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 if you make something that's relatable then people will attach themselves to it. You can express it in a lot of different ways but I feel like as long as you are consistent and fair with the audience they'll engage irrespective of how they self-identify. I think it just gets too complicated to track all those differences between demographics.

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.

I always remembered that when I saw people get married they got on a rocketship and went to Planet Happiness, Population: Them.

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].

I was a Marvel guy. I started reading comics when I was a kid.