great for the franchise, which is great for Hollywood and how we’re shooting in America. We’re shooting in New York.”
Jamie Foxx was influenced by Amadeus, Clint Eastwood, and Alec Baldwin:
His own real-life experience detailed above wasn’t the only inspiration for Foxx and his character. “I looked at Amadeus and Salieri, the way he felt about Mozart and it’s sort of what I wanted Electro to have — that jealousy, that coveting, like I want what you have, as opposed to to being happy with what you’ve been blessed with,” Foxx says. He added, “I remember when Salieri said, “This is who he chose, this little monkey.” And then he takes the cross and he burns it. And I was like, “Wow, this guy is in a dark place,” so I used a bit of that. Then just the mechanics, watching Clint Eastwood.” Foxx follows with a spot-on impression of, “Go ahead, make my day.” He adds, “That’s sort of how I wanted to get my voice in a certain place. Even Alec Baldwin in the Capital One commercials. [Laughs.] All those little things that you can grab from different places and put in your mindset and people won’t know what you’re going through in the audience, but it helps.”
Responding to Spider-Man 3‘s villain overload:
When it comes to the finale of Sam Raimi’s trilogy, one of many major complaints was the overload of villains, so with three (and perhaps more) teased in this film, how did Webb and company respond? “Yeah, there is certainly an awareness of what had come before us and people’s response to that,” Webb says. “But we had a really wonderful writer, Alex Kurtzman, who came in and we tried to navigate all those characters and give them the appropriate amount of story and really tell the stories of those characters and how they are all really reflections of Peter Parker.”
He expands, saying, “What they extract from that character, Peter Parker, is the really the important thing, and Electro allows you to see the empathy and the empathetic side of Spider-Man, and his physical abilities that are conjured, and he focused on a very specific way against Electro, the cleverness and how he stops the guy with water instead of violence. But then there is the Harry Osborn, which brings up a different side of that character, which shines a light on the relatable, domestic relationship. We all have best friends, we all have arguments with best friends, it’s just that in a Spider-Man movie, that’s taken to it’s absolute surreal extreme and it was a way for us to conjure and focus on the Gwen story. But it was very carefully placed and plotted out.” There was a single towering criminal, however, as Webb says, “In a very real way, there’s one big villain in the movie and it’s Oscorp and its different tentacles.”
On the only way there could be a Spider-Man cross-over movie with X-Men or The Avengers:
The question on the minds of many fans is, if the studios ever agreed, what a cross-over between Spider-Man other Marvel superheroes such as X-Men and The Avengers could be. Producer Avi Arad shared his thoughts, saying, “I think there are some stories that will fit beautifully into a cross-over. I think that if we want to do that, the cross-overs, it has to be a story that is absolutely centered on Spider-Man. We can not become a second banana to anything out there, because this is the king. This is the one that influenced young people from birth. I’m not preaching by saying Spider-Man/Peter Parker, who is in all of us, is too important to go in and use it at a side-piece for corporate purposes. There’s certain stories about Spider-Man that are incredible mixed up with another universe.”
When it comes to his long-standing relationship with The Avengers and other Marvel properties, he said he sees all the films. “I view them all as my children. The Avengers was in the plan for a long time, it had to be built over the years,” Arad says. “When we did Iron Man, people thought we were all nuts. No one knew what was Iron Man, unless you were a comic guy. They thought it was a documentary about some competition in Hawaii. No one got it. So it’s part of the education. The great thing is that today our movies are meaningful. You leave a movie like Spider-Man and I think you feel better about yourself and you want to do the right things and you are inspired.”
On what Spider-Man’s relationship would be with Tony Stark:
If a cross-over with The Avengers ever were to happen, Andrew Garfield also opened up about his possible relationship with Tony Stark. “The amazing thing about Peter, always, has been that he’s a working class hero and a genius, not just in terms of the physical abilities he gets. He’d be a computer hacker or he’d be a part of the hacker table in the start-up of Google or Twitter,” Garfield says. “It’s interesting when you think about what his relationship would be to Tony Stark or what his relationship would be to these guys.” Instead of a billionaire tycoon like Iron Man’s alter ego, he says, “I think he would be a subversive, underground revolutionary.”
Webb added, “There’s a rebel spirit, there’s an irreverent quality. He’s very distrustful of institutions and corporations. He’s a kid and he’s a loner. And he’s super smart and he’s a critical thinker. He likes to ride his own horse. That’s so much in the identity of that character. I think he cares more about people than he does ideas.”
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hits theaters on May 2nd, 2014.