triple threat
SMALL SCREEN TALKS TO SPIDER-VERSE’S OSCAR-WINNING TRIO OF DIRECTORS…
afilm as wildly ambitious as Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse could never have been made with just the one director. Or even two. In fact, it required cine-Cerberus Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman to push it over the line. We caught up with the triumphant triumvirate, post-Oscars celebrations, to talk about their richly deserved Best Animated Feature win, plus the many secrets buried in the Spider-Verse Blu-ray.
Congratulations on your Oscar success. It must have felt incredibly gratifying…
RODNEY ROTHMAN: It felt insane. I was surprised how many thoughts that were in my head were not in the moment… I was just wondering if I was going to trip on the staircase! BOB PERSICHETTI: Because we finished the movie so late, there wasn’t a lot of time to digest what was going on. The Oscars was the moment where it all became real.
How did you develop the film’s immersive comic-book style?
PETER RAMSEY: It was all part of the mandate to make this feel different from any other cinematic iteration of Spider-Man, and all of us wanted to break out of the same old look of so many animated features. The key was in embracing the graphic nature of comic books, all those things we could have fun with, and then bring that level of self-awareness to our story.
In the deleted scenes, Miles watches a Spider-movie based on Chris Pine’s Peter Parker and directed by Easy A’s Will Gluck…
RR: Anything can happen in an alternate universe! Will and Phil Lord and Chris Miller have a prank war that is 15 years old and involves trying to humiliate one another in as grand a scale as possible. There was a brief period where we were going to end our movie with a Will Gluck prank. But we all decided that’s maybe not appropriate!
Miles’ roommate Ganke features heavily in the deleted scenes. At what point did you cut him?
BP: When Ned was in Homecoming. [Jacob Batalon’s Ned took on a lot of Ganke’s character traits, as created by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli.] That’s the reality of it. He was a big part of Miles’ life in our movie, and when we took him out we struggled with the first act for six months. But it became a bit of a gift because it made more room for Miles to find his own motivation.
Doc Ock jumps into the collider in another deleted scene. Why keep her fate ambiguous in the theatrical release?
RR: In the end we found the movie played fine without us tagging every single possible thing. But we definitely think of Liv as someone who is not gone from the story, and who in many ways, is our most powerful bad guy. She’s manipulating a lot of things to achieve her own grand ambitions.
How involved were Lord and Miller? PR:
They were very involved. It was a passion project. They were a constant presence and the ones, honestly, behind the push to make it as wild and crazy as possible. Phil would always say, “The note I want to give is: ‘OK, you went too far.’” [laughs]
How does it work with three directors? What happens when you’re not in sync?
BP: The studio heads did not think we were going to finish the movie. There were phone calls from the head of Imageworks and Sony. So, at a certain point, we had to get out of the way of the movie. There were little things each of us held on to, but when you watched the movie it made it really clear what was supposed to be there and what wasn’t.
RR: But now I’ve won an Oscar, I’m not going to compromise anymore. My ego’s too big! Jordan Farley