Sam Raimi on SPIDER-MAN 2... and 3

By: Den Shewman
Date: Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Source: Chuck the Movie Guy, Coming Soon

Sam Raimi talked to Chuck the Movie Guy about how the story for SPIDER-MAN 2 came together, and said that he's ready to direct SPIDER-MAN 3.

Raimi's decision that Peter Parker needed to lose his powers in the second film was influenced by the comics themselves. "I was thinking about a great issue of Stan Lee's Spider-Man comic book where he gets the flu," said the director. "And [Peter Parker], for a time, is really weak. It was so human to me, I thought it was great. This superhero's got the bug that affects all of us, and just like we all have to go to work when we're sick and we really don't know why we're doing this and how we're gonna do our job, he had to fight criminals when he had the flu. I thought that was incredibly human, a humanizing thing to have happened to a super hero."

Then there was also the influence of the famous "Peter throws away the costume" issue. "It was issue number 50, perhaps, his life problems had just become too great, so I think what happened was there was a synthesis of those two ideas, along with other elements I was interested in telling in this story. That's where the genesis of the loss of powers came from."

Raimi also put the heat on Tobey Maguire, who at one point was out of the webslinging race due to a back injury (THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW's Jake Gyllenhall was going to don the webshooters, but Tobey's back healed in time to, um, shoot). Raimi said that, ironically, Tobey's physical status fit right in with the theme of the sequel. "I wanted them to realize that to be responsible, you have to pay a price. It's not easy to do the right thing. You always have to give something of yourself. [Y]ou have to make a personal sacrifice, you've got to maybe risk personal injury, you've got to say something that you may be ashamed to say. So I wanted to show that to be this hero had a great cost to Tobey... So I wanted him to suffer to be that hero. So I beat him up as much as I could in the story."

In terms of directing the third Spidey flick, Raimi said that he's always imagined Peter Parker's story in three parts. "[O]ne, the Spider-Man comic books have always been in parts. But two, the movie itself seemed complete to me. In my mind, I was working on the story and I knew how I wanted it to end. The story of a life out of balance, first lopsided in one way as he tries to be this responsible young man and then lopsided in another way as he decides the hell with it, I'm living my life, damn anybody else. And then that road leads to such moral decay that he finally has to say to himself I will go back to my lopsided life of being Spider-Man and just down this road of responsibility. Unfortunately it's like a prison sentence to him."

You can read more of the interview right here. SPIDER-MAN 2 opens next Wednesday, June 30.


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