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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won this year’s Oscar for best animated film – well earned for its spectacular, innovative visuals, and strong messages about diversity and family. Rhodé Marshall chats to the film’s co-director, Peter Ramsey, about the making of the film.
This has been bugging me for a year. What texture is Miles’ hair supposed to have that it doesn’t bulge under the mask?
[Laughs] we just sort of ignored reality to give it a clean comic-book shape. We wanted to have the classic Spider-Man feel to it. In real life we know it would look different but we couldn’t go for an Afro-friendly mask [laughs].
What do you make of the international success of Spider-Man and Miles? It’s one thing for it to resonate with African and Latino-Americans because it’s very culture specific, but it has done so well all over the world.
Beyond the issues of representation or race, we worked hard to tell a good story. We were concerned that we were introducing a new Spider-Man, a new version of the character. We knew that if we were going to show people a new Spider-Man, you’d have to fall in love with this character as much as you loved Peter Parker. We worked hard to make Miles and his family appealing, making sure you understood the trauma of his own life with the conflict between his father and his uncle.
Your first feature, Rise of the Guardians, was kind of overlooked and a moderate success. But comparing going from that with one of the most widely recognised properties in pop culture, there had to be some kind of adjustment. What that was that like? How did you approach it differently?
The biggest difference between Rise of the Guardians and Spider-Verse is that Spider-Verse is a real team effort. There were three directors on Spider-Verse. There were my co-directors Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman and producer Chris Miller and writer-producer Phil Lord – people know them for The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. They’re the ones who originally got the call from Sony to come up with a new Spider-Man movie and they just assembled a really good team. I was lucky enough to be one of the people on the team. I brought everything I learnt on Guardians to making Spider-Verse. We talked about it a lot because we were that many people involved creatively. You want everyone to have the same vision as much as possible. That’s one thing I’m proud of on this movie – you can’t really tell one person’s contribution from another. It feels like one vision.
The balance between the ambition of Spider-Man and having to keep it accessible for a wider audience is crazy, for instance knowing to pull back on some of the zanier ideas like the planned Tom Cruise sequence while pushing the boundaries by adding more and more animation styles and really crafting this unique look in the first place. It looks like a comic and it’s got this jumpy animation blended with some wild colouring techniques with Benday dots. How did he maintain it?
I have to give credit to an incredible team. We had a lot of really brilliant people working on it but we all knew that none of those techniques would help us if we lost the emotional core of the story. So at every step we had to ask ourselves, is this how Benday dots tell the story, is this how Benday dots make Miles’ experience more dramatic or more intense or funnier or is this how it is to live the movie through Miles because if it didn’t, then it didn’t really have a place in the movie. The most important thing and our toughest job on Spider-Verse was to make sure that the style did not overwhelm the substance. The story is of a young man and his family that were thrust into this strange set of circumstances that they’re not ready for. And he has to rise to the challenge and become the best version of himself. We tried to keep that as our north star, no matter how crazy things got around us.
There are so many people criticising Marvel and characters like Miles, saying that their conception is motivated by “political correctness”. They seem to get louder all the time, to the point where Rotten Tomatoes had to revamp its whole prerelease rating system. How do we fix this before it can grow or filter down to younger generations of fans who won’t see Miles as a ground-breaking step forward but as an enemy pushing them to the margins?
It’s one of those things that feels sort of like if you just don’t react to those people that stuff tends to burn out on its own. But much of it is real, much of it is just people venting on the internet. You look at the success of these movies and it’s pretty clear that most people want this, they enjoy it, it’s filling a void for them, it’s something that they haven’t had before. The people who are threatened by it are a minority but they make a lot of noise because they can be anonymous on the internet. You can’t stop it but you can minimise it by ignoring it and just continuing to make these movies as good as you can. The big thing we did with Spider-Verse is we just tried to make it as specific and as true to a character’s actual experience. What would an Afro-Latino kid in Brooklyn’s life really be like, what would his room look like, what would his parents be like, what music would he listen to, how would he dress? We tried to make that stuff as real as possible so that you were dealing with a real character and not a political stand-in for a character.
