"Web Savvy"

By Patrick Lee 

SOURCE: SciFi   (June 2007)

 The article is copyrighted to the above referenced author/publication with all rights reserved.  No copyright infringement is intended.

  Marvel’s wallcrawler discovers his dark side as the villainous Venom takes control in Spider-man 3.

TRY DESCRIBING SPIDER-MAN 3, the much-anticipated third and possibly final installment in director Sam Raimi’s series of superhero films, and you’re likely to get mired in a web of analogies.

“The first one’s white chocolate,” star Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson) says. “The second’s milk chocolate, and now we’re into dark chocolate. Now we have more of a sophisticated taste in our mouth.”

“It’s like the second film was twice as big as the first film, and the third film is like three times as big as the entire franchise put together,” says Bryce Dallas Howard, who joins the cast as the flaxen-haired Gwen Stacy.

Not so fast, says Spider-Man himself, Tobey Maguire, who plays the role of Peter Parker for the third time. “I’m not sure,” he says in a deceptively placid monotone. “I don’t really boil things down like that myself.”

In any case, everyone agrees on one thing: Spider-Man 3, which swings into theaters on May 4, will be big. The movie will have not one, not two, but three villains: Harry Osborn (the returning James Franco), whose simmering anger finally explodes at Peter Parker over the death of Osborn père in the first Spidey; Flint Marko, aka Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), an escaped convict who is revealed as the real culprit behind the death of Peter’s beloved Uncle Ben, triggering vengeful rage in Peter; and Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), Peter’s journalistic and romantic rival, who morphs into the mysterious black-clad super-arachnid Venom.

That’s not to mention Peter’s new love interest, Gwen Stacy, a popular character from the Spider-Man comics franchise, as well as Peter’s evolving relationship with the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson, who is achieving success as an actress.

The interweaving storylines all limn Peter’s continuing journey as a man and hero, Maguire says. “Peter Parker is dealing with his pride at the beginning of the film,” he says. “Things are going very well for him. The public perception of him is good, and he’s feeling like a useful hero for the first time, I think. And so he starts to become a little self-involved and prideful, and it starts to affect his relationships and whatnot. And also, the black suit comes into play, and that brings out his darker side, or the darker sides of himself, and things happen from there.”

Ah, the black suit. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Spider-Man gets a makeover this time around. The familiar blue-and-red suit gets replaced early on by a cool jet-black one, the result of an encounter with … an alien organism? The organism eventually takes over Eddie Brock, prompting his transformation into Venom. Raimi says that he was at first reluctant to take his movie franchise so far into the realm of science fiction for the third installment, but that the fans seemed to want it. After all, the Venom storyline has been one of the most popular in the comics.

“Producer Avi Arad [the former Marvel chief] – who’s really got his pulse on all the Marvel fans better than any head of a corporation has ever understood those people who are interested in the corporation’s product – he really knows what those kids want.” Raimi said in a group interview at Comic-Con International in San Diego last year. “And he said, ‘You know, you’ve …had two Spider-Man pictures. This third one, there’s so many kids, so many fans of Spider-Man, [who] want to see Venom, even if you didn’t grow up with him. They want to see him. So you’ve got the Sandman. That’s one of your favorite villains. Why don’t you bring Venom in also and make those kids, the fans of Venom, happy?’ And that’s what I thought we should do.”

Raimi added that he was won over once he saw how screenwriter Alvin Sargent made use of the character, not to mention how Grace played him and his human alter ego, Eddie Brock. “Now that I’ve seen Topher Grace perform and saw what Alvin Sargent did with the script—he created a great character, really filled out Eddie Brock into a very meaningful character – and Tobey has a great energy with him in the few scenes they play together as competitors, and I really like him now.”

As for the science-fiction nature of the Venom storyline, Raimi said: “There’s a lot of fantastic elements about Venom that you could say are in conflict with the realism that we wanted to have in the picture. But we just said to ourselves, ‘Kirsten and Tobey, you’ll have to do the heavy lifting here to bring it back down to earth, because there’s this wild goo from outer space, and you’re just going to have to connect us to the characters.”

The decision to make Venom the central baddie in Spidey 3 seems to have been sound, based on early reactions: When Raimi unveiled the first at-times-rough footage to an audience of more than 5,000 people in a hall at Comic Con International in San Diego last July, the crowd went nuts at the first glimpse of Venom.

“I think we’ve got a big movie, with a lot of moving parts, and the action sequences are going to be phenomenal,” Maguire says. “You know, it takes them a full two years to work on all those sequences, and I know that the whole idea is to make it more exciting and bigger and better than the previous. And I think that we’ve probably achieved that.”

For all that, Maguire is just happy to go to new places emotionally and psychologically with his character, who is beloved because he’s human and fallible, super-powers notwithstanding. “It’s great,” Maguire says. “And I encouraged it to go a litter further in that direction…One of the things that’s kept it interesting is that each of these films has stood out as it’s own movie. It’s not just the same movie or the same scenes rehashed. They’re very unique journey’s for Peter Parker in each movie. So it’s great. It keeps me interested.”

Grace, who plays a kind of Bizarro version of Parker/Spider-Man, agrees. “Well, there’s a whole other metaphor in this one.” He says. “Tobey was wonderful in this movie in terms of how brave he was to take a character that …obviously was so loveable…all over the world….and he goes to some really dark places with it. And, I mean, he really pulls it off.”

Since the first Spider-Man in 2002, the stars have also undergone a kind of maturation. New girl Bryce Dallas Howard saw a major life change: She got married during the filming of Spidey 3. Maguire became engaged to Jennifer Meyer and the couple recently welcomed the birth of their daughter. (Maguire’s fiancée – a jeweler by trade – crafted the locket that Mary Jane wears in the film, a gift from Peter.) Maguire also won warm reviews for taking on an unsympathetic role as a postwar hustler in Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. Dunst, similarly, branched into more sophisticated roles, include the title role in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. “I had so much more to bring to the table as an actress” in Spidey 3, Dunst says. “[I’m} constantly growing as an actress, and [in] my personal life and what I do.”

As for Mary Jane, Dunst says, she got to do a lot of new things, including singing and dancing. “We leave the second [movie] with a lot of hope and openness for their future, and we start off at that point in the film, and Mary Jane is successful on Broadway, and I think that she’s putting a lot of her confidence into her work, which isn’t the best place to put it. So.. [she] has false confidence and is so happy, and you basically watch her deteriorate through the entire film. She gets beat down and beat down and beat down. But it was a great journey for me, this one. I definitely go to do…the most work in this that satisfied me. …I had a lot to sink my teeth into on this one.” (As a sign of Dunst’s growing confidence, she took charge of a key piece of wardrobe: In much of the sequel, Mary Jane wears a man’s tie, which Dunst appropriated directly from Raimi, who is known to wear a suit every day on set as a sign of respect for the cast and crew.)

The film also gained energy from the presence of newcomers. Grace and Howard “were both really great to work with, a lot of fun and funny,” Maguire says. “Both [were] excited to be a part of the movie, which was great. And Topher in particular was a fan of Spider-Man comics and the movies, so his energy was great on that. And I think Bryce did a lot of research on Gwen Stacy. And so, yeah, it was fun, and they’re really talented, so you know, just them showing up and doing their job was very energizing.”

“Yeah, well, me and Bryce Dallas Howard – who’s an amazing actress – I remember we saw each other the first day. We were so nervous and excited, we were like the freshmen.” Grace recalls. He adds: “It’s actually the greatest, like guest-star-ring on the biggest hit television show, and everyone’s nice, and it’s kind of nothing to lose. You’re not carrying the bulk of the responsibility, either, so it was really fun. I just got to kind of play a bad guy for the first time, which I had never done.”

For Grace – who, like Raimi, is a longtime fan of the Spider-Man comics – playing Venom was particularly exciting. “When we saw the preview at Comic-Con, I was like, ‘That would be a big moment in my life if I weren’t in the film.’ And I’m playing the guy. I was going nuts.”

Grace adds: “There’s a lot of freedom with a bad guy. When you’re a protagonist, whenever you go a certain distance away from the center…a bell goes off, because you have a responsibility to the audience to be very real. So they can kind of relate to you. But when you’re a bad guy – especially when you’re me, who’s kind of a psycho alien from outer space -- … like, the bell doesn’t go off as many times.”

Howard, last seen in Lady in the Water, quickly bonded with her counterpart, Dunst. (Howard, a natural redhead, plays the blond Stacy, while the naturally blond Dunst plays the redheaded Mary Jane. “It’s ironical,” Howard says.)

“I play Gwen Stacy, and she’s a part of a love triangle between Peter Parker and Mary Jane, and that’s all I’m going to say about it,” Howard says. She adds: “Raimi is “very reverent to everything that people would expect, and yet it’s surprising.”

“I adore this woman so much.” Dunst gushed. “She’s one of my dearest friends now, and I want to work with her in a film where we can really, like, do a movie together, because I’m like, “Oh, now people won’t hire us together in the same movie.’ But they will, because we’re not interconnected enough that it would bother anybody to see us in a movie together.”

Dunst was also glad not to be the only girl on an all-male set. “I was so happy to have another girl to talk to about how uncomfortable the harness is,” she says.

For Church, who ahs seen his own acting career revitalized by his Oscar-nominated performance in 2004’s Sideways, joining Spider-Man 3 was the fulfillment of a long-delayed desire to work with Raimi, whom he described as “Elia Kazan trapped inside this Motor-City-madman, action-picture director body.”

“Several years ago, Sam wanted to hire me for The Gift [2000], and we had a great, like, two-hour meeting,” Church recalls. “We really hit it off, and Sam essentially asked me to do the movie at the end of the meeting. The studio then weighed in with their own opinion, and really thought Keanu Reeves was the right guy for the movie, because he’s a good actor, and he’s a big movie star, and he was starring in the first Matrix [at the time], which was huge. And Keanu wanted to do it. So Sam kind of got trumped. But he said that he did not forget me.”

In 2005, Church exited semi-retirement to appear in Sideways, which won him rave reviews and award nominations. “At the Broadcast Film Critics awards, I accepted the supporting-actor award,” he says. “Sam and [producers] Laura [Ziskin] and Avi Arad were there. And [they] saw me give my acceptance [speech]. And, apparently, I think…Laura was kind of emotionally affected by my acceptance and said something to them, and Sam was like, “I know him. And I think he’s a good actor, and he’d be perfect [for Spider-Man 3].’ They weren’t even casting the movie, but…we met, and everybody hit it off, and they asked me to do the movie.”

Church describes Flint Marko as “a pretty emotionally isolated loner. A guy that spends a lot of the movie by himself. He has a mission, and it’s a mission that wreaks at times tremendous physical violence and damage. He’s not always completely in control of himself.

Both Grace and Church put on muscle for their roles; Church in particular had to fill out Marko’s signature tight striped shirt. And since the sequel demanded bigger and better action sequences, many with close-ups of faces without masks, Grace Church and Maguire found themselves performing stunts themselves.

“Yeah, I do more in this movie because…there is some battling, either without the suit on or with the mask off,” Maguire says. “So, yeah, I did a greater percentage of the stunts…A lot of it is wired stuff, getting yanked around on wires. I think…it should be really clear, in the movie, …because you can just see me doing it.”

Grace adds: “They have pretty incredible fight scenes, I think, before I become Venom. …It’s difficult. It’s kind of about the destination; it’s not really about the journey. I had four hours of prosthetic makeup every morning when I was Venom, and just getting on the suit takes about 45 minutes before that, so I had to get there at 3 or something. And I had to work out. I put on 20 pounds, which really was very hard. I’m a skinny dude, and it was a lot of work. It wasn’t just hanging from those rigs. I’d watch Tobey and go, “Oh, that looks like fun, swinging around.” But I…did, like, one one-hundredth of what he does on the film, and I just have a lot of respect for what he’s been doing for all of these years. Physically, it’s a whole sort of process.”

To play Marko/Sandman, Church says: “I know this is a cliché, {but] I’d say I did 97 percent of my stunts. And stuff that I never thought that I would [do]. I’m 45 years old. …I realized that that was the hidden benefit of training so rigorously…was that I … had become just kind of physically resilient in a way that I probably wouldn’t have been at that age.”

Church adds: “There were stunts every single day and getting yanked on the ratchet and doing stunt falls and fighting. Fighting and falling off of stuff, hanging from a wire and having to perform acrobatic movies. There was one stunt that was actually extremely dangerous. … The stunt coordinator told me … straight out [after I asked,] ‘In terms of danger, …how is this?’ And he goes, “um, if anything goes wrong, you could get really hurt or killed.’ … They literally spent, like six hours rigging for it and practicing.”

In the stunt, Church has to run straight at the camera while something takes place around him. He remains coy about the exact nature of the stung, saying only that viewers will recognize it when they see it.

Now, as Spider-Man 3 builds to its May debut, questions have arisen about the future of the franchise. Not surprisingly, everyone remains cautious about committing to a fourth installment.

“Well, it’s possible that we make another movie, Maguire says. “It’s all depends on if there’s a story worth telling. I feel very proud of the three movies that we’ve made. I feel like the stories all deserve to be told, and you know, if they come up with a good movie, and the whole team wants to get back together, and we feel like we can make a good movie that’s worth making, then I’m up for it.”

For Dunst, it depends on whether Raimi is involved or not. “There’s an openness at the end [of Spider-Man 3], which I like, but … I feel like this is a trilogy unto itself,” she says. “And I think if we venture into a fourth, it will be some time from now and in a new way. Because I don’t think Sam can do that: continuing on this same course. I think he needs to venture as an artist and do other things; otherwise, none of us will have anything good to bring to the fourth. So I think we all need to venture out a little bit, and then maybe we’ll come back together one day and do another one.” She adds: “I would work with Sam on any movie he wanted to work on with me, because I just adore that man.”

  © Patrick Lee, Sci Fi