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

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.

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

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.

Romance: That's one of the things that makes Spider-Man really unique, in terms of the comic books. There is a tender, romantic quality to it. And certainly, that's something that's always fascinated me about the cinema: good romance.

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.

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].