The man responsible for Harry Osborn’s sullen, vengeance-driven sulk talks character, curses and CG…
Did you train for the Sky Stick glider sequences?
"You'd think, wouldn't you? I did ride a skateboard when I was young... But when you're filming those things, I wish it were as exciting as it looks, because you're really just hanging there like a marionette and a lot of the moves are programmed into the wires. So if you're fairly athletic, and have some endurance, you let the machine flip you around. But there were no injuries, fortunately.
The release date for this one was set before the last one came out. Were you talking about the third while you were making the second film?
"I tried not to think about it, but Sam kept bringing it up! But I remember ideas that we were talking about back then. The general ideas have stayed the same, there was the set-up for my character at the end of two and the relationship with Tobey's character. But as they wrote the script after part two, things changed a lot."
How has Spidey 3 coped with the “difficult” third film curse?
"The third one's solid, and there are some reasons for that. If you look at other third outings - X-Men, Superman - some of the major players changed on those movies, and some of the creative forces that made the early ones great were not there anymore. We have everyone the same. And the story we're telling in the third one is not just something they've made up because the other two were a success, this is the culmination of everything that's been building in the first two, so it's part of the same story. It's not just throwing characters that we like in different situations, it's a true trilogy. And Sam is such a perfect fit with the Spider-Man world because he still has this childlike enthusiasm for movies and for these kinds of stories. If he changed, I think the franchise would be in danger."
But the studio must want to make more films, surely?
"Yeah... The fourth one sounds like it's going to be so expensive! I imagine they'd want to do them forever, it's just the cost of making them goes up every time!"
What about Spider-Man 20, with you all in the retirement home, fighting it out over watery soup?
(Laughs)"Well, they'll have captured all our images into the computer by then... They won't even need us."
James White
