Interview: Sam Raimi – Spider-Man 3

Interview with Sam Raimi
Director of Spiderman 3.

It’s a big year for movies…. And it doesn’t get any more colossal than Spider-Man 3. The web-slinger is back for a third serve, this time pitted against comic-book legend ‘Sandman’ and the legendary villain, ‘Venom’. 

In between trying to save the day – in the guise of his tight-wearing alter ego Spider-Man - Peter (played by Tobey Maguire) is also trying to salvage his relationship with long-time love, Mary-Jane (Kirsten Dunst)… not to mention envelop his feelings for the new girl on the block, Gwen Stacey (Bryce Dallas-Howard). It isn’t easy being the indirect descendant of a red-back, as director Sam Raimi tells Clint Morris.

For Spider-Man 3, Raimi decided it was time to give the fans what they wanted in a super-villain, one Eddie Brock.

“[Producer] Avi Arad said you've had two Spider-Man pictures and there are so many kids who want to see Venom”, director Sam Raimi says in relation to one of the film’s new villains. “So he said ‘Why don't you give the kids what they've been waiting for, since you've got a villain you love in Sandman?’.

Raimi says the decision might’ve been easy – to use Venom – but coming up with a look for the classic character was a little tougher to figure out. “We studied all the different looks and we tried to take the ones we thought would work for us but also the ones Avi thought were the most classic elements,” says Raimi, who also directed the horror classic The Evil Dead.

“Venom is less of a technical challenge and more of an artistic challenge in trying to capture this very powerful, somewhat spiderized, graceful but animal movement. It's like capturing a dance form on screen.”

The character of Venom (his alter-ego Eddie Brock's powers stem from his symbiotic relationship with the alien that serves as his costume) is one of the more fantastical characters in the Spider-Man universe; Raimi said he was concerned that having such an off the wall villain would take people out of the grounded reality of the film.

“There are a lot of fantastic elements about Venom that you could say are in conflict with the realism we wanted to have in the picture. But we just said ‘Kirsten [Dunst] and Tobey [Maguire], you'll just have to do the heavy lifting here to bring us back down to Earth’ because Venom’s this wild goofball from outer space.”

Raimi decided to combine some of what we know about Venom from the comics with some new back-story. “In this story we are less specific but we did try and stay very true to the Venom comic books when they described his birth, the creation of Venom. We did try and stay true to the writers' and the artists' ideas on how that happened.”

This is Raimi’s third Spider-Man movie and he says, to an extent, it’s gotten easier each time. “What's been easier each time is getting to know the family that we work with and really trusting them to the point that they become complete collaborators. There are so many people that make this movie [while] there are a lot of smaller films where it is just one person and the actors and the writer and the producer; you have a tiny little court and we have a thousand people making this. 

“So it's gotten a lot easier because we have gotten a system of knowing each other, knowing how we work together, trusting each other. That has made everything a lot easier.”

The challenge this time was with the script - how do you juggle a third villain (James Franco’s Green Goblin) and a love triangle?

“Spider-Man comic books had all these characters and successfully interwove the stories. A lot of what we're doing is not introducing elements, like if Harry Osborn does decide to seek vengeance, it's certainly something that's been set up. So we have less work to do in that sense. He's one of the villains we've tried to interweave into Peter Parker's life in a way that could give us insight into the first two pictures. Probably only with the Brock character is there an introduction to a whole new character but that's okay because he can meet new people too.”

The latest Spider-Man was filmed in Cleveland; a location that Raimi says “was great. The soundstages are in L.A. All the stage work was done there, and New York has always been the city of Spider-Man so we did some there too. Now, there is some car action in the story but we couldn't ask Manhattan for ten straight blocks of city dedicated to our car chase. Cleveland could. So for ten days we were able to monopolize these streets, that's why we shot in Cleveland.”

After three Spider-Man movies, Raimi isn’t sure whether he’s ready to pass on his franchise director’s cap to another filmmaker, but one thing’s for sure, he would like to do something different with Spider-Man 4 should his arm be twisted to sign on. One idea is to do a crossover movie with another superhero.

“…Somebody that creates some sort of serious conflict with Peter's whole point of view on this job of what 'superheroing' is. That’s one idea.”

SPIDERMAN 3 WEBSLINGS IT'S WAY INTO CINEMAS IN MAY 2007