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.

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.

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.

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.

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.