Director Marc Webb on casting the new Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy
It was a really terrifying prospect to cast such an iconic role and there were some days where I thought, "I don't know how we're going to do this." Then Andrew Garfield walked through the door. When he was auditioning, he had this rare combination where he could do the emotional gravitas that was required for Peter, but he's also got whimsy -- he's also funny and alive and light and sarcastic and those are the aspects I really wanted to explore in the movie. He also has an incredibly physical stamina and that's important when you're doing a movie that requires this level of physical intensity. We tried to do a lot of the stunts in a more practical way and that required a very, very significant amount of effort on the part of the actor. And then we brought in Emma, who is so fast and funny and so alive, but she can also do emotional depth. In a movie like this, you can't cast actors independently when you're relying on a romance to develop that drives the story. You have to cast the chemistry. I remember seeing them together and watching them have fun and open up and be spontaneous, there was just some magic that was happening between them that was fun to watch. 500 Days of Summer was built around private, personal moments between two people and I wanted to build the foundation of Spider-Man on those little details between the characters.

New Spider-Man Andrew Garfield on the differences between performing on Broadway and in a big-budget superhero blockbuster.
Not much difference actually in terms of how I approached it. My only intention was to honor the character and that goes for Biff Loman [in Death of a Salesman] as well as Peter Parker. So my approach was the same, just from my heart and guts. There were certain things that were challenging about both, obviously. The repetition of going through trauma every night onstage is a killer and your body doesn't know it's not real even if you're mind does. With this movie, the only thing that was a challenge was that it was difficult to get into a rhythm because of the 3D cameras; they take a lot of care and delicacy and so we were [delayed] occasionally and I just love going and going and going. That's how I like to work and that's why I liked working with David Fincher [on The Social Network] because he does so many takes.

Emma Stone on how she got into character as Gwen Stacy
I worked with the costume designer, Kym Barrett, to make sure that Gwen felt like Gwen, but that she also made sense in the real world. Obviously I'm a lot less voluptuous then Gwen unfortunately, but the signature headband and the thigh high boots and the coats were important to keep in the movie. I'm by no means a supermodel or unattainable looking person so that element of Gwen was a bit different from the comics, because she was such a beauty queen and not the girl next door. In terms of her as a character, it was a hodge-podge of different versions of Gwen. She's not very hippie-ish in this and I don't think she'll ever be birthing Norman Osborn's twins. I just don't think that'll be happening. [Laughs] But we tried to keep some of that moxie and self-assuredness in there.

The director and producers on the decision to re-tell Spider-Man's origin story
Webb: You've seen the origin of Spider-Man, but you haven't necessarily seen the origin of Peter Parker and I wanted to go back into the details that surrounded, say, the spider bite and the backstory with that. I thought it was important to expand those details while honoring the iconic elements of Spider-Man's origin. I wanted it to make sense for the larger, newer story we were telling. Spider-Man is perennial character; he's not like Harry Potter who has a closed canon. There are 50 years of Spider-Man comics and there are a lot of stories to tell from that.
Matt Tolmarch: [We felt] that high school is an incredibly ripe moment in life. It's that moment where everything seems apocalyptic. You're being asked to behave like an adult even though you don't have the tools. And when you fall in love, you fall in love in a way that's unique to the rest of your life. It's not a coincidence that a lot of great movies and novels are written about people in this period of life. It's also where Peter Parker spent a lot of time in the comics and for us to return to that was important because it's a metaphor of the character and what he's about: that balance between being a kid and a grown-up and that's the balance that Peter is trying to draw between himself and Spider-Man. We've been open about the fact that we tried to make another installment in the Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire movies and Sam was the first one to finally say, "My story has been told, but someone else should tell this story." I think the power of this character is that he belongs to everybody. We knew Spider-Man lives on forever and there are so many ways to represent him onscreen. Marc Webb's vision of Spider-Man is wholly different from what Sam was doing and we felt incredibly good and clear about reinterpreting this iconic character.
Avi Arad: It was also important to establish that Andrew, as the new Peter Parker, has his own beginning. We keep hearing this stuff about it only being ten years since [Sam Raimi's first movie]. Ten years is a huge amount of time. It's a whole new generation that we're dealing with and you have to give the character time to breathe.

Martin Sheen and Sally Field -- the new faces of Uncle Ben and Aunt May -- on the comic books they read back in the day
Sally Field: I read Little Lulu -- that was my girl. I loved comic books and was a real comic book freak when I was a kid, but they were the girl ones like Archie and all of those. But my older brother read Spider-Man and is so excited about this movie.
Martin Sheen: I followed Sluggo and Nancy and Archie, but not Spider-Man. I'm exactly 21 years older than he is so I missed him totally. I do recall the afternoon cartoon, which my kids would rush to the TV to watch. But that was as close as I ever got.

Marc Webb on Stan Lee's obligatory cameo When I got hired to make the film, the first thing I did was ask Avi for Stan's number and I invited him to lunch. And the first thing he did when we sat down was to say, "So Marc! Let's talk about my cameo." In all honesty, before we started shooting the movie I was going through thinking about places where we could add a little levity and humor and this library scene came up and it just made sense to put it in there. He kept on trying to add lines to the scene.
Arad: I got the calls complaining. He was like, "I didn't get a line!" And I said, "You'll get the laugh."
Webb: The line that he had there was "Oh, Dostoyevsky. He's like the Russian Stan Lee!" I should've kept it.

Part-time rocker Rhys Ifans on how he got into character to play the heavy, Dr. Curt Connors a.k.a. The Lizard
There weren't any kind of rock 'n' roll inspirations for Connors because you need two hands to play guitar. [Laughs] I think the whole franchise is kind of rock and roll anyway. Marc liked to play music on set between takes. There was one scene in particular where Connors takes the drug that turns him into the Lizard and it gives him this sense of euphoria, like crystal meth or something. That feeling becomes addictive to Connors and why he keeps reverting to the Lizard. So when we were shooting the scene where Connors sees himself transform, Marc played the Velvet Underground's "Heroin" which is a beautiful, beautiful song about addiction. So we were supplied with a soundtrack a lot of the time and that helped us with our performances.

Denis Leary on playing father to Emma Stone as Gwen's cop dad, Captain Stacy
Horrible, it was just a nightmare. [Laughs] Listen man, in all honesty, I'd seen her in a couple movies and heard great things about her through the grapevine. But she was the real deal and so was Andrew. They were able to improvise, which not everyone can do even if they think they can. The first couple of days was me getting used to the idea that these two kids were going to steal the movie. I remember shooting this dinner scene, which was one of the first big dramatic scenes we shot. We were playing around and improvising and I still wasn't there yet; I was supposed to be intimidating Andrew's character and I didn't feel like it was working, because he was really coming right back at me. So Marc came up to me between takes and he said "You gotta step it up." So they're the real deal, they're going to be around for a really long time and I'm saying nice things about them so I can ride their coattails.

Emma Stone on Spider-Man's enduring appeal
He's one of the only teenage superheroes, which is major. A lot of times people start reading comic books as kids or teenagers, so he's the most identifiable instantly. You can relate to him. Not to mention he's bullied, which is huge. For either a girl or a boy, everyone has experienced something along those lines. The fact that he's bitten by a spider and he's able to respond to the bullies in a way he wasn't before is symbolism for these kids. They have so much power within in them to speak out and stand up for themselves -- to stay unique and true to who they are as Peter does. He finds those heroic elements within him with our without those powers. In an early scene in this movie, Peter stands up for a kid whose being bullied, so he displays that heroism before he gets super powers.

Denis Leary on why it's important to always make sure you return for the sequels
There was no pressure on me -- I just showed up on set every day. I just gotta make sure I show up somehow in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. In the original Ice Age, my character Diego was supposed to die at the end and I said "This is not going to work. You cannot kill a major character, kids are going to bum out." So they screened it and kids bummed out; you can kill the mother in the beginning, that's okay. But you can't kill a major character at the end. So I got in on that, thank God. I truly love doing those movies. You can show up looking like shit and then you walk into a room and talk to an electric stick and pretend to be some kind of fucking tiger or something and they give you all this money for it. It's the greatest job in show biz. I want to do Ice Age until we reach the Civil War, the Johnson administration and Obama gets elected. By Ice Age 13 we'll catch up to current times and move into the future.

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