Director Marc Webb discussed some of his Spidey changes in my latest TOH/Indiewire column. He acknowledged that “the sins of the father” was a compelling theme. “I kept on going back to the single moment where Peter Parker was left by his parents,” Webb suggests. “Realistically, anybody’s whose parents disappeared in a very urgent or chaotic manner when he was six or seven-years-old, that’s going to have a huge emotional impact. And that moment is more definitive than even the spider bite. It defined the character and the movie in a very specific way for me.” 

In fact, Peter’s orphan story was very Dickensian for him and he finds the whole notion of these kids having a generosity of spirit yet distrust for the world around them very provocative.

As far as VFX and 3-D, they weren’t such a huge leap from commercials and music videos. “The action scenes just tend to be more physical obstacles, but not always. I worked several months on all that stuff with previs from Proof and that was really fun to do because of the exploration process and some of my friends of the last few years are previs artists and so I knew about that. The other thing is that Andy Armstrong, who is our stunt coordinator, put a real emphasis in the first part of the movie about doing the stunts practically, which usually makes the scope smaller but it enforces a certain physical dimension or physical language, which I thought was really helpful to inform the animation in the second-half of the movie.”