I think my favorite character beat in the movie is when I think James Woods offers Jason Clarke a slice of cake and he just says, “I’m diabetic!”
[Laughs] Yeah.
That came out of nowhere and I was really worried when that happened, that the end was gonna be Channing Tatum shoving cake down Jason Clarke’s throat, like that was this weird setup and payoff.
[Laughs] Death by cake. Eddie Izzard, “Cake or death?” Actually, that’s all from Harold Kloser, who’s our producing partner. Harold’s daughter is diabetic, and so we had this runner in the script that there was this retirement cake for Woods. So, we were like, “When he’s in the Oval Office, it’d be really funny if he was eating cake, watching…” Which is sort of a fun image, going from talking heads saying, “Clearly, clearly this is the work of foreign terrorists,” and going to our guy sitting behind the desk… Oh! Woods wouldn’t sit on the desk. In the script, he’s supposed to sit on the desk. He said, “This guy would never sit on the desk.” It was just a really interesting character beat for him.
He’s still being kind of respectful.
Yeah! Still respectful, and I remember there was a scene where he was supposed to have his feet up on the desk and he was like, “No. He wouldn’t do that.” I know it sounds like weird, actor-y stuff, but it’s actually those moments where you’re like, “Oh, I’m so glad I hired this guy. He cares this much.” In any case, Harold was like, “What if he’s diabetic?” We were all like, “We gotta try that. That sounds great.” And Jason did it, and Jason also liked it because you just don’t see it, usually. So, anything that kind of adds a little humanity or humor, we always would sort of jump on.
Another bit I’m kind of curious about is sort of a “What came first, chicken or the egg?” kind of deal: the flag twirling. Did that stem from wanting to sort of wave off an air strike, or did that stem originally from just a father missing his girl’s talent show?
It was both. It was always this idea of, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” There’s also the danger of you put a kid in an action movie, it can go really, really badly.
Really badly, yeah. That can be dangerous.
There’s sort of precocious girls in movies like this and you’re like, “Oh my God!” We were trying to be conscious of like, “All of this has to work.” And Joey King, I mean obviously I’m biased, but I think pulled it off pretty great and you actually want to see her on screen. It was always from the jump, about this idea of, “How could she really save the day, in a way?” And then I just sort of worked backwards to flag twirling, and then he missed it. So that was always in the first draft.
I’m curious, after working on White House Down, did Roland just say, “Hey, we’re doing an Independence Day sequel. Write it,” or did you just have an idea for it that you pitched to him? I know you can’t talk about it in any detail, I’m just curious how it came about.
It was just one of those things that was very organic. He and Dean [Devlin] had written two scripts, which were really, really good. On [White House Down], I was also producing it, so I was up there sort of every day with them. With Roland, Dean wasn’t there. He’s not on this, but they were sort of, “Oh, what are you doing next?” He started talking about Independence Day, and I love Independence Day. It’s the way that I and many people first kind of grokked into Roland and what he was good at and so capable of. So, I was like, “That’s so awesome! That sounds great!” Then we didn’t talk about it for months. And then, right around the end, I got the call, “Would you be interested in taking a look at them and maybe coming in, doing some work?” I was like, “Absolutely!” I read the script and I was thrilled as a fan to go like, “Wow. Okay, I know why they’re doing this,” as opposed to, “Is this a cash grab or anything like that?” There’s a really cool narrative reason to telling the story and when they tell it. It’s 20 years later. And so, I just sat down with them. It was very mellow, because Roland’s a very mellow guy. They said, “What would you do?” I said, “I would do this, this and this. I would keep this,” and they were like, “Well, that sounds great!” So, it was very sort of simple and fun and easy and it’s been that way.
Roland just said they’re only gonna do one film, and they said they were originally going to do two. Was that part of your idea? Did you want to sort of truncate it and sort of get everything really solid into one flick, or did they require you to rejigger some things?
No, no. It wasn’t. I mean, I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, so I’m gonna take the Fifth a little bit about it.
Yeah, sure. Air on the side of caution.
But the things we really talked about were the characters in it and what their journeys are. Again, that’s always his sort of way into it, so I was just like, “Here’s what I think.”
Are you still involved in any of the other Amazing Spider-Man movies? I know you have a story credit on the second one.
I do, yeah. I have a story credit on 2. In terms of the fact that they announced 3 and 4? Good for them, man.
What was that like, just the responsibility of rebooting something that quickly?
It was a really great experience, actually. It was an odd thing for me because I actually came in to write Spider-Man 4 for Sam [Raimi] and Tobey [Maguire], so that was my entree into the world. The late Laura Ziskin called me up after Zodiac and was like, “Would you be interested?” and I was like, “Absolutely.” I was really sort of fascinated by the idea of ending the franchise, and no one had sort of done that before like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to kind of do that?” What ended up happening is I did a draft, then David Lindsay-Abaire, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer came in after me and did a draft. Then Gary Ross came in and did a draft, and they were working really hard to make a release date. Sam looked at the budget and looked at where the script was and, I think quite rightly, went, “You know what? I can’t. I don’t wanna jam this. I don’t wanna make a movie just because we can make a movie.” And so, they all sort of collectively were like, “We’re not gonna do it.”
Meanwhile, Amy Pascal… I had originally made a deal to write two movies. I was like “Let’s close it with 4 and 5 and make ’em one big story.” Everybody was sort of on board, and then when they scaled that back to just 4, Amy said, “We’re gonna, at some point, make another Spider-Man movie. It’s a really important character, it’s a wonderful franchise, and would you be interested in doing that?” I was like, “No. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what the reasoning would be, narratively, to do that,” and then I went home. I thought about it and I kind of came up with a take, so I called them back, “Let me just come in and tell you what I’m thinking. If you like it, great. If you don’t, no problem. We’ll figure something else out.” I went in and kind of pitched them the very broad strokes of what ended up becoming Amazing Spider-Man. And I pitched them actually, sort of where it goes as well. They liked it and I came in and started on it. It was a really cool experience, just because it’s like driving a Ferrari that’s not yours. You get to play in somebody else’s sandbox that’s so storied and means so much to so many people. Sometimes, you’ll watch the news and you’ll see two-year-old boys in South Africa, wearing Spider-Man t-shirts. It’s such a global phenomenon. It was just so great to be able to drive that car for a little while and play in that sandbox. Then they brought in Marc [Webb], which I think was just a phenomenal choice. Again, somebody who is all about the emotion of it, rather than just pyrotechnics. It was cool.
Spider-Man 3 left Peter Parker and Mary Jane on a very ambiguous note in their relationship. Can you tell me what the idea was? Did they get back together? Were they broken up? Were they just friends?
The honest truth, and I could pitch you all the different ones but I won’t because it never got made, but I will say… Listen, we all thought Peter and Mary Jane, they probably belong together, ultimately. It was really interesting because, and this is one of the reasons I think ultimately it didn’t make the movie, because I wrote one movie that was its own story and then David’s story was a completely different film and then Gary’s story was a completely different film. Mine didn’t have The Vulture in it and I don’t think David’s did either but I don’t want to… Sam and Tobey were really trying to find what that one last story is, so they kept going down different roads, which is what you do with these things, too. You wanna sort of cast a wide net and really figure it out. We just didn’t get it there and so I’m glad that we didn’t pull a trigger on a movie that wasn’t ready.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
