PETER PARKER gETS DARKER

the 2007
movie
preview
By tom roston
peter
parker
gets
darker
The third installment of the blockbuster franchise
pits our hero against Venom, Sandman, the new Goblin,
and his own out-of-control ego. Sam Raimi and
the cast explain why Spider-Man’s back—in black.
60 premiere
“s
k
yj
i
t
s he now fights
” with the thrill
u
!
of sky boarding and the
anyone harboring doubts about whether director sam
raimi can still get his geek on for Spider-Man 3, due out
May 4, need only ask him about the spanking-new goblin
glider. “Harry Osborn’s
new Goblin develops
a form of glider called
the sky stick,” he says.
“The old one, that’s
your generation. That
clunky old Cadillac.
kill of jujitsu.
Sky jitsu! Sky jitsu!”
Wearing a spiffy three-button jacket
62 premiere january/february 2007
the 2007
movie
preview
a hero with
hang-ups:
When Spidey turns
black, “it’s just
seductive,” says
Tobey Maguire. “It
makes you feel your
power, it makes you
bolder, it’s a darker
kind of energy.”
disturbing dramas like A Simple Plan and
The Gift. But now, first and foremost, he’s
the king of the Spider-Man franchise, which
after two films has grossed more than $1.6
billion worldwide.
“It’s as if Elia Kazan is trapped inside of
a gigantic action-picture director’s body,”
says Thomas Haden Church, who plays
Flint Marko (a.k.a. Sandman, a villain who
can transform into sand and shape-shift) in
the third film. “Like, if Elia Kazan and Otto
Preminger had a baby.”
Raimi insists that at its core, Spider-Man 3
is an intimate drama, even with a budget
rumored to be in the astronomical $250
million range. “What was important to me
was Peter Parker; the love of his life, Mary
Jane Watson; and the terribly strained
relationship with his best friend, Harry
Osborn,” he says. “And how that love
triangle would continue to develop. I
thought anything that distracted or
detracted from that would be a problem.”
And that, adds Raimi, even more than
the Goblin’s new glider, is what keeps him
“fresh” for Spider-Man 3. (Most geeks are
wounded romantics, after all.) “The best
way to entertain the audience is by getting to
PREVIOUS SPREAD: MICHAEL MULLER.
THIS SPREAD: COURTESY OF COLUMBIA PICTURES
over a striped dress shirt and blue jeans,
Raimi sits on a couch in his production
office on the Sony lot, brushing his tousled
hair back with his hand as his eyes widen
with excitement. “That’s actually ripped off
from a trailer I saw years ago, for this
movie Gymkata. They go, ‘The thrill of
gymnastics!’ and then they show some guy
flipping. ‘The kill of karate!’ And I love how
they say ‘karatay.’ It was so cool.”
Replicas of Spider-Man in various sizes
adorn the room, and a Green Goblin helmet
idles menacingly on the desk. premiere has
been to Raimi’s office before, while he was
making the first Spider-Man in 2002, and it
appears the same bottle of Maker’s Mark
whiskey is still in its place of honor. “Oh,
that other one was probably 50 bottles ago,”
Raimi says with a smile and a sigh, as he
brings the conversation back to the goblin
glider. “We’re going to have our own style
of fighting, like that trailer promised,” he
says. “With this board, he can whack
Spidey and jab him and flip around. I really
wanted to take the battles to the skies.”
Jazzed by the image, the 47-year-old
director gyrates slightly on his couch.
“That’s him. That’s where he’s coming
from,” says Tobey Maguire, who has played
the webbed crusader in all three SpiderMan films, when he hears about Raimi’s
excitement. “He’s making movies for the
geek.” If there were a holy trinity of
fanboys–turned–blockbuster directors,
Raimi would be at the head (with New
Zealand-based Peter Jackson and that kid
Bryan Singer at his side). First known for
his Evil Dead trilogy of cult horror hits,
Raimi evolved into a director of dark and
know the character in a much more intimate
way. I want to know who he is, what his
weaknesses are. I want to know how
miserable he feels. I want to know where he
next has to grow to as a human being.”
despite everything that it could cost her,”
Raimi says. As for Peter, “The poor guy is
ready to go on this prideful journey; he
thinks he’s got it all figured out, but he’s
just a dumb kid.”
Raimi held off on starting the Spider-
The third installment begins with
Spider-Man no longer getting bad press—
he’s become a beloved hero. “It’s a pretty
classic story line,” says producer Laura
Ziskin. “Now you’ve got power, everything’s kind of okay, you’ve got the girl and
people like you. And [now] what temptations are you subject to? He loses his way
and he has to find his way back.”
In a turn of events that will make
shrinks and comic-book fans alike drool,
Raimi revises Spider-Man history to create a
painfully complex knot in Peter’s psyche. It
turns out that the shooting death of his
Man 3 script until after Spider-Man 2 was in
the can. “I just sat down with my brother
Ivan [with whom he collaborated on the
first two movies], and said, ‘Where are our
characters now? And what is it that they
still have to learn about life?’ ” The brothers
picked up on the final image of Spider-Man 2,
a close-up of Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst)
looking worried as she watches Spidey, who
she now knows is Peter, taking to the air to
battle crime with a boyishly triumphant
yell. “She’s an insecure girl who made a
bold decision to be with the man she loves
Uncle Ben in the first movie, which he
thought was his fault because he didn’t stop
the thief when he had the chance, was
really the work of the thief’s partner, Flint
Marko, who jumped out of the getaway car
unnoticed. So when Spidey cornered the
thief and let him fall through a window to
his death, he was punishing the wrong guy.
(Go ahead, look back at that scene in
Spider-Man, and you’ll see that the change
is viable, if a bit of a stretch.)
“When [Peter] finds out that he’s fallible
for this murder, he’s so prideful, he just
focuses on destroying the man who really
killed Ben,” Raimi says. “He’s unwilling to
face the sins of his past. Mary Jane can’t
stomach this. She was ready to take on
villains and the risks, but not his ego.” It
doesn’t help that Mary Jane’s acting career
hits the skids while Peter is beating his redand-blue breast.
“Peter’s in a different place, and his
journey’s different,” says Maguire, who
appreciates that Raimi shook things up for
his character. “I don’t want to see the same
things. I don’t want to see him in four
scenes haggling with [Daily Bugle editor]
J.J. Jameson over the price of a picture.”
At the newspaper, Peter will encounter
new competition in Eddie Brock (Topher
Grace), a slick photographer who gets good
shots of Spider-Man and who will eventually
develop the alter ego of Venom, a villain
with some arachnid powers not unlike
Spidey’s. “What if someone who’s very
similar to Peter didn’t have as great a father
figure as Uncle Ben?” asks Grace about
Brock. “What would have happened if that
kind of power fell into the wrong hands?”
And then there’s Gwen Stacy (Bryce
Dallas Howard), whom Spider-Man saves in
the movie’s first action sequence. Gwen is a
fan favorite; in fact, Raimi considered
making her Peter’s main object of affection
in the first Spider-Man. “But upon further
examination we realized the only potent
thing about Gwen, if you read the books, is
her death and the aftermath on Peter,”
Raimi says. (In the comics, she dies in the
bridge fight that was a highlight of the first
movie.) “If you really look at her as a living
character, she was a little vacuous compared to Mary Jane. But for Spider-Man 3,
it was time to introduce more of the SpiderMan family.”
Raimi credits the inclusion of Brock to
producer Avi Arad, who until recently was
the chairman and CEO of Marvel Studios.
“He said the fans want to see Venom,”
Raimi says. “I come from a different
generation. I read the comic books in the
’70s, where it was Green Goblin, Sandman,
Electro, Mysterio, the Vulture. It was not
until the late ’80s that Venom came about.
But Avi said, ‘I’m telling you, they’re
waiting for him. Don’t be selfish. SpiderMan is everyone’s myth, not just yours.’ ”
Brock’s transformation into Venom is
the result of an alien “symbiote” organism
premiere.COM 63
the 2007
movie
preview
that infects its host, making him more
powerful but also unleashing his dark
side. But first the symbiote latches onto
Peter, who, because of his recent bloodlust
for Flint Marko, is a receptive host. It
stains Spidey’s costume black before a
subway action scene (Arad promises it will
top the aboveground train sequence from
the second movie) in which Spider-Man
battles Sandman. The blackness enhances
Spidey’s powers while clouding his moral
imperative to do as little harm as possible.
“He can shoot webs farther, he can run
faster, jump farther,” Raimi says. “He’s
more powerful and unfortunately a little
more careless.”
Although Sandman and Venom have
exciting and frightening powers, Raimi says
it’s their complex motivations to do evil that
matter most. “I wanted to humanize the
villains. Because it’s really the story of Peter
Parker learning that we’re all sinners, and
none of us are right or wrong.”
Also riding the wave of complex
emotions is Harry Osborn (James Franco),
who has inherited the mantle of the Green
Goblin from his father. Though Harry and
Peter come to airborne blows, Dunst says
that their conflict is essentially personal:
“We’re all trying to find ourselves in this
film. The relationships—especially me,
Harry and Peter—are full of history, and we
could take the story to a much more intense
level.” She adds, “There’s a lot more story
sand-Blasting: Sandman, played by Thomas
Haden Church, “is conscience-stricken,” says
Raimi. “He wants more than anything to be
forgiven for his crimes by Peter Parker.”
going on in this one. I feel like every time
we did a scene, Sam explained the entire
film to everybody so that we’d all
understand where we were at.”
To realize his vision, Raimi drew from
both likely and unlikely sources for the
casting. “Gwen Stacy is this buxom blond,
and I’m this red-headed character actress,”
says Howard (The Village, Lady in the
Water). “I was really, really shocked.
Especially when I saw pictures of the
64 premiere january/february 2007
character, I was like, ‘What? Aren’t there a
million other women walking around in
Los Angeles right now who actually already
look like this?’ ” Says Ziskin, “My joke is, I
cast a blond as a famous redhead, and a
redhead as a famous blond. There were a
lot of hair issues.”
Church, too, thought “Really?” when he
got the call; after all, he had just reinvented
himself as an indie star in Sideways.
Though he hadn’t been a fan of comic-book
movies, he signed on because of Raimi. “I
saw there’s an acuity to Sam as a
storyteller,” he says.
Grace resembles Maguire and so was a
more obvious choice to play a kind of
doppelgänger to Spider-Man. And he was
steeped in Spidey lore as a kid. “I remember
I’d be reading comic books and my mom
would say, ‘Do your homework. Are you
really going to use that when you grow up?’ ”
he says. “I told you so, Mom.” He admits that
he was elated to be cast. “Watching Tobey in
the first and second ones, I thought, ‘Man,
that must be the coolest job ever.’ ”
For his part, Maguire, 31, enjoyed going
to the dark side in the third installment.
“We had a lot of fun with that, Sam and I,”
he says. “The first days we were trying to
figure out what the tone of that would be.
We wanted it to be energized. We had to
play with exactly where we could go to
make a distinct character turn without it
being totally out there.”
Raimi was also intent on creating a
greater sense of “vertigo” in the shooting of
Spider-Man. “I wanted to get into his
environment in this one and soar with
him,” he says.
“On the first one, they were still getting
a handle on how to shoot the scenes of
Spider-Man flying through the streets. The
shots were more static,” Franco says. “And
now, Sam has been able to make it more
dynamic by countering camera moves. As
an audience member, you’ll have more of
an experience of being up there.”
For Spider-Man 3, Raimi says, Maguire
multiplied his action scenes “by, like, fourfold.” One extensive sequence has Harry
fighting with Peter, who doesn’t have his
Spidey suit on. “It was more work for me,
but it was fine,” Maguire says of the
maskless battle. “It’s actually good when
you’ve got the faces in there, because you get
to feel for the characters and react more.”
“It is cool for me and hard on Tobey,”
Raimi notes. “He’s got to do everything he
could possibly do as Spider-Man. Stuntmen
can fill in for the wide shots, CG can fill in for
the outrageous stuff. But he’s had to do a
tremendous amount of physical action, of
rolling, tumbling, leaping, landing, punching,
fighting, falling.” It’s a touchy subject,
because Spider-Man 2 almost imploded when
there was talk that Maguire couldn’t return
because of back problems. “We’re always
careful with him,” Ziskin says. “I mean, he
has chronic problems and he works on it and
he has a chiropractor, and we’re careful in
terms of what we ask him to do.”
For Spider-Man 2, the production
developed new gear that helped relieve the
strain of dangling from harnesses. As for
the costume itself, “it got a little more
comfortable,” Maguire reports. “Some of
the undergear was more uncomfortable in
the first one, and then the second one it
got better, and then the third one I think I
ended up finally getting some orthotics in
the bottom of the boot.”
Raimi can talk about the suit in the
most minute detail—hey, at around
$30,000 a pop, each one has an impact on
his bottom line—but for Spider-Man 3, he
double your fun: Topher Grace (right, with
Raimi) plays Eddie Brock, a.k.a. Venom, “an
evil doppelgänger of Peter,” says Grace. “He
dresses better, he’s kind of good with the
ladies, and we gave him a lot of hair gel.”
1
2
3
BOTH PAGES, CLOCKWISE FROM BOTTOM: MERIE W. WALLACE; COURTESY OF COLUMBIA PICTURES (2);
MERIE W. WALLACE; COURTESY OF COLUMBIA PICTURES
found himself obsessing about a new
element: sand. “Everything in movies is so
drawn out to the outrageous detail,” he
says. “We looked at like 16 different sands.
And then combinations of sand. We had to
photograph it close up, seeing how it
reacted to light. ‘What’s the best way to
light falling sand? What kind of contrast
ratio does the sand have? How does it
pile?’ We had to bury people alive in this
effects of the Mummy films—something
Arad says they accomplished easily. (“Oh,
forget it,” Arad scoffs at the notion of
comparing them.)
Even a cursory review of the first two
Spider-Man films shows that computer
technology can progress in leaps and
bounds. “We look at some of the early shots
we did in Spider-Man and they’re just
nowhere near . . . We didn’t know as much,”
“I wanted to humanize the villains,” says
raimi. “because it’s really the story of peter
parker learning that we’re all sinners, and
none of us are right and wrong.”
sand, so we had to have a substitute
material that could double for it. Because
you can’t really bury people alive in sand.
We ended up using ground-up corncobs,
and so we had to choose something that
had a similar quality. We ended up with
something called Arizona sand.”
He adds that about one out of every five
shots involving sand are the real deal, and
the others are computer-generated. “We
really want to give the audience something
they’ve never seen before.” To this end, he
enlisted Sony Pictures Imageworks to come
up with a shape-shifting Sandman who
could blow away the previous CG sand
Ziskin says. “The animators learned as they
went, and I think it got much better in 2.
And as the artistry improves and the
technology improves, the director’s demands
increase. So no one can rest on their laurels.”
“So what’s the price on something
like that?” Raimi asks. We’re now sitting
with the Spider-Man visual-effects team,
watching a five-second sequence on a large
screen above the editing facilities. “Black
Spidey,” as Raimi calls him, enters a bank
that has been torn up by a robbery.
Raimi wants to know the cost for a slight
FX tweak on the lighting of Spider-Man’s
web sights: (1) Harry Osborn (James Franco)
takes to the skies on his new goblin glider.
(2) Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson (with
Harry) “is really put through it emotionally in
this one,” says Dunst. (3) Bryce Dallas Howard
plays fan favorite Gwen Stacy. “Kirsten was like,
thank God, another girl,” says Howard.
costume. Someone in back says, “Less than
$10,000 and more than $5,000,” and adds
that the fix might not even work. These are
the little decisions Raimi has to make.
Today, he’s already given notes on a sound
design mix he’s just heard and sent an artist
back to the drawing board after the 3-D
mock-up of a creature that Sandman morphs
into differed from the 2-D rendering. And
after this visual-effects meeting, he’ll spend
22 hours with his brother Ivan rewriting a
scene that they’re shooting next week.
“Let’s not spend the money then,” Raimi
calls out in the darkness.
It’s ironic that the director would care
about a few thousand dollars in a $250
million production. Although no one will
confirm the final budget, Ziskin attributes
any increases to the visual effects and the
fact that “both above and below the line,
the movie gets more expensive in terms of
just the talent involved. We have really firstclass talent in every department, many of
whom have been with us. We’re a family.”
Clearly, the cumulative success of the
franchise adds to its cumulative cost
(Maguire’s fee alone has reportedly jumped
from $4 million for the first one to more
than $10 million for each sequel). And the
franchise is unusual in that the same
director and lead actor have been holding
the reins for all three films. It begs the
question, even before we’ve seen number
three, if there will be a fourth.
“I’m sure they’ll keep making Spider-
Man pictures,” says Raimi, who has signed
up for each one individually. (Maguire was
contracted for all three.) “Amy [Pascal,
Sony cochairman] told me that she would.
I love Spider-Man. And I love working with
Kirsten, Tobey, James. I don’t know if
Thomas and Topher will be around in the
next one, but probably Bryce will be. But I
have to make sure that when I’m done
with this picture I’m really still fascinated
with the character. At (Continued on page 118)
Spider-Man 3
(Continued from page 65)
this moment I’m fascinated with him.
Whether or not I will be in six months
when the movie’s done I couldn’t say. And
I absolutely would not have anything to do
with the picture unless I was hungry to tell
the story.”
Could Raimi imagine doing Spider-Man
without Maguire?
“I’d rather not,” he says, and then, “No, I
couldn’t imagine it.”
Would Maguire do another without
Raimi? “That would be a long shot,” the
actor says. “But you never know, I guess. It
would be a whole different thing. But that’s
not to say there wouldn’t be a reason to do
that at some point if the right story was out
there. I feel like Sam would be involved
even if he didn’t want to direct it.”
Raimi does seem quite attached to his
cast; he’s watched them grow up over the
course of three installments. “Remember
on the first movie, Tobey and Kirsten had a
thing?” he asks. “I’m so dumb, because I
met with them for dinner one night during
the shooting to talk about the next day’s
scenes. And I go, ‘Okay, well, that’s it for
the meeting.’ And then I ask Kirsten, ‘Can I
drive you home?’ And they look at each
other and she goes, ‘No, no, I’m going to
play a game of Touch 10 with Tobey.’ I don’t
know, it was some game. I thought, ‘That’s
weird. She’s got to work tomorrow.’ ”
Five years later, Maguire is engaged to
Jennifer Meyer, a jewelry designer (Peter
gives one of her heart-shaped lockets to
Mary Jane in Spider-Man 3) and daughter of
Universal president and COO Ron Meyer; the
couple had a baby girl in November. Raimi
himself has added another child to his
brood, which now numbers five (the newest
arrival was born just two nights before our
interview). Last year, Franco went back to
UCLA to get a degree in creative writing. As
for Dunst, she says, “I just felt more
confident as a collaborator on this one. I
think ’cause we’ve all grown up together.
Our relationships have become more open
and honest and I think that in turn made for
a richer experience for all of us.”
“The Spider-Man stories have always
been coming-of-age stories,” Raimi says.
“I feel like the movies must draw upon
what happens in our lives together. So to
watch Tobey mature as a human being,
just seems fitting. I’ve seen him go from a
single guy to . . . He’s no longer swinging,
you know.”
Did Raimi say no more swinging? Not to
worry—the movie gods will no doubt find
millions of reasons to keep Spider-Man
web-slinging for years to come.
118 premiere january/february 2007