Podcast Interview: Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse Directors Talk Deleted Scenes
On the February 26, 2019 episode of /Film Daily, /Film editor in Chief Peter Sciretta is joined by senior writer Ben Pearson, and writer Hoai-Tran Bui to talk about the latest film and tv news, including a Gremlins animated series, Rotten Tomatoes, A Quiet Place 2, The Eternals and the future of the MCU. And in Our Feature Presentation, Peter sits down with the filmmakers behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse to talk about deleted and alternate scenes.You can subscribe to /Film Daily on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the popular podcast apps (here is the RSS URL if you need it).
Opening Banter: Happy Birthday HT!!!In The News:
In Our Feature Presentation: Peter sits down with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse filmmakers Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman to talk about the movie's development and deleted scenes.Rodney Rothman: Okay. Peter works for slashfilm, right? Yes. Yeah. Big fans of you guys. You say all kinds of nice things. He was cool at the LA online film critics society awards...Bob Persichetti: Can I ask you about your shirt? Where'd you get that shirt today? Was it a gift today?Peter Sciretta: Oh no, I found it online. I think it's a bootleg.Bob Persichetti: Yes. It's a good one...Peter Sciretta: Because they don't make a lot of cool merch...Bob Persichetti: Well Sony doesn't, you know, there's a deal involved that doesn't involve Sony when it comes to that stuff.Peter Sciretta: We're here talking about the home video release. I'm wondering what kind of deleted and alternate scenes we can find on this thing? Which are some of the favorites that didn't quite make it?Peter Ramsey: It's going to be really nice for people to see the Ganke and Miles stuff. Ganke was Miles roommate in the comics. We were originally being very faithful to the comics and that relationship was, it was there before, before school. Yeah. It was close to being the emotional backbone of the movie, those two guys relationship in a way. Which is probably one reason that's not there anymore. But I t was so charming and we had so much fun with it and it took up so much of the movie for so long that when we had to finally shift gears and cut that way back, it was a huge, uh, it was kind of traumatic. So it's nice that people get to see aliteral alternate universe version of the comics.Bob Persichetti: We also had some great... one of my college friends did the voice for Ganke.Rodney Rothman: Also a wildly famous animation director.Bob Persichetti: Yeah. Yeah. He won't get in trouble anymore cause we talked to the people at Pixar, right? Pete Sohn, he's like a magic man, right. He went to cal arts when I went to cal arts. So he came down and he's Korean American, from the Bronx, and is a giant lover of comic books and that is that character. And it was just like, there's nobody else but Pete who should do this character. And he came down, recorded the whole movie and it's really, it's really good. But the movie was three hours long and there was no room for Peter to come into the movie.Peter Sciretta: So it wasn't because of Spiderman: Homecoming?Bob Persichetti: You can read into it what you want, but yes, there were some Ned similarities.Rodney Rothman: There's a lot of stuff to met version, stuff that we took out of the movie for good reasons, but that give you a window into the creative process behind the years that were spent on the movie. So an example of stuff they are talking about... There's a line from Doc Oct that's a very direct reference to Doc Oct's most famous line in Spiderman 2. Is the Tom Cruise stuff in the alternate universe version? So there was a whole period of time where Miles rather than learning about being Spider-man from a comic book learned it from watching the films. There was a movie version of a movie about Spiderman in Miles universe about the real person Spiderman, but it was a James Cameron directed movie with Tom Cruise as Spidey. Yes. Spidey. And it was James Cameron and Spidey and Tom Cruise on the audio.Peter Ramsey: Yeah, it was literally the director's commentary with guest star, Tom CruiseRodney Rothman: and guest star real Spider-Man.Peter Ramsey: He was the technical advisor on the movie.Rodney Rothman: And the fact that it's taken us almost three minutes to explain this idea to you, it gives you an idea of why it didn't make it in.Bob Persichetti: But oh my God, it was fun to do.Peter Sciretta: Rodney said on Twitter, that the third act of this film was basically improvised. I'm wondering what that means?Bob Persichetti: This is why I don't go on Twitter.Rodney Rothman: I kind of walked it back a little later. What I meant by that, you can't improvise a massive animated movie, but we built the third act of the movie in the last four months of production.Peter Ramsey: Basically from like kind of bullet points and index cards. And were like Go!Rodney Rothman: Well here's the bit that was always an anchor. Once we had that anchor in, we were like, that's the target and all. Everything's just leading to the moment when Miles and Jefferson talk and Miles leaves on his mask and he hugs them and he says, all right, I look forward to with you. When we storyboarded that moment and we cut it into the film, it was like, Oh yes, like there's the target no matter what, that's where we're going to end. But all of the junk that came. Yeah, well between like the collider firing like from Oct and Kingpin and the ballroom and the bread moment from there all the way to that moment when the collider sort of implodes was essentially like three decks of cards and we were (makes a shuffling sound) going all the way, like even in production.Peter Ramsey: It was like throwing down railroad tracks and like the train was going.Bob Persichetti: And we would do edit, like even in animation, you know, image works in a sort of like a real rudimentary way. We'd like open up shots. We would shrink shots, we would go, oh, we're going to, we need another shot here. Because we were so behind. And we were literally like, my favorite line that Rodney ever said was like, "man, how does it feel to be Jackson Pollocking an underscore budget million dollar movie?Rodney Rothman: And that's kind of what we were doing. I think what I meant by the improvisation comment. We were working with amazing technicians and filmmakers, you know, in every department, we really were. And great improvisation is performed by people that know what they're doing.Bob Persichetti: And they're all up here. And at that moment, every single shot was building off of shots. We had done it earlier in the movie. And so every single shot was like a new discovery. The visuals of the entire climax of the fight we saw the week they were done. That was when we went in. Like that's it. I mean we had, we had an obviously a plan in place and a, an aspiration that was, that was the idea that this space becomes abstract and is being inundated by Black Kirby dots, which are helping us represents sort the king pin. And Miles was being swallowed up by all of that. And we're going to get him to be super tiny on that screen. But that was it. And then, and then it was like, here we go and now we're starting to see things in dailies. And we're like, Oh yes, yes, yes. And so in that sense it did feel like we were looking around the room going like, oh yeah, amazing.Rodney Rothman: Right? But by the way, I think the reason why it worked for us and why we all felt, although we'd love to have another month or two to work on it, while we all thought it felt happy with how it turned out as, because it expressed Miles and an expressed where Miles was, like visually and artistically. It was like this kid that had just come into power was just figuring out how to use it on the fly. And that's Kinda how we made the last 20 minutes of the movie.Peter Ramsey: Yeah. Very true.Peter Sciretta: Very cool. Very cool. Thank you guys. Again, my favorite movie last year.Peter Ramsey: Thank you.Rodney Rothman: Pleasure man.All the other stuff you need to know: