Earnestness can ferment into sentimentality.

I think that the dramas that you find in TV are actually a lot more interesting, typically, than what you find in cinema.

Sundance is a really special place. They're very protective of movies, especially lower-budget movies.

I think that Spider-Man is a part of our culture. He's a perennial character. He's something that's constantly reexamined and there are so many versions of him in the comics that it was something that I thought that we could do cinematically. He belongs on the big screen.

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.

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.

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].