Jennifer Avary
When we get our first glimpse of Tom Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man this May via the cameo the webslinger makes in “Captain America : Civil War” don’t expect the iconic Marvel superhero to be doing anything super-super-super.. superheroish.
According to directors Joe and Anthony Russo, their version of the wall-crawler is significantly different to the one played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, respectively.
“If you look at what we did with Winter Soldier with the Cap character in terms of bringing him into the modern world, trying to ground the movie tonally into something that was a step toward real-world, at least to the degree you can do that in a superhero movie, that’s still the tonal universe that we’re playing in in Civil War”, says Anthony Russo in a new interview with ComicBook.com. “We’re bringing a character… we’re bringing Spider-Man into the movie in that universe, now, in that specific tonal stylistic world. I think underscoring everything Joe was saying about your question in terms of how were we thinking about the character in relation to past interpretations of the character, part of our choices were all so colored by the specifics of the world what we were playing in with these two Captain America movies, meaning Winter Soldier and Civil War. It’s a very specific tonal world. It’s a little more grounded and a little more hard-core contemporary. That was also coloring our choices a lot about the character on Spider-Man.”
“We took a very personal approach to the character,” Joe Russo says. “We had thought back to the things that excited us about him as a character when we were younger, and one of the most important components of that was that he’s a high schooler burdened with incredible powers and responsibility. That really differentiates him from every other character in the Marvel universe as opposed to other superheroes.”
Russo insisted it had to be a kid playing Spidey this time around.
“The previous films had adults playing a high schooler. We wanted more of an authenticity to the casting. We were very specific about that,” he said.
The directors also took a more grounded approach to the character.
“You go look at the home that Tobey Maguire lived in in Raimi’s Spider-Man was… those were very expensive homes,” he said. “A character growing up with his aunt in New York, a single income family… Where would they live? What would that look like? Where could they afford to live? We asked ourselves all those questions. We try to take a very logical and realistic and naturalistic approach to the character.”
Still, Joe wants to point out that they’re not trying to erase memories of previous Spider..Men.
“I want to be clear. We’re not trying to denigrate other interpretations of Spider-Man. Raimi’s movies are fantastic. Spider-Man one and two are amazing. Two, is one of if not my favorite comic book movie of all time. But he made a very strong choice with those movies from a color palate standpoint to a costume standpoint, execution standpoint, camerawork standpoint to honor the feeling of the comic book. We’re trying to honor the feeling of naturalism and to honor the feeling of reality. The harder we can pull these characters into reality, the better for us, especially because we’re all so connected now through social media, the Internet. We’re all so dialed in to what’s happening in current events. That it’s important for us that these characters live in the world that we live in because it makes them more real and it makes our experience of watching them more passionate and more well-rounded.”
