INT: Spidey 3 cast

Note:
These interviews took place during the weekend of the San Diego Comic Con,
July 20-23.

The cast of SPIDER-MAN
3 making an appearance at the Comic-Con was supposed to be a
surprise. But it was the worst kept
secret in

San Diego

so Sony finally decided to announce it officially the day before.
There were still plenty of people surprised when the cast walked out
onto the floor but I wasn’t one of them as I had the pleasure to interview
them about an hour before they took the stage.

Sam
Raimi did most of the talking while Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire sat back
and tried to prep themselves, for the most part, for their big introduction
to the ravenous crowd below. Raimi was
very protective of the plot remaining cagey about all details, even refusing
to admit that Harry Osborne would become a Goblin-esque villain.
“If” and “should” seem to be Raimi’s favorite words.
Regardless, we do get a lot of goods from the gang.
Check it out below.

So are you making a big announcement today?

Sam Raimi (SR): I am having a baby (laughs).
No, what do you mean?

There’s speculation about big SPIDER-MAN 3 news being
announced today.

SR: You mean in regards to the story and the characters and
the picture? Not interested in my personal life then I guess? (Laughs)
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 (KD): You [press] guys are like “we
already knew that.”

SR: I think that is what we were basically going to reveal
today.

KD: I thought I let that out of the bag a while ago (laughs).

SR: You did, you hinted at it.

We always heard that you loved the classic villains and
that you might not be so interested in doing Venom. What was it that made
you decide to bring Venom into this picture?

SR: Well, 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 2 SPIDER-MAN pictures this
is the 3rd 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.

How do you feel about him now?

SR: Well now that I have seen Topher Grace perform him and
saw what 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.

How do you make Venom grounded in reality?

SR: That is a good question. There
is 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.

So Venom is from outer space then?

SR: I never said that, Sir. I don’t know what you are talking
about (laughs).

The BATMAN films faltered when they introduced too many
villains into the film. How do you
plan to avoid that trap?

SR: 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 2nd 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. 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.

Tobey, Kristen, how do you see your characters evolution
in terms of where you are coming from and where you started coming from?
Basically how have your characters changed?

KD: 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.

Tobey Maguire (TM): For me there 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.

For all 3 of you, is this the completion of this
Spider-Man story whether or not there are more Spider-Man films or any of
you are involved? Does this kind of bring the whole story to some closure?

KD: Well, there is definitely a culmination, but you would
have had to seen the 1st and the 2nd and this definitely ties up some story
lines but if there are more stories to tell then, if things are unresolved
then we will tell them, it depends I think on if everyone is game and if
there is a story to tell. If there is a good story I will be there.

Sam, can you talk about filming in Los Angeles and
Cleveland. I just heard that Los Angeles was great and does Spider-Man hate
Cleveland?

SR: No Cleveland was great to us, they really put the red
carpet out for us and allowed us to do a tremendous amount of shooting
there. We are very thankful to that city but what happened was the sound
stages are in Los Angeles because we are Columbia picture so we shot right
on the back lot, Columbia Pictures in Los Angeles. All the stage work was
done there or 90% of it and then New York has always bee the city as you
know of Spider-Man so we went to New York to shoot all of the location
photography.

Now there is some car action in the story, there is a car
action sequence, but Manhattan couldn’t give us 10 straight blocks of city
dedicated to our car chase but Cleveland could so we sent a 2nd unit there
under the direction of Dan Bradley a great stunt coordinator and 2nd unit
director I have worked with before to shoot this car action stunts there. So
for like 10 days we were able to monopolize these streets, that is how we
shot in Cleveland.

What is the status on the EVIL DEAD remake?

SR: We have been so busy. I have been so busy on SPIDER-MAN
that I haven’t’ even had time to think about it lately but what we ant to do
with this company, myself, my partner, Ghosthouse Pictures is find the right
director who can really reinvigorate that story and really spook the heck
out of the audience. That is what we are waiting for.

Is Bruce Campbell in SPIDER-MAN 3?

SR: He plays a cameo, yes. He has got a new character.

Is it Mysterio?

SR: We can’t say.

Can you talk a little about the Special Effects? What can
we expect especially with Spider-Man?

SR: I think what is different is that we had new challenges
this time. We had to bring about the Sandman and we have got a great Special
Effects designer in Scott Stokdyk who is one of the 2 fellows who did the
first 2 SPIDER-MAN pictures along with John Dykstra and now he has got the
job alone. He’s got a lot of the same animators, we have replaced a lot of
them, others have moved on but the core team is there and we are trying to
build upon it. We have become better at working with animation, I have
learned a lot over the last 5 years.

It is like directing animated picture after animated picture
you start to understand what is working what is not and why. As far as the
technical aspect and what the new hurdles are, it is really about bringing
about Sandman to the screen. How can we make it believable to the audience
not just fantastic but believable that this fellow could turn into sand and
become this substance and still be a human being, it is really about feeling
the hand and the manipulation of the artist all of the time. Just getting
into the dream of it and getting sucked up in the story.

It’s about technical expertise and artistic expertise on
behalf of the teams of artist that we have working on those effects. They
have made a lot of new techniques available to themselves, they have
developed some new programs, written some new programs, they have taken some
existing software and combined it into new ways we haven’t seen, new
applications for it, and a lot of just ideas that they have been ground
breaking on. That is still groundbreaking we are still not sure we can do it
actually.

How is that related to Venom?

SR: Venom is less of a technical challenge and more of an
artistic challenge and trying to capture the spirit of this very powerful
somewhat Spiderized graceful but animal, not Spider-Man style of movement.
That is more about capturing a dance form on screen.

You have a new composer on this film. I was just wondering
why this was and will you use Danny Elfman?

SR: I haven’t spoken with Danny but I am hoping that it will
be Danny Elfman in conjunction with Chris Young.

Previously you have done some visual nods to covers and
panels out of the comic books. Do you have any specific shots that mimic
certain things?

SR: In this story we are less specific but we did try and
stay very true to the Venom comic books when they describe his birth, the
creation of Venom. They did try and stay true to the writers and the artists
ideas of how that happened.

Avi Arad said that the Lizard is one of the favorite
villains. Are we ever going to see Dr. Curt Connors go down that path?

SR: I am not at liberty to say, Sir.

Sam, bringing Gwen Stacy into this film and she is a
character who is famous for being killed so are you killing her or Mary
Jane?

SR: I wouldn’t dream of it, Sir.
The villains may have something else in mind though.