The Return of Spider-Man
Spider-Man 3 didn't exactly earn rave reviews, and Raimi is well aware of that fact though he doesn't dwell on it. "Do I take the criticism into consideration? Yeah, absolutely," admitted Raimi when asked about the negative reviews. "All filmmakers want their films to be liked. I shouldn’t say that, but I definitely want my films to be liked by the audience. I don’t make an artistic type of picture that I can say to myself, 'Even if this crowd doesn’t like it, it stands as a work of art and will be appreciated years later or has meaning without the audience.' I simply am an entertainer and I make films for audience appreciation. When they don’t like it, I don’t have a leg to stand on. If a critic doesn’t like it, it’s like, 'Oh, he hates me,' or, 'It’s bad, they don’t like it.' Every time I get a bad criticism, I just try not to dwell on it but it’s very upsetting. You really want to please people."Given the fact a lot of the criticism over 3 was leveled at the multiple villains, will Raimi go back to just a single villain on Spider-Man 4? "I’m still working on Spider-Man 4," answered Raimi. "More properly, the writer is writing the screenplay right now. David Lindsay-Abaire, a New York playwright, is in New York supposedly writing. We’ll see. I gotta call that guy. He should be done with his script in about four weeks I think. I think I’d be better prepared to answer that question once I’ve read that script and know what the movie is."
Lindsay-Abaire was tapped to write Spider-Man 4 in order to take the franchise in a new direction. It definitely wasn't because Spider-Man screenwriter Alvin Sargent had exhausted all of his Spider-Man stories. "[Alvin Sargent] has got so many great stories and characters and great humor and drama within him that it would be impossible. But, I wanted to work in a new way and a new direction. I had just read this great play that David Lindsay-Abaire had written called Rabbit Hole and I just really wanted to work with him on Peter Parker."
"I remember often times in this process [on Drag Me to Hell] my assistant director Michael Moore would come up to me and say things like, 'Sam, you've got an hour left and you've got eight shots what do you want to do?' And I would think, 'Oh my god, we'll just shoot it tomorrow.' And he would say, 'You're not coming here tomorrow, you're never coming back here, the budget won't let you come back here. You now have 55 minutes, how are you going to get the shot?' First I’d panic and then I would remember the basics are all I ever needed and I would think, 'Well, what's the point of this scene? What's the core of what I'm after? It's that this character in the story is confronted with this situation, she makes this realization, and that's where the scene ends. And I can get that with a close up of my actress and a little bit of a lighting effect.' Maybe she was going to come outside and see the sun coming down and I was going to have a crane shot and she was going to realize she didn’t have much time. With a simple rose colored gel and a lamp that’s being faded up and her coming into a close up, she can look off into the direction of the light, suggest she's seeing the sunset, a little bit of wind will help with the idea of the setting sun and she'll make a realization in her eyes, at that moment the camera will move in a little bit to underline this realization, a bit of fear will come upon her as she realizes she doesn’t have much time as the light is dimming, and she exits frame. With that shot I remembered I can get everything I needed, that I thought I needed eight shots to get. And it was invigorating. It never should have been those eight shots anyway," said Raimi.
But as much as Raimi wanted to return to the Spider-Man franchise, he didn't want to do it without Spider-Man star Tobey Maguire. "I only wanted to do it with Tobey because my interest is in living the character with Tobey in a deeper way than we ever have lived it before. There comes with the familiarity a knowledge of a lot of the basics. I think it’s really going to allow us to delve deeply into him as a human being, which is really why I’m into it this time."
"With great power comes great responsibility," as Uncle Ben says, and Raimi knows there's a lot riding on the fourth film of the franchise. "With those Spider-Man pictures, which I love making, there's still a lot of responsibility on the director's shoulders and the producers, everyone's shoulders, because you're dealing with a character that has been around for 40 some years, is much loved by people throughout the world. And people not just have a sense of ownership of Spider-Man, rightfully so, but they look up to him as a hero. Generations of people do. So you have to be careful with how that portrayal takes place. You have to have a lot of respect for the ownership of everyone, which they do have over that character and so I was using the word responsibility of the responsibility to present him in a proper light. And that's a great job, but it's much more freeing to take a break from that and work with your own characters in a place where no one has any expectation of them because they don't know them. You’re really free to do anything you want. So there's a lot more freedom's that come with the independent picture, Drag Me to Hell.
