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.

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].

For me, there were a few things in the Spider-Man comics that I thought were really interesting. There's this story about Peter's parents and where he came from, and I thought that it was really interesting to explore the emotional consequence of someone whose parents had left them, at a very young age.

When you dont inherit an identity you have to define it on your own.

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.

Sundance is a really special place. They're very protective of movies, especially lower-budget movies.

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