Last week, Polygon checked out an early preview for the fourth Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland and the first directed by Cretton (the previous three were all helmed by Jon Watts). Based on watching the first 30 minutes of Brand New Day, the upcoming movie feels like both a natural evolution of the ongoing MCU sub-franchise and a bold leap forward in style and tone. So we were excited to sit down with Cretton a few days later to talk all things Spider-Man (and a little Shang-Chi, too).
Check out the full conversation below, which covers everything from Cretton’s approach to filming Brand New Day‘s webslinging scenes to how the Spider-Man video games influenced his movie.
Polygon: There’s a shot at the beginning of Brand New Day where Spider-Man is sitting on a skyscraper upside down that visually reminded me of the Spider-Verse films. Did you look at those movies for inspiration?
Destin Daniel Cretton: I love those movies and I love Chris and Phil. We definitely looked at those movies. We also drew inspiration from the video games. We drew inspiration from all the other Spider-Man movies. There wasn’t a place where we weren’t at least trying to find, you know, references of things that we could do in our movie that you haven’t really seen before in live action.
Are you a gamer? Did you look at the Spider-Man games a lot when you were working on this?
I am not a gamer, but I’ve played the game, but I surrounded myself with people who were obsessive gamers. So a lot of the people in our stunt department loved playing those video games. So they would do screen grabs of their play and bring it in and say like, “Can we pull this move off?” So that was a great inspiration for things.
The webslinging also looks great in this film. You really captured that feeling of being Spider-Man, of sort of going for that ride, in a way that reminds me of the Sam Raimi movies. What was your approach to shooting those scenes?
We looked at a lot of references of wingsuiters or parkour athletes online. Not only the athleticism, but how they capture it with GoPro cameras and selfie sticks. And we used all of that as inspiration as to what would be the best lenses and angles to really make you feel like you’re right there with Spider-Man and give you the rush that he might feel dropping off of a skyscraper and swinging at 200 miles per hour.
There’s a lot of superheroes in this movie. Did you ever consider trying to put Shang-Chi in the story?
Yes. Everybody was a discussion, but there’s a point when you can’t just cram people into a movie, you know? Every character in this movie is in it for a very clear reason, and when you watch the movie, you’ll see, we’re not just doing cameos for the sake of it. So as much as I would love to see Shang-Chi and Spidey together in a scene, we’ll have to save it.
So as much as I would love to see Shang-Chi and Spidey together in a scene, we’ll have to save it.
Based on the footage I saw, Brand New Day really feels like a New York movie. Was there anything you did specifically to make New York feel like a character in this movie?
It was really important for us to have New York be a primary character of this movie. We started off our entire creative journey here in New York City with all of our heads of department, and we walked the streets, and we took pictures, and we talked about what it was about this city that we wanted to capture the essence of in our movie. I always felt like if we could capture the heart of the city, we are in a sense capturing the heart of Spider-Man. And a lot of that really was leaning on our production designer, Charlie Wood, who really desperately, obsessively tried to capture what the essence of this city is in our movie. And the sets that he built were so intricate and paid so much attention to detail that I think you will see, you will feel New York in the heart of this, of almost every frame of this film.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day releases in theaters on July 31.