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I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.
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I loved the idea of Spider-Man as a kid, and I loved the Todd MacFarlane run in the 1990s, and the first Raimi movies were released when I was in film school. Those were big.
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To me, the best comedies get a little dark, and the best thrillers are a little bit funny. So I'm not exactly sure where I draw the line between the two.
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It's really cool to do, like, a 'Harry Potter' evolution because you can really take your time with the character development: really, like, don't rush past the implications of great power and great responsibility.
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That's why people love Spider-Man: he's the most grounded, relatable of superheroes.
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Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you're playing with time, and you don't have that ability where someone can pause at home. That's such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don't really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.
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A great thing about kids is they're just themselves and can't help it a lot of the times.
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I liked writing with my friends and making our own little stories. Making a movie like 'Spider-Man' never even crossed my mind.
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On an independent film where you're working with just a handful of people, you don't have to explain anything because no one cares. You can do whatever you want. There's no one there to tell you not to do it.
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Every film you see in film school takes on a heightened importance in your life.
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What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it's just what's inside of that frame. It's going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that's my focus.
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When we were kids, we would just go walking: just walk in a direction and hope that you were gonna find a crashed alien spaceship or buried pirate's treasure or something like that. You never did. You'd find, like, a coyote skeleton, something like that. That was the most exciting thing you'd ever find.
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I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.
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Have you ever seen the video of the kid with the Spider-Man pinata? He just sets the stick down, walks over, and gives the Spider-Man pinata a hug. He doesn't want to hurt his Spider-Man. He loves him! And I think that's a universal feeling towards Spider-Man. You just can't help but love him.
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'The Onion' is an amazing place to work because it's a bunch of really smart, collaborative writers who aren't afraid to try crazy things.
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I think every kid is a 'Spider-Man' fan at some point.
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I wouldn't say I was a massive comic fan growing up, just because I now know people that really are, and I would never claim to be in that same category.
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There's this great panel - I forget what the actual comic is - of Spider-Man in the rain holding an umbrella and eating some Chinese takeout. It's like, that's the essence of 'Spider-Man.'
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I'd been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to 'Spider-Man: Homecoming.'
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If Spider-Man is your ground level superhero, I wanted to come up with a ground-level villain. I wanted to figure out if I could turn a regular guy into a super-villain.
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There was a time when I just loved 'Indiana Jones' so much. I was in fourth or fifth grade, and I wore a fedora like that one to school every day. It was so dumb.
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I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I'm afraid we're going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I've had that dream a long time.
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You go to the movies to be transported. That's the responsibility of filmmakers and the people that hire the filmmakers - to try and find new dreams we can all share together.
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When you're writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you're going to do. You don't have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.