Some spoilers for Spider-Man: Homecoming follow.
Last summer I visited the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming in Atlanta to check out what stars Tom Holland and Michael Keaton, director Jon Watts and producer Amy Pascal are cooking up for the MCU version of the wallcrawler. The main message coming out of the day was that this take on the iconic character will give us the same old Peter Parker, but with a distinctly fresh and modern approach.
It was day 46 of 74 for the production when I and several other reporters arrived at Pinewood Atlanta Studios. The new facility (the first film ever shot there was Ant-Man) had several sets in place that anyone who has since seen the Homecoming trailers would now recognize: a partial Washington Monument, although it was just the base and sitting in an empty lot; a full-size (but again partial) Staten Island Ferry, which when one climbed aboard revealed itself to be completely bisected, and which would split in two at the flip of a hydraulic switch; and last but not least, Spider-Man and the Vulture themselves confronting one another while Spidey wore his old homemade suit for some reason...
Co-producer and director of development for Marvel Eric Carroll took us through the basic plot of the film, and we also spoke to the stars and key crew members to gather some interesting information about the production. Read on for the 17 things we learned on the set of Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Whereas the other MCU movies take place at a sort of “penthouse level” where you meet alien royalty and guys like Tony Stark, the filmmakers wanted Homecoming to depict a Peter Parker who grew up watching these heroes from the ground. What was that like for Peter?
“[It’s] the whole aspect of keeping him grounded and making sure the audience sees a kid as a superhero,” said Holland, who of course made his debut as Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War. “Because we've seen the sort of Norse god, we've seen the billionaire, we've seen the soldier, now we get to see the kid. And one of the most important themes of the movie is, what would a 15-year-old boy do with superpowers? So, sort of opening act to the movie, you see Peter really trying to discover who he is, what he can do, which is something I feel like we haven't really explored massively in the previous movies -- is seeing Peter make mistakes and try and rectify them and try and learn exactly what he can do.”
Read about even more tech secrets that have been revealed for Spider-Man's costume right here.
“Spider-Man starting out -- he’s not irrationally afraid of heights, but he has the fear of heights that all well-balanced people do,” Carroll told us. “So he’s going to work up to becoming the Spider-Man we know he will someday. But we will not see him swing down Fifth Avenue in this movie. We will not see him 40 stories off the ground acting like that is not the most terrifying thing he will do that day.” Basically, Spidey will be working more at Queens level in this movie -- five or six stories high is good for him for now. Until he goes on a school trip to the Washington Monument, that is…
Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes/Vulture also starts out with a more grounded worldview. He’s not a “take over the world” kind of guy, but more just looking out for number one. When we first meet him, he thinks he’s landed a big contract for his salvage company to clean up after the Battle of New York from the first Avengers film. Toomes and his men are literally working in the shadows of Stark Tower here, but then another organization sweeps in to handle the project instead -- a group called Damage Control. This is what sets Toomes on his dark path and frames him as almost a reverse Tony Stark.
“He's somewhat of a victim,” explained Keaton. “He takes things in to feel like a victim. And some of it is justified actually, because he believes that there is an upper echelon of society and people who are getting away with a lot and have everything, and there was a whole lot of folks who are working hard and don't have much. Does that sound familiar to anybody, given the political climate?”
Damage Control wants to recover the various discarded bits and pieces of alien technology and weapons left in the wake of superhero battles like the Battle of New York. Their mission is to destroy or otherwise dispose of the tech safely. But Toomes and his cohorts (including the MCU versions of Spidey villains the Shocker and the Tinkerer) realize the value of this technology, and they steal and otherwise acquire bits and pieces of it in order to build the wings that will transform him into the Vulture. They then use those wings to stage raids against Damage Control, sometimes covertly, in order to steal even more tech.
With the Vulture, it was important to the filmmakers to avoid comparisons to Anthony Mackie’s Falcon or to make him just another guy with a backpack with wings. So the concept for Vulture’s wings was to make them more like a small vehicle; with a wingspan of 32- to 34-feet, Carroll describes them as more of a small plane. “It’s not a backpack that he puts on and wings pop out,” said the producer. “It’s a thing that rests on a gantry that he has to step and climb into it. It’s massive and it’s super cool.” Among the features of the wings are the alien turbines which allow him to hover in place or go very fast as well as the ability to cocoon around Toomes’ body so that he can crash into targets.
Yep. Peter hung out with the Avengers last summer, and now in Homecoming he’s back in school dealing with that stuff again. That old Parker luck!
We’ve glimpsed a bit of this in the trailers, but the filmmakers said one of the signature scenes in the film involves Spider-Man chasing some of the bad guys through backyards, encountering friendly dogs, and so on. No word yet on whether or not “March of the Swivel Heads” will be playing on the soundtrack, however.
Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man has the most interaction with Peter/Spidey in Captain America: Civil War, as he’s the one who “discovers” Peter and brings him into the superhero big times. And while Downey returns for Homecoming in a sort of mentor role, that wasn’t always the plan. “The story was being developed as that was happening,” recalls director Watts, who was on the Civil War set to provide notes for the Spider-Man scenes. “But their relationship is so great in Civil War that you kind of feel you have to keep exploring that.”
Holland sees Tony as more of a big brother than he is a father figure to Peter. “Because he picks on him,” said the actor. “And he kind of is down on him quite a lot, but then there is that level of him caring about him like his own. And Robert has really brought something lovely to the character. A very different side to Stark than we've ever seen before.”
Continues
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire