The latest Amazing Spider-Man trailer swung into theaters last night attached to copies of The Avengers, and now director Marc Webb has a few words about how the film has evolved since the release of the first trailer last year.

Thanks to ComingSoon for the interview!

Q: In the earlier teaser, some of the POV web-swinging seems a lot more CGI than it does now. Is that an evolving process?
Marc Webb: We were still in production when we made that trailer, I believe. That was a very early rendering of some of the CGI things. Part of the fun was to create the movie thinking about subjectivity, meaning getting to feel what Spider-Man feels. I thought that 3D was a really interesting way to exploit that. We spent a lot of time refining and just making that s–t better. So there is that in the movie, but it’s a much more refined version of what you had seen before.

Q: How much of the film features those POV segments?
Webb: It’s interspersed throughout the film. It’s not like the third act is all point of view. Though that’s an interesting idea! [laughs] I’m not that bold.

Q: Not to get too specific about the trailer, but who was the voice that said, “Did you tell the boy about his father?”
Webb: Oh! [laughs] You’ll have to see the movie.

Q: So it’s intentional mystery?
Webb: Yeah.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about bringing the Lizard to life and how, technically, you accomplished it?
Webb: There’s a lot that goes into it. I mean, when we shot those sequences, we actually shot a human. There was a combination of things. A guy, Big John, who was this guy who was literally a big guy named John, who did a lot of the interactive stuff. When you’re trying to interact with Andrew or with Peter, you need someone grabbing him and doing those things so we would replace him with computer-generated Lizard. Then the performance capture was done with Rhys and, for that, we would shoot Rhys in a similar environment and get his facial composure. We’re still working on it. I actually just came from SPI [Sony Pictures Imageworks] where we’re trying to incorporate his performance into the Lizard itself. That takes an enormous amount of time. It’s tricky, you know? In the comics there are different incarnations of the Lizard. There’s the MacFarlane one, which has the snout, but I was interested more in finding something that could relate human emotions. I wanted to keep Rhys’s performance in that creature. Performance — Pixar does it extremely well, creating those emotional qualities within characters that are, essentially, computer generated. So Rhys’s performance is giving that nuance, getting the eyebrow tics and the looks. Creating an armature that can actually speak and lips that make sounds. It’s a very detailed and, frankly, tedious process. I really wanted to capture emotion. I wanted him to have a face, have a feeling and that’s the way I chose to do that. Then there are the physical components of it. I wanted to make him very powerful. I wanted to make him stronger than Spider-Man. That was a really important part.

Q: We see a lot of on-screen spectacle in this trailer. How do you balance your approach to providing the thrill ride that people want with the fact that Spider-Man is one of the more down-to-Earth heroes?
Webb: That’s the thing for me, that access point. I was always a Spider-Man fan, but I was a bigger Peter Parker fan than a Spider-Man fan. When you see the movie, I don’t think anybody will be worried about the emotional part of it. There is an incredibly innocent and tender quality to Peter Parker. He’s not a billionaire. He’s not an alien. He’s a kid and he doesn’t have money. He has trouble with the people that raise him and he has trouble talking to girls. There’s that intense relatability that’s all throughout the movie. I wish you were in the edit room. I could show you scenes that would describe it, but I think you guys have now all seen the hallway stuff. That’s a texture that, for me, is really intuitive. It’s just something that I love in movies, that particularly romantic dimension. It’s something that I’m very familiar with: girls and being made nervous by women. But again, there’s that relatability. How do I put it? The interpersonal relationships that Peter Parker has are so simple and so domestic that it’s a very fun dichotomy to play that big, massive spectacle alongside those very small moments. There are very real moments and, in a very small way, there’s a small, intimate little indie movie at the heart of Spider-Man. That was my access point. In the trailer, you want that spectacle and you want that energy because I think there’s an expectation surrounding that, but as we get closer to the release, there will be scenes that show the more intimate parts of Spider-Man and show where the heart is.

Q: The first Sam Raimi film had a lot of Peter discovering his powers for the first time. Do you get to have fun with that again?
Webb: There’s elements of that. Listen, I wanted to do things differently. If we’ve seen the origin of Spider-Man, maybe we haven’t seen the origin of Peter Parker. There are certain iconic elements of Spider-Man that I felt obligated to honor. There are some exploratory phases. But, again, I wanted to build something with a different tone and a different attitude and to do things in a little more of a practical way, especially at the beginning of the movie. There are elements where we spent a lot of time engineering and designing sequences that existed within the camera that we just shot practically with him swinging on these chains to help create that sensation and feeling of joy and fun, which is always a great part of these movies.

Check out the full interview at ComingSoon.net!

What do you think? How did trailer #3 compare to other trailers?