Co-director Joaquim Dos Santos talks action, abstraction, and all things Spidey in a wide-ranging discussion of Sony Pictures Animation’s hit sequel, now playing in theaters worldwide.
How do you follow up an Oscar-winning animated feature which made over $384.3 million worldwide and redefined what a CG-animated movie could look like? Unless you also happen to be a physicist with new insights into string theory, or an economist who can make a convincing case for cryptocurrency, probably the best option is to make a sequel in which you up the visual ante, take audiences to new places, and offer surprising plot developments while never forgetting the emotional core of the story. Which, happily, is exactly what the creative team at Sony Pictures Animation did.
Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, with a screenplay by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller & David Callaham, and a voice cast featuring Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya, and Oscar Isaac, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is the second film in what will be a Spider-Verse trilogy. It chronicles how, after reuniting with Gwen Stacy/Spider-Woman (Steinfeld), Brooklyn’s neighborhood Spider-Man Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is catapulted across the Multiverse, where he encounters the Spider Society, a team of Spider-People charged with protecting the Multiverse’s very existence. But when the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself pitted against the other Spiders and must redefine what it means to be a hero so he can save the people he loves most.
Like its predecessor, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is an incredibly ambitious undertaking that demanded the best that its multitudinous and highly talented cast and crew had to offer. Among those shouldering the lion’s share of the responsibility was director Dos Santos, who, with his co-directors, labored mightily to bring the groundbreaking film to the screen. In an extended and illuminating interview, he told us all about it.
AWN: You've been immersed in this thing literally for years. You know you've got a lot of things going your way, but you also know you can't count on anything working until it's actually in front of audiences and they like it. Was there a point though, during production, when you said to yourself, "Okay, this is going to be good. This is going to be big."
Joaquim Dos Santos: We screened the film at various stages and, at one point, when we screened it internally, it was super-, super-long and you could feel it. And so, we made some decisions on where to trim and stuff. The next time we screened it, it was still very much an animatic, it didn't have much final animation, but Miles's throughline was cutting through. And when that landed, and jokes started landing, and the counselor scene started landing, we were like, "Something good is happening here."
AWN: Tell me a little bit about your dynamic with your two co-directors, Justin Thompson and Kemp Powers, and how your personal experience and skills helped you navigate the production.
JDS: Thankfully, all the shows that I've been lucky to be a part of have been pretty ambitious – even going back to Justice League, which was reaching for something that I think Batman: The Animated Series had started. It was telling these longer-form stories, and it was telling more mature stories, and it wasn't necessarily playing for kids, it was playing for everyone. So, I think that sort of tonally prepared me. In my mind, society needed to get caught up with the tone of those types of shows. It was like features and society and the zeitgeist all sort of aligned.
On a nuts-and-bolts level, it's being able to just jam out ideas, especially when we're putting things in late in the game. If you had to noodle them down and then ask all the respective pieces in the pipeline to sort it out, that can cause a bit of a clog. So, it’s important to set up a really solid base, like, "Hey, the staging in this storyboard that's going through is really, really clear, and the intentionality of the cinematography is set forth from the get-go, and the emotion of the characters is coming through. You guys have to make it better, but you don't have to invent it.” It's all about that pyramid getting to the tippy-tippy top and being as sharp as it can be.
AWN: There are two different areas that I want to talk about: narrative and visual style. I'm going to start from a visual standpoint. It felt like every frame of this film was heavily stylized – characters, background, animation, graphic styles, color scheme. How did you determine what was going to work? Tell me a little bit about how you laid it out, how you ensured that visual continuity.
JDS: First of all, I think we were super-lucky to have Justin Thompson and [Production Designer] Patrick O'Keefe back from the first film. We started developing this one before the first Spider-Verse had been released; it hadn't won all its awards yet. In watching it, I was like, "Holy crap, there's something really special and different going on here." I'm not blowing smoke when I say there’s a before-Spider-Verse time and an after-Spider-Verse time, with regard to the freedom that it gave the entire industry to try new things.
So that was sort of our intention going into this one. Look, I had a moment, when it won the Academy Award, I was like, "Oh, my gosh, these shoes got so much bigger." And then I just immediately felt embraced by my fellow directors, the producers, the entire crew. They said, "No, this is now our permission to push even further." So, there was a ton of experimentation. The first thing we did was say to ourselves, "Look, we're in a comic book shop. We can leap from one graphic novel, one world, to the other.” So, there was sort of this kid in a candy store aspect.
And then, as the story started finding itself, we started applying these different styles to the journey of Miles and Gwen. We got really, really lucky, I think, with what Gwen's comic did inherently, which was that it codes as a mood ring. When you read the book, those covers look like they're dripping paint. So that lent itself to her narrative, but it also allowed us to kind of punch the audience right in the face from the get-go. So, it sort of helped set a pace for us.
AWN: It is kind of like a punch in the face. It's like you were breaking everything in the pipeline to do things differently. But it also seems like there's no way you could have made this film unless you really trusted that you were going to be able to create these visuals and that this broad departure was going to work.
JDS: I think part of the joy for us was that making the film was kind of scary at times. We were asking ourselves, "Is this too much? Are we pushing too hard?" And when we got in that scared position, we kind of smiled and said, "Let's just go." It felt right. The story is the blueprint and, if you're able to track the story, that’s your guiding light.
There were times where we weren't sure if Mumbattan was going to work. We were like, "Is this too much?" And I can remember distinctly, we walked into an early screening, and we were in the incredibly lucky situation of being people that don't have to figure it out. We can sort of talk about our emotions as directors and ask for what we want to see, and ask for all the reference to evoke this, that, and the other.
The team used these interpretive shapes to represent characters in the background. If you were to look at it in isolation, you wouldn’t recognize that they’re characters. But when you pull back and you see the entire composition, you could now see this was a group of people. And then they hit play on the scene, which I was not expecting. And those squiggles started to move, and you could sort of attribute the performance to those people.
The performance was cutting across in what were essentially squiggles. They were moving in 3D space. But you could tell one person was hailing a cab, and one person was running across the street, and one person seemed like they were rushing to get somewhere with something in their hands. And it just felt, in that moment, like everything was possible. There was no limit to what we could do.
So, I think giving the artists and the tech folks who made this alchemy the freedom to just try that stuff, that was the secret sauce. And then, once you start layering Miles's journey and Gwen's journey on top of that, you do what's best for them. You don't just throw everything at the screen at once, even though it may feel like it; it's all very deliberate and it's in service of the characters.
AWN: From a visual development standpoint, what were some of the biggest challenges in realizing those final frames in which everything fit together so well?
JDS: To me, what felt the scariest but came together so beautifully was the second sequence with Gwen and Captain George Stacy – when she's confronted by him and they have that conversation, and it really goes abstract. I mean, it goes even further than the beginning of the film. And when you’re watching some of those shots without sound, you go like, "Ooh. This feels jarring. I don't know that my brain is quite accepting this.”
Then you start layering in the dialogue, you bring in the music, and those things start playing off each other, and the jarring quality actually accentuates where they're at emotionally. The music's beautiful, but those visuals feel like a grand experiment. When the entire scene drops away, and it's just shapes moving behind Captain Stacy, you’re like, "What exactly are we doing here? Are we just painting with any brush?" And then you realize, "Oh my gosh, with these characters' interactions, this actually elevates all their performances."
AWN: How far along in the production were you still making what you would consider fairly substantive changes?
JDS: The first film was finished days before they had to lock and send out to the theaters, and this wasn't too different. There was definitely stuff happening up to the last, last minute. Modulating a lot of the color and stuff in Mumbattan was a big task. This is the moment where Justin was like bleeding from his eyes because he was going from room to room to room to room to room. [For more on this, see our upcoming interview with Justin Thompson.]
Mumbattan was a huge technical jump. There was a lot that was being asked not only of the artists, but I think the audience, as well. We are in a completely different neighborhood. And you just have to buy into that. We went through versions of that world, and Pav's character, at the storyboard phase, and it wasn't coming together. Fortunately, we had a whole bunch of Indian and Indian-American artists on the crew, and they wrote us a letter that said, "Hey, this has the potential to be amazing. But right now, Pav doesn't feel aspirational. He doesn't feel like the character we aspire to have in our neighborhood protecting the streets." And they assembled a specific Indian writers’ room that could give voice to Pav. It allowed him to make those kind of jokes and sort of wink at the camera, but you know this is coming from a very true place.
AWN: Across the Spider-Verse is the second part of a trilogy. Did you know from the beginning that there would be two more movies, or did you figure it out along the way?
JDS: Originally, it was going to be one film. We screened that pretty early on, and it was long. You were looking at animatics, and the third act was a giant brawl that felt like it was just action for action’s sake. It was too much for one film. Once that became clear, we decided to split it. Exactly how much of what exists will be in the third film, I can't say. I think there will definitely be elements – we set stuff up that will definitely have a payoff – but I think there's so much more we can do now that we've given it enough breathing room.
AWN: You talked about there being pre-Spider-Verse and post-Spider-Verse eras. What does the success of this film mean for cinematic animated storytelling? Does this make it harder for less-stylized CG to keep an audience's attention?
JDS: I think it gives all the creatives out there license to try to push the boundaries and not feel like it has to fit in a box, which is very exciting. I do think there's room for everything. What I love about Spider-Verse is that – and even the marketing spoke to this – it is literally meant for everybody. And I think that's a beautiful thing. That is something I've been waiting my entire life for. Before, it felt like we had to speak of content like that in these little niche circles, in comic book stores, and in D&D games. And that's not to say it all has to be comic book-related or fantasy-related, but it's just meant for everybody, and people of all ages will respond to it. We made a film that’s just as much about the parents' journey as it is about the kids' journey, and that's awesome too.
AWN: Basically, you told a great story that happened to be animated.
JDS: Creatively, the multiverse allows us to lens these things in a very extreme way. But, even if you were to strip the multiverse away, there's still drama there, whether they’re traveling across the country or traveling within boroughs in Brooklyn. That core is still there.
