'Spider-Man' Director Defends Use Of 'Spidey Vision'

'I wanted there to be moments where you really feel and see the world through Spider-Man's eyes,' Marc Webb tells MTV News.
By Eric Ditzian, with reporting by Josh Horowitz

Andrew Garfield in "The Amazing Spider-Man"
Photo: Sony Pictures

Behold, the glory of Spidey Vision! Perhaps that was the reaction "Amazing Spider-Man" director Marc Webb and his team were hoping fans would have when they peeped the final 30 seconds of the Marvel flick's first trailer, a first-person romp that puts viewers in the web-slinger's sight line as he swings from buildings and scales brick walls. But not everyone was sold on the inherent grandeur of this visual effect.

Maybe it was just a tad too reminiscent of mid-'90s first-person shooter video games like "Doom," the complaint went. Maybe Spidey Vision was neither revolutionary nor simply cool enough to warrant such lengthy and climactic placement in the trailer.

The whole thing left us wondering: just how much will Spidey's P.O.V. be a part of the finished film when it hits theaters next July? Not much at all, apparently.

"[There] are also moments we really wanted to embrace this experiential process of 3-D," Webb told us about Spidey Vision while at San Diego Comic-Con. "The teaser is a hint at some of that."

The great majority of the action, he promised, is grounded in realism and was accomplished not with CG trickery but down-and-dirty stunt performances. "We try very hard in the movie to make the stunt work grounded and real, and anything we could do live or practically, as they say, we did live or practically," Webb explained. "We built this huge rig on Riverside Drive in Harlem, a traveling rig of hundreds of feet, and we slung our Spider-Man over cars, through traffic in a real way, which hadn't been done before. That was really exciting."

So why even resort at all to a throwback effect like Spidey Vision? The better question might be, Why feature it so prominently in a trailer? But that's a separate matter. As Webb sees it, he wanted to capture, in three dimensions in the movie, what it really feels like for Peter Parker to propel himself through the cityscape. Hence the P.O.V. effect.

"We shot and conceived of this film in 3-D," he said, "and I wanted there to be moments where you really feel and see the world through Spider-Man's eyes. I wanted to get that visceral feeling. In 3-D, I thought there was something about the experiential process, in a big theatrical environment, that was really special that I had seen before. I was like, 'If I'm going to do a movie in 3-D, I want to give the audience that experience.' "

Check out everything we've got on "The Amazing Spider-Man."

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