I love 'River's Edge.'
Jon Watts
I wouldn't say I was a massive comic fan growing up, just because I now know people that really are, and I would never claim to be in that same category.
It doesn't matter whose idea it is or where it came from or when it arrived in the process. The best idea is the best idea no matter what.
When we were kids, we would just go walking: just walk in a direction and hope that you were gonna find a crashed alien spaceship or buried pirate's treasure or something like that. You never did. You'd find, like, a coyote skeleton, something like that. That was the most exciting thing you'd ever find.
I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I'm afraid we're going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I've had that dream a long time.
There are so many great John Hughes movies covering so many different genres. You can pull so much from him.
I was going to be a chemical engineer - I was a science nerd - that was the plan. I secretly applied to USC and NYU and got a scholarship to go to NYU based on a dumb animated short I made. It was a huge shock to me and my family.
I think it helps if you have a clear vision of what you want.
It's really cool to do, like, a 'Harry Potter' evolution because you can really take your time with the character development: really, like, don't rush past the implications of great power and great responsibility.
If you think about it, now that Spider-Man is in the Marvel universe, that means that Peter Parker was probably, like, eight years old when he saw Tony on TV telling the world he's Iron Man. And when you start thinking about it as a whole world like that, it gets really fascinating.
I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.
Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you're playing with time, and you don't have that ability where someone can pause at home. That's such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don't really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.
Have you ever seen the video of the kid with the Spider-Man pinata? He just sets the stick down, walks over, and gives the Spider-Man pinata a hug. He doesn't want to hurt his Spider-Man. He loves him! And I think that's a universal feeling towards Spider-Man. You just can't help but love him.
'The Onion' is an amazing place to work because it's a bunch of really smart, collaborative writers who aren't afraid to try crazy things.
It's just this feeling of when you're a kid, you have these ideas about the world and about people in your life that don't always hold up as you get older and start to realise that things are more complex than you might've realised. That's always a big part of a coming-of-age story.
I was definitely the kid who was the chicken, who didn't want to say the cuss words.
It's such an amazing team working with both Marvel and Sony, and I have the support of just the very best technicians in the world.
I've always been a very collaborative person, and I think 'Cop Car' and all the people I worked with who made it possible is a good example of that.
When you make a movie for a really low budget, it makes you really strict. You have to plan things down to the tiniest detail.
'Cop Car' was made with all of my friends. I wrote it with my best friend.
A great thing about kids is they're just themselves and can't help it a lot of the times.
People know the broad strokes of what it's like to be Spider-Man, but I wanted to really get into the details.
I had no problem relating to Peter Parker. He feels like he might be in way over his head but is desperate to prove himself.
I liked writing with my friends and making our own little stories. Making a movie like 'Spider-Man' never even crossed my mind.
You go to the movies to be transported. That's the responsibility of filmmakers and the people that hire the filmmakers - to try and find new dreams we can all share together.
We always talked about the sequel to 'Clown' being called 'Clowns,' like an 'Alien'/'Aliens' sorta thing, where you have multiple clowns. And just really make it, in the way that 'Aliens' was an action movie, do the same thing. Action-horror. That would be great.
I just remember having the President's Fitness Challenge when I was in elementary school and middle school. You had to do different activities, and at the end of it, I think you got a little pin or a badge. I was like, 'How do we incorporate Captain America into high school?' You would have the 'Captain America Fitness Challenge.'
There was a time when I just loved 'Indiana Jones' so much. I was in fourth or fifth grade, and I wore a fedora like that one to school every day. It was so dumb.
Sundance is like a genre.
Peter Parker is sort of our ground-level view of this Marvel universe. You know what it's like to be in the penthouse with Tony Stark or have this god-like view like Thor, and I want to show what it's like for regular people in this world.
What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it's just what's inside of that frame. It's going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that's my focus.
You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.
I only realized I could potentially make movies after seeing 'Ed Wood.'
There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.
Every film you see in film school takes on a heightened importance in your life.
I'd been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to 'Spider-Man: Homecoming.'
To me, the best comedies get a little dark, and the best thrillers are a little bit funny. So I'm not exactly sure where I draw the line between the two.
I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.
If Spider-Man is your ground level superhero, I wanted to come up with a ground-level villain. I wanted to figure out if I could turn a regular guy into a super-villain.
I feel like what we've done in 'Homecoming' is really scratching the surface with Spider-Man.
I wouldn't say that I was a Spider-Man super fan.
I loved the idea of Spider-Man as a kid, and I loved the Todd MacFarlane run in the 1990s, and the first Raimi movies were released when I was in film school. Those were big.
My friends and I have always been trying to make movies, at every moment. We've tried so many different angles and approaches. But when it happens, it happens, and you just run with it.
I think it would be great to have more female directors making huge-budget movies.
I think saying 'a John Hughes movie' is just shorthand for a lot of people to say 'a coming-of-age story,' because I think, when you're of a certain age, that's what John Hughes means to you.
When you're getting to do what you want to do, you just assume you're going to hit a point where someone is like, 'No, you can't do that.' Strangely, that never happened.
I've always pre-vized my movies, just on my own. Even when it was, like, zero-budget things, I used this programme to do storyboards because I can't draw that well.
My attitude is one movie at a time. I don't want to get ahead of myself.
I think 'Badlands' is my favorite movie because it reminded me of where I was from.
The movie I made with my friends in my hometown based on a dream becomes a stepping stone to 'Spider-Man.' I wish I could say this was an amazing, calculated path but... It's so weird.
