It's very important to keep the emotions grounded, to keep the characters in some real place.

When you have to react to a lizard that's a tennis ball, it's a really, really difficult, tricky piece of craft.

Nerds are running the world. Andrew Garfield made a movie [called “The Social Network”] about it. Nerds are no longer pariahs and knowing how to write computer code is longer a [mocked] quality. What was important in those early comics was this notion that Peter Parker is an outsider and how we define that in a contemporary context. That, I think, was one of the challenges for us — getting Peter Parker’s outsider status to be current.

There's a punk rock quality to Peter Parker, that I identified with when I read the comics [Spider-Man], and that I really liked. He has this chip on his shoulder.

I think that the dramas that you find in TV are actually a lot more interesting, typically, than what you find in cinema.

We're creating a different universe with different rules and a different tone and different villains. We were very careful to honor the iconography of Spider-Man, but we wanted to tell it in a new and different way [in the film].

Working with the actors, working with production designers, working with the creative people who surround the process is really fun, it's really inspiring and I take great pleasure in working with them. That's what's most fun about directing.