Sony and the production team behind the highly anticipated Spider-Man 3 have done a great job of giving the fans behind the scenes looks at the making of the movie via the internet. But now Spider-Man producer and long time Sam Raimi collaborator, Grant Curtis has put together an excellent book, The Spider-Man Chronicles: The Art and Making of Spider-Man, which details nearly everything that went into the making of the sure to be summer blockbuster. I got a chance to talk with the very busy producer about the trials and tribulations of continuing the most popular comic book movie franchise of all time.

Newsarama: What are you up to today?Grant Curtis: We’re doing a variety of things. We’ve got a lot of people on our editorial team, physically just checking prints, how they look and all that. Sony is obviously kicking into full gear with getting the prints out there and we still have a lot of marketing stuff. In the last month it’s been really intense so we’ve been having a lot of seven day weeks. It’s really doing a lot of the cleanup work that we were able to put off for a month or so by the good graces of various departments here at Sony that didn’t need certain information right away. So the last six weeks has been a lot of prioritizing of what should come first and what could wait. Now we’re getting into the stuff that could wait until the insanity slowed down.

NRAMA: Is it much different than the insanity that led up to Spider-Man 2?

GC: It’s very similar with Spider-Man 2 we went seven day weeks at the end there. But for Spider-Man 3, I know we worked at least 50 days straight or some insane number. The amount of days straight on Spider-Man 3 did top Spider-Man 2. It’s a bigger movie.

NRAMA: It seems to be a much bigger movie…GC: Yes, it’s got more characters. It’s got more intricate, complex visual effects shots, so working on that end of it was much more or detailed than the previous two movies, as it should be. You should always get bigger and better and tell a more complex story and have more complex visual effects. Or there’s no reason to do another one.NRAMA: Does Sam [Raimi] have final cut on these movies?

GC: That’s a good question that I simply do not know the answer to. Sam is such a collaborator and visionary. It’s not the way he directs; it’s just not the person he is.

NRAMA: Is it because there are so many people involved that you can’t answer that?

GC: No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. He’s not a dictator on set and he’s not a dictator during post. One way or another, it’s not something he would ever flaunt and that’s why I don’t know the answer to it. I know that’s weird. To this day, this is his vision but he’s very respectful of the studio, very respectful of Avi [Arad] and Laura [Ziskin] who produced the film.

NRAMA: Is The Spider-Man Chronicles made up of material we’ve been seeing through the video blogs and the regular blogs from you guys?

GC: There’s some in there. The book is made up of five chapters. There’s a chapter on how the script came about and that process. There’s a chapter on the casting. There’s a chapter on the visual effects. There’s a chapter on the production design and there’s a chapter on the costume design. Then there’s also a day-to-day journal I kept while we were shooting. The video blogs that you see on Sony’s site directly dovetail or vice-versa into that particular day or the multi-day journal entry from when we were shooting that scene or that shot. So it’s very unique.A lot of the artwork in there has not been seen, but there are aspects of it that people have seen through other avenues, like the web blogs and video blogs. But the artwork on the blogs has barely scratched the surface. There’s an amazing conceptual artist, named E.J. Krisor, that worked through the whole film. The artwork that he compiled with Sam and the costume designer James Acheson will blow people away. The book has the various stages of Venom, how we came up to that final version of Venom and the lines in-between. I think the book is going to wow Spider-Man fans and filmmaking fans as well. What I do think is unique about the book is that you don’t have to be a Spider-Man fan to enjoy this book. You could be somebody who really likes to study and wants to learn more about film because it really does take you through the whole process from day one to the very last frame. It is a special “Making of book” because I write from a unique perspective because I was there from the first day to the final day. I carried around my camera during pre-production, during our script meetings, during read-throughs with cast members, during early costume meetings. I was a miniature Peter Parker. Then when we started shooting, we had an incredible on-set photographer Mary Wallace, whose work is also featured heavily in the book. So it’s really a combination of pictures I gathered from so many departments and from many other crew members who happened to be on set, saw something amazing and pulled out their camera at that moment.NRAMA: How long have you been working with Sam Raimi?

GC: We’ve worked together for 10 years now. I started with him a little before A Simple Plan, a little bit before that. It’s been a great run.

NRAMA: Just by coincidence I happened to be watching Raising Arizona which reminded me that Sam has had great collaborations with the Coen brothers. The camera tricks that Sam made famous with Evil Dead films and then used throughout many of his later pictures, does he still use them or is it a modified version that’s combined with special effects?GC: Sam likes to get anything in the camera as much as possible, without a doubt. In a lot of the Spider-Man stuff, you’ll see those camera tricks in the way Spider-Man swings and those fighting styles. But I think he’s got different tools available to him now. You’ll still see the in-camera photography that was relevant and used back on the Evil Dead days but then you’ll also get the camera and photography that’s just pure CG such as when Spider-Man is swinging through the cavernous alleys and roadways of New York. So he still has it. He storyboards heavily. It’s fun to watch camera shots emanate through the storyboards but then it’s also equally cool to be standing on set and see that he’s thinking about something, then he goes and discusses the camera move he has in his head with [Spider-Man 2 and 3 director of photography] Bill Pope. Sam is a master at his craft and it’s always a pleasure to watch.

NRAMA: At this point how much are the actual Spider-Man comic books being referenced by cast and crew?

GC: We always reference them in the beginning. The tone, pacing and the environment that Steve Ditko and Stan Lee created 40 plus years ago is always a common thread. I do think that inevitably when you’re creating full character arc for someone like Sandman or Venom or the new Goblin, you do have to go outside the comic books and really look at how that character has grown in the previous two movies and what they should be doing in the third movie. That doesn’t always line up with the comic book. But we’ve got Sam and [co-screenwriter] Ivan [Raimi] and [co-screenwriter] Alvin Sargent doing the writing duties on Spider-Man 3 and the story they were able to tell was just enthralling and compelling.NRAMA: Is Steve Ditko simply impossible to get a hold of or has he told you guys he’s not interested?GC: He’s elusive. I know there have been some phone conversations very infrequently. But he’s very much his own man and he stays to himself and we respect that. There’s no doubt about the impact that he’s had on our movies through what he created with Stan. We hope we keep his flame going as well, but he is tough to get a hold of.

 

NRAMA: Is it ever confusing to executives that this guy won’t do anything for the movie?

GC: You probably know the history better than I do, but it’s something that I think has been common for a while now, so I don’t think it necessarily was a shock. I’m not the guy to talk about the history of all that. He’s obviously an incredible storyteller. But long story short, I think we knew the environment in which we were working.

NRAMA: I always say if he didn’t show up to the first Spider-Man premiere, he’s definitely not going to show up for the third one.

GC: [laughs] I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’m sure he’s a really fine gentleman.

NRAMA: I read that the Vulture was originally going to be the villain in the third film instead of Venom. Did that make it into your book at all?

GC: I do cover that. We had to figure out how to best tell Peter Parker’s story in the third film so you start to look at villains who can help tell a part of that story. In the beginning the Vulture was one of those characters that we looked at incorporating.

NRAMA: Was he going to look very much like he did in the comics? GC: It’s not an answer that I can completely give because it was so early on. But I think if there’s one thing you can always look at in relation to James Acheson’s designs of our costumes, and Sam’s designs of those as well, is that they’re very reflective and reverent and respectful of what has come before by the numerous, talented Marvel artists over the years. I think it’s a good bet that it would have been very reflective of the designs of the comic book.NRAMA: In the previous Spider-Man movies, and pretty much all the other comic book movies, they’ve always used the early classic villains. I’ll probably get corrected on this on the message boards but I believe that Venom is the most modern villain to be in any of the Marvel movies. Does the look of him present a challenge much different than Dr. Octopus or The Green Goblin?

GC: I don’t know how the villains in X-Men or Daredevil or Elektra or any of that compare to the villains in Spider-Man 3 or what’s a modern villain compared to one of those franchises. But Venom does mark the modern era of villain entry into the Spider-Man films. It was important to us to introduce Venom because as we started looking at the story that we needed to tell about Peter Parker, Eddie Brock was a natural off-shoot of that because of the relationships with Peter at The Daily Bugle and their similarities.

NRAMA: Is Venom an all CGI character once the costume is on him?

GC: Yes, it’s very similar to Spider-Man. There are times when he’s practical and it’s Topher [Grace] standing there in a suit. Then there’s times when he’s doing something fantastical that a human being couldn’t do, just like Spider-Man, in which he’s CG. I think Venom did produce some unique challenges to us, as did Doc Ock, with the tentacles. But the real challenge in terms of looks on Spider-Man 3 was definitely Sandman.

NRAMA: Because of when he goes all sand?

GC: Yeah. There’s no denying Venom’s level of status he has attained in the comic book fans’ hearts. He’s the cream of the crop. But in terms of visual effects and creating a character, Sandman was definitely harder because the technology to create Sandman simply did not exist when we started prepping the movie. In the early days when Sam was describing how he saw Sandman to [visual effects supervisor] Scott Stokdyk, Scott just shook his head and said that we don’t have the technology right now, but we will have it when the time comes. That’s exactly what happened. Code had to be written, algorithms had to be produced in order to create Sandman as he appears in the movie. I never want to say Venom was easy to pull off because none of the characters are easy to pull off but there’s nothing like creating Sandman in the visual effects forum.NRAMA: So it sounds like Spider-Man won’t be defeating him with a vacuum cleaner as he did in his first appearance.GC: [laughs] Sandman’s had his own challenges. He’s tough. As you know he’s a shape-shifter. I think Thomas [Haden Church] is an amazing actor to play him. It’s one of those things that you just get comfortable with it right away because you see Thomas as Flint Marko and it’s spot-on. Then at the same time, Thomas makes the character his own as well.

NRAMA: I asked Peter Jackson this at the junket for King Kong, is it difficult to keep your movie pure when there’s all this marketing around it?

GC: I don’t think it is because it came from the top down. It comes from Sam, it comes from Avi, it comes from Laura, the goal is always to tell the best story possible and to tell the next step in the Peter Parker’s journey of becoming a better human being and a better superhero. So when you start with that as a core, it’s hard to become distracted by other things. I guess it might be a possibility if we focused on visual effects or another aspect of the filmmaking process, but when your focus is story from day one until the last day; I think that’s what keeps you grounded. There’s no doubt that with a movie like this movie and other blockbusters, the marketing and the promotional partners are a big part of it. But that comes with the territory and I think we’re lucky or blessed to have those aspects also associated with our film because that means people are interested in it.

There are movies that have an audience built in and there are movies that have to go out and capture that audience somehow. If you have a built-in audience for a movie like this, you’re already ahead of the game though it puts more pressure on you to come through for that audience. We enjoy the marketing and the promotion side of it because at the end of the day it’s a reflection of our audience.

NRAMA: Unlike most movies that cost as much as the Spider-Man films, the critics have been very good to the Spider-Man films. I’m not sure what’s going on with Sony, but I have this feeling that Spider-Man 3 is going to be a movie that they are going to be very cagey about screening for critics. But at this point with the franchise, is Spider-Man 3 a movie that needs a good critical reception?

GC: This is one of those movies that people are going to go see opening weekend. But I think every movie at the end of the day hopes and needs the critical acceptance because it’s a reflection of the story being told. It’s always what we strive for. Spider-Man 2 was one of the best reviewed movies we could ever hope for so we hope to have a repeat performance of that critical acclaim.NRAMA: If Spider-Man 3 makes as much money as the first one or the second one, but doesn’t get the kudos that those two did, will you guys really care?GC: I think you always care about what people say about your product. If you go out and you write a screenplay or you write a book or you build a rocketship, you’re always going to care what people think of it. Does it become our focus? No. We think we have a very entertaining product that tells the next phase in Peter’s maturation process and if someone says something negatively about it, it doesn’t change the story that we have. We don’t think anyone’s going to say anything negative. But I think the proof will be there on May 4th when people come and enjoy Peter’s further adventures.

NRAMA: Is Joseph Gordon-Levitt being considered to take over the role of Spider-Man if Tobey [Maguire] doesn’t come back for a fourth film?

GC: The truth of the matter is 3 has been so all-encompassing that to press pause to think about the future would do 3 an injustice. So that’s not a conversation we’ve even had. But as the dust settles on 3, we’ll see what the future holds. As you know, there are a lot of Peter Parker stories and we’ve barely scratched the surface. This is a project that Sam holds very near and dear to his heart and he absolutely loves working with Tobey. I think Tobey is the ideal Peter Parker so we’ll see what happens.

NRAMA: Will you be working with Sam on The Hobbit?

GC: [laughs] I can’t answer that one because I honestly do not know what his next project is. I don’t know if I’m working on it or not. Any presumption on my part would be not smart. We’ll take a rest and see what comes.

NRAMA: One of the things that has been leveled at some superhero films was that they were packing too many characters and villains into them. But you guys kept it very simple for Spider-Man 1 and 2. Did that prepare you for the multitude of characters in 3?

GC: The third film just happened to be a multi-villain platform. It’s not something we necessarily set out to do. We wanted to tell Peter Parker’s maturation process in the most exciting and most engaging manner possible and it emerged as a multi-villain piece. But it’s not something we set out to do. Besides the dealings Peter has with Eddie Brock, you do know that his relationship with Harry [Osborn] is inevitably going to go to another level in 3 and we’re also exploring some of the aspects of the night Uncle Ben was murdered. The story really set itself up and lent itself to a multi-villain forum. So it’s not something that we necessarily thought “okay, we had a handle on” because when we had a handle on Peter Parker’s story, we realized that there were multiple villains in that.

The Spider-Man Chronicles: The Art and Making of Spider-Man 3 is a 240 page hardcover priced at $50.00.Spider-Man 3 opens May 4
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/spiderman3/site/  

Posted under Hollywood, News

This post was written by MLT on April 20, 2007