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 have to react to a lizard that's a tennis ball, it's a really, really difficult, tricky piece of craft.

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

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

Geeks are running the world, anyone who's seen The Social Network knows the dynamic has shifted, but what I think is iconic and timeless about Peter Parker is that he's an outsider, on the outside looking in, and that was something I thought was very important to protect.

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].

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.