Weaving the Web of 'Spider-Man 3,' Part One: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and Director Sam Raimi
By Scott Huver, Hollywood.com Staff
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Monday, July 31, 2006
Toby Maguire returns as Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Spider-Man 3 |
It was the moment the fans had been waiting for. And boy did it have bite.
Not only had Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi made the trip to the San Diego Comic-Con to tease the most anticipated film of 2007, he also cajoled a nearly full complement of its all-star cast—including Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace and Bryce Dallas Howard—to join him onstage to surprise the thousands of eager and overwhelmed comic book fans who’d assembled hoping for any shred of new information from the forthcoming film, he also unveiled the first full-on look at the villain at the heart of the movie, the vicious, fang-faced symbiote Venom, a fan favorite since he was created by superstar artist Todd McFarlane in the early 1990s.
After slyly vamping a bit over not having any finished footage to show the fans, Raimi relented and the crowd was treated to a rough assemblage of footage from the third installment of the popular superhero franchise: there was Maguire as Peter Parker, donning the jet-black spider-suit seen in the trailers and appearing to battle his darker impulses; there was James Franco as Harry Osborn, dodging his father’s deadly pumpkin bombs; there was Dunst as Mary Jane and Howard as the iconic Gwen Stacy, twin temptations for both Peter and his rivals; there was Church as the Sandman, dropping a hammer-shaped fist toward Spider-Man in a series of rough computer animatic sequences, and there was Maguire again, ripping off the cursed black suit in agony.
But the big payoff was the introduction of the aforementioned Venom in the teaser footage’s climactic moments: after Grace as Eddie Brock goes to a cathedral and prays to God to kill Peter Parker, the gooey black symbiote suit drips down from the ceiling and slowly but forcefully envelops him. As he rises from the floor clad in the black suit, he raises his head and the fans got a split second look at Venom’s horrific face and the entire hall erupted in a deafening cheer.
Hollywood.com made out even better than those lucky fans, taking part in the first official Spider-Man 3 interviews with the superstar talent on hand. For the first words on the film, we sat down with the returning Raimi, Maguire and Dunst, then chatted with the new class, Church, Grace and Howard.
Hollywood.com: So are you making a big announcement today?
Sam Raimi: I am having a baby. [Laughs] No. What do you mean?
HW: They have been speculating about big news coming out of Comic-Con.
Raimi: You mean in regards to the story and the characters and the picture? Not interested in my personal life then, I guess? That's fine. Yes, there is a big announcement that we were going to make today in front of the kids who come to Comic-Con and that is that the movie, the big villain that we have been expecting will be…my mother-in law [Laughs] No, it will be Venom. He is coming to star across from Tobey in the picture as the villain, along with Thomas Haden Church who plays the Sandman. Is that the big secret?
Kirsten Dunst: You guys are like “Oh cool. We already knew that.”
Raimi: I think that is what we were basically going to reveal today.
Dunst: I thought I let that out of the bag a while ago.
Raimi: You did. You hinted at it.
HW: We always heard that you loved the classic Spider-Man villains, and that you might not be so interested in doing Venom, who was created in the 1990s. What was it that made you decide to bring Venom into this picture?
Raimi: Well, [executive producer and former head of Marvel Comics] Avi Arad—who has really got his pulse on all the Marvel fans better than any head of a corporation has ever understood those people that are interested in the corporation's product—he really knows what those kids want, and he said “You have had two Spider-Man pictures. For this third one, there are so many kids so many fans of Spider-Man want to see Venom. Even if you didn't grow up with him, they want to see him, so you've got the Sandman and that is one of your favorite villains. Why don't you bring Venom in also and make those kids, the fans of Venom happy?” So I thought that was what we should do.
HW: How do you feel about Venom now?
Raimi: Well, now that I have seen Topher Grace perform him and saw what [screenwriter] Alvin Sargent did with the script, he created a great character. He really filled out Eddie Brock into a very meaningful character, and Tobey has a great energy with him in the few scenes that they play together as competitors. I really like him now…We had a great design team on this picture led by James Acheson, our costume designer, working with a team of brilliant sculptors, artists, painters, and we studied all the different looks. So many different artists created different looks of Venom and we tried to take the ones that we felt would work best for us, but also the ones that Avi felt were the most classic elements and based it on that.
HW: In the comic books, the origin of the black suit is extraterrestrial and a little cosmic. How do you make that fit into the somewhat more realistic world of the Spider-Man films?
Raimi: That is a good question. There are a lot of fantastic elements about Venom that you could say are in conflict with the realism that we wanted to have in the picture. We just said to ourselves “Kirsten and Tobey, you will have to do the real heavy lifting here to bring it back down to earth because he is this wild goof from outer space. So you are just going to have to connect us to the characters.”
HW: So Venom is from outer space, then?
Raimi: I never said that, sir. I don't know what you are talking about. [Laughs]
HW: Tobey, talk about the new black costume. Is it a lot different for you?
Tobey Maguire: Not really. Pretty much the same, I mean, yeah, what it feels like – the material is similar. I think it is probably a little sleeker and sexier—kind of more like me in real life. [Laughs].
HW: There has been some speculation about a third villain, in the form of Harry Osborn. The Batman films faltered when they attempted multiple villains. How will this film pull that off with a love triangle also introduced? How do you juggle so many characters?
Raimi: The Spider-Man comic books have all of these characters and successfully interwove their stories. A lot of what we are doing is not introducing elements—like if Harry Osborn does decide to seek vengeance upon Peter Parker for the death of his father, it is certainly something that has been set up in the first and then second picture. This is more the conclusion of that, so we have less work to do in that sense, not just introducing all of these new people. One of the other villains we have tried to weave the story into Peter Parker's personal life, in as important of a way as we could, in a way that hopefully will make more of the first two pictures and give us insights into what we have seen before. I think only with the Brock character is there a complete new introduction of elements into Peter's life but that is okay I think because he can meet new people too.
HW: Tobey and Kristen, how do you see your characters evolution in terms of where you are coming from and where you started coming from?
Dunst: For Mary Jane, basically she is still an actress and you could see where it was heading towards in the last film with Peter—so emotionally much more adult and mature. There is a lot more at stake because their relationship—they are together. That's okay to say, right? [Laughs] Emotionally there is a lot more at stake for all of the characters, and I think that we have gone to their relationships because they are older have just developed more and become more complicated. Emotionally it is a much heavier film to me.
Maguire: For me there is obviously a continuity of character that you have to keep up. Peter Parker is Peter Parker, so it is important to not just try to create new things for Peter just for the sake of that. But I don't necessarily want to see the same scenes played out and Peter going through the same kind of things that he has gone through. I think that Alvin and the other people who have input into Peter's story and what Peter is going through in this movie did a fantastic job. As an actor, for me it was like there was nothing stale about it, I got to approach it and got to do brand new really fun interesting things for myself. In terms of what the specifics of that are, you will see when you check out the movie.
HW: Tobey, do you delve into the darker side of Peter Parker? In the trailer he looks a little different and seems to act a little different. As an actor do you think “Okay, I am going to sink my teeth into the dark side of who this guy is?”
Maguire: Again, it was because we have gone into some different areas that it was new and fun for me, without losing touch with who Peter is, and so I really enjoyed the things that I got to do in the movie.
Photo(s) by Sony Pictures/Columbia /Tristar Sony Pictures Entertainment- © 2006- All Rights Reserved