Lord & Miller On 'Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse' Spoilers And That Post-Credit Scene [Interview]
2018 is coming to an end soon, but one of the year's very best movies just hit theaters. We've been singing the praises of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse for weeks, and now that the movie is out for all to see, it's time to hear from producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller about some of the movie's more spoilery elements, including that hilarious post-credits scene, a couple of surprising vocal performances, and more.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Spoilers
Make sure to read the non-spoiler part of our interview here, and check out our interview with the directors if you haven't yet. In the meantime – and this should be obvious by now – there are major spoilers ahead for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Last chance to turn back if you haven't seen the film yet.
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Tell me about the decision to make Doc Ock a woman. That was a cool surprise.
Lord: Yeah, that is one of the things that hasn't leaked out.
Miller: It's been amazing. People have been really cool about that.
Lord: I'm really excited for people to see that and discover it. We just were trying to think of as many ways to do things new. We had the benefit of the [Sam] Raimi movies kind of cornering us into trying to think of another take on it.
Miller: It's an alternate universe, so any chance we had to say, "This is sort of like the thing you know, but slightly different," we were trying to take that at every turn. How can we make a Doc Ock that isn't the Doc Ock you know? It seemed like a fun twist, and Kathryn Hahn is amazing in everything that she does, and she brought a lot of personality to it, so it was great.
Lord: Everything about her incarnation of Doc is different, down to the way her tentacles work. They're pneumatic, like plastic, bubbly arms.
Like suction cups, almost.
Lord: Yeah, that was a really important thing to Justin [Thompson], our production designer, and the directors.
Miller: Soft robotics.
Lord: Just to make it feel totally updated.
Can you talk about the post-credits sequence? Did you always want to include a shout-out to that iconic meme?
Miller: Yeah, it seemed sort of almost obligatory because that meme encapsulates what the movie is. So there were many opportunities for it, but that seemed like the best opportunity to do it. We also felt like 2099 is such a cool character and –
Lord: What's the worst situation we could put him in? (laughs) He's really maintaining a degree of professionalism and grittiness. That's the possibility of the multi-verse, is that you can slam two completely different people together. I want to see the De Niro and Groden movie with the two of them.
Midnight Run-style.
Lord: Midnight Run with 2099 and '67 seems like a perfect follow-up. (laughs)
Miller: Obviously we did want to tease what the possibilities of the future could be if we could be so lucky as to open up this world even more. So that was sort of the point of that whole thing.
2099, that's Oscar Isaac, right?
Miller: It is!
Talk about him and Chris Pine – that was another big surprise for me. I've been following the casting on this for a long time, and that's another one you managed to keep secret.
Lord: We're really smart. We put all of our biggest names –
Miller: (laughs) The biggest movie stars, we don't promote that they're in the movie!
Lord: (laughs) Exactly. We put them in small, un-promotable roles where literally it's a secret we can't tell you, that they're doing it.
Miller: But yeah, it was so fun. Both of them are amazing actors and really funny and give their all. They don't just phone it in. Chris was such a sport to not only do all the stuff for Peter Parker, the ideal version, but also just at the last minute, to be like, "Hey, will you sing a Christmas album and give it your all?" (laughs)
Lord: And then Oscar, I talked to him – he was in Jordan and I was in L.A. having the most awkward phone call you could have trying to explain to him what we thought this was going to be. God love him, he was very polite, and we had to write it down and send it to him. Then he's recording and we're just going, "All right, Oscar, get in an argument with Rodney. And Rodney, frustrate Oscar as much as you possibly can." You know who plays '67 is Jorma Taccone from The Lonely Island, who oddly, is also Green Goblin.
Excellent. I think that's all the time I have. Thanks very much guys, I appreciate it.
Lord: You've got some scoops!
Miller: Scoops!
Congrats again.
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is in theaters now.