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.

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

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.

It's really hard to find just a simple character-driven drama, outside of a genre, that was available to direct, except for on TV.

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.

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.