Director Sam Raimi Talks 'SpiderMan 2'
[Thursday, June 17th, 2004]Director Sam Raimi says he had more leeway for the upcoming SpiderMan 2 movie than the previous one. "I had a tremendous amount of freedom," Raimi told Sci-Fi Wire. "A little bit unearned on the first movie, but I didn't want to say anything. You know, when I got the job, I really thought the studio clamps were going to come down. 'Oh, you’ve got to make it like this. We work like this.' But they really let me have anything I wanted, which was really surprising and fantastic. So I just kept my mouth shut and enjoyed myself and tried to make the best picture I could."
He added, "I even had more freedom on this picture, if that’s possible. To construct the story, to create any visuals I wanted, to really do anything I wanted."
Raimi says wanted to meet audience expectations by trying to outdue the first SpiderMan movie. "The challenge was in trying to figure out what the audience wanted to see in part two, because I really wanted to please the audience," he said. "And there were a lot of different directions the story could have taken in the second Spider-Man. So I tried to think about what ... [the audience] must have been attracted to in the first one. And I think I came up with the answer: that they were probably most attracted to the characters and the stories of Mary Jane Watson and Peter Parker, ... versus the bigger extravaganza type of effects or visuals or making it louder or bigger. So I tried to concentrate the story and the writers on focusing on the relationships between Tobey McGuire's character [Peter] and Kirsten Dunst's character [Mary Jane] and James Franco's character [Harry Osborn], and Peter's relationship with his aunt [played by Rosemary Harris]. These are the things I thought the audience would be interested in most, so that's what I pursued. But the biggest challenge was in trying to figure out what the audience would want to see. Not what they expect to see, necessarily, but what they really were connecting to."
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