One of my life philosophies is that you have a choice to make when you're doing something creative. You can be cheesy... or you can be lame.

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

I think one of the things about Peter Parker that is so great, and what has made him and Spider-Man last so long is he is a kid that we all feel connected to, he's not an alien, he's not a millionaire, he's just this kid that has trouble asking girls out.

Something you can do in a comic that you can't do in a film is that you can have thought bubbles.

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].

Earnestness can ferment into sentimentality.

There's a bigger universe at hand.