Spoilers for “Avengers: Endgame” throughout. Spoilers for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” will be discussed after July 7 and have been avoided in this piece, though sometimes redacted (much like a typical Marvel Studios script).
One perennial complaint critics and fans seem to have about reactions to Marvel films is critics proclaiming the latest movie is the best one yet, which usually elicits some sort of skeptical eye-rolling. That’s not really neither here nor there for me personally (they all vary in quality), but if there’s one thing to laud “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and Marvel for—especially in a troubled season of poorly performing sequels—is that the company and its filmmakers always keep their eye on the prize of entertaining and charming their audience and this is why they continue to succeed film after film. Fans are more than satisfied each time at-bat. First and foremost, that always seems to be the goal, not world-building, setting up the next sequel or distracting yourself by looking at the horizon, the goal of these films, especially the ‘Spider-Man’ ones of late have been to delight you.
And “Spider-Man: Far From Home” is quite delightful. It’s also surprisingly substantive too, taking a fun, lighthearted, charismatic superhero movie and giving it layers of depth. ‘Far From Home,’ has a lot on its mind, really. It’s a movie about a teenage boy, feeling the pressure, who doesn’t want to face the burden of his powers and responsibility (so he goes on a European vacation). It’s about the emotional and psychological aftermath of “Avengers: Endgame,” and a world that has been thrown for a loop (half the population nightmarishly disappeared before everyone’s eyes only to disorient the world and reappear five years later). It’s a world still recovering from that trauma, extremely vulnerable and thus ripe for manipulation as the planet looks to find new heroes to believe in in a post-Iron Man existence. This manipulation leads to a terrific theme of trust, the loss of trust, faith, self-belief, illusions, and more. Fake news is essentially on the rise in the MCU.
On a practical level, it’s also a movie about a new hero in town Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is chasing down a new threat and could potentially be the new heir apparent to Iron Man which would take off the heat of Peter Parker (Tom Holland) who’s just looking to be a regular teenage kid for the movie. There’s great inner and outer conflict throughout.
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Directed by Jon Watts who developed the film alongside Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, ‘Far From Home’ is extremely thoughtful and considered when it comes to looking at global PTSD and the ramifications of a culture that witnessed such great, crazy catastrophes, they’re willing to believe almost anything. I spoke to the filmmaker about ‘Far From Home,’ the character Mysterio, creating a film that has to follow in the footsteps of ‘Endgame’ and much more. There are no spoilers within, some parts have been redacted or massaged to avoid spoilers and if there’s anything that quite doesn’t make sense, make sure to revisit the piece after you’ve seen it.
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First and foremost, congratulations for being one of the special few need-to-know people, who were privy to all of “Avengers: Endgame” and its ending years before it was in theaters as you developed your directly-impacted-by-it movie.
Ha, yeah, thanks. It’s a very stressful position to be in. You can’t tell anyone anything. As you said, everyone is operating on a need to know basis, but the harder thing was shooting it. All those big [Tony/Stark and Iron Man] murals, we couldn’t do any of that in public because we couldn’t risk that the secret [of Tony Stark dying] would get out so. So, we painted all the murals full size, but then had to composite it them onto the walls later.
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And a lot of the actors had to know about this a long time ago including your blabbermouth Tom Holland.
Heh, yeah, you do work around certain actors though. It was a need to know basis where if it wasn’t absolutely necessary for you to know any of those details, we wouldn’t tell you. The scripts were so redacted, they looked like leaked CIA documents they were covered with black lines.
Tell me the development process of coming on to the idea of using the Mysterio character—played by Jake Gyllenhaal—and the fun ways in which you play with him in this movie.
From the very beginning we knew a few things: we knew that we would be immediately following ‘Endgame’ and would be dealing with the fallout of that movie, we knew that we wanted to do a European tour, a European class trip and we knew that we wanted Mysterio to [redacted redacted], so it was all about cracking the story and finding a way to be true to who Mysterio is, his origin story, but make it work for this story and context.
Granted, I haven’t read those specific comics since I was a kid, but he seems very different in this.
Well, sort of. In the comics, he’s an ex-stuntman, and most of his tricks are—like he has springs in his shoes and he can jump really high and there’s a lot of smoke bombs. But in terms of his actual intent, the very first thing that Mysterio does in the comics is turn up as [redacted] in New York City, he defeats [redacted] he can be the greatest hero in the world. So, in terms of the overall intent, that was pretty much pulled straight from the comics. It’s more just about the execution of how he pulled that off was very different. You know, it’s making a movie in 2018 versus, a comic book in 1965 version of Mysterio, you want to update things and make them modern.
