I spoke about this with Peyton Reed last year with “Ant-Man & The Wasp,” which is fundamentally affected by the events of ‘Civil War.’ Is it a blessing or curse to have to follow these bigger films and play by the rules they set out or is it a bit of both?
Right, Peyton’s movies have been a bit more tangential to the larger stories that were being told in ‘Avengers,’ but ‘Far From Home’ isn’t [laughs]. It’s directly dealing with the fallout of ‘Endgame,’ and it sets up an extremely emotional situation for Peter Parker to be dealing with. So, in a way, I would say it’s a blessing because you get a jump start on this very emotional arc for Peter and you don’t have to spend the entire first act setting that up—people go into the movie already knowing the context. I can imagine how it could be challenging for some, but I like it.
I love what you did with the exposition: you and Peyton did the same thing actually. Using all these potentially longs swaths of catch-up explaining, relaying the events of the last movie and what has happened in between, as an opportunity for some terrific comedy.
Ha, thanks, that’s the challenge. How do you deal with that ‘Endgame’ fallout? I remember reading an interview with the Russo brothers where they said ‘Endgame’ was the first time they didn’t need to think about the future of the MCU and I was like, “Well, great guys, but now I do!” There are so many unanswered questions at the conclusion of ‘Endgame,’ and I knew we had to address them, but you could spend a whole movie about that aftermath and all those crazy events. So, it just seemed like the right way to maintain the tone of ‘Homecoming’ while answering those big questions that were unanswered at the time.
Trying to dance around spoilers, there’s this awful/hilarious thing you do with around the snap and the high school. It’s so omg, horrendous for a split second and then snaps back as this gut-busting moment. Tell me about crafting that.
Ha, yeah, we had this long list of things we could do with the snap, the before and after, because there are so many questions and we can only answer so many of them, but that would happen.
And it’s I suppose, somewhat controversial in that, we’ve never seen the snap outside of a totally tragic and gutting context. Here you are playing it for laughs.
Yeah, we’ve never seen what it’s like when people come back. It’s dark, but it’s funny, that video would exist. Think of all the implications of ‘Endgame.’ There are so many things I would have loved to show I can’t even get into it.
To pivot, tell me about the future of Marvel and Sony, this is your franchise now I assume. The Spider-Man universe is still really rich with villains we haven’t seen, at least not in the MCU.
There are still so many Spider-Man stories to tell, but personally, I just try and focus on one movie at a time.
Well, if you’re not making the next one, you’ve sure set up a nice conundrum for that person.
Yeah, I feel bad for that guy; whoever’s gonna figure that out [laughs].
Your end-credits, technically mid-credits scene. Was that a callback to “Iron Man?”
Yeah, exactly. It’s a callback to “Iron Man,” but because he’s Peter Parker and nothing ever goes his way [redacted redacted redacted]. It’s that old Parker luck, nothing ever really works out for that kid.
[Redacted further question about end credits]
Let me ask you a bigger question. Sony/Marvel. I think it was a three-film deal. Is there a future beyond that?
I don’t know, all that stuff is above my paygrade. I’ll just wait until someone tells me what’s going on.
If you had a carte blanche choice of villain, Norman Osborne, the Sinister Six, whomever… who are your favorite Spider-Man villains?
I mean, Kraven’s pretty great and coming up with a take on Kraven would be a fun challenge, but you know, to me it’s all about trying to show people things that they haven’t seen before, so I would dig back in and started reading the comics from issue #1 again.
A tiny bit more from this interview left that we’ll have to run in a spoiler piece on Sunday, July 7 where we’ll discuss a little bit of the post-credit sequences.
“Spider-Man: Far From Home” is in theater July 3rd. Check out our review here.