'Spider-Man 3' - Sam Raimi interview

The 'Spider-Man 3' director discusses how his approach towards filmmaking has changed over the years.

May  1 2007

Sam Raimi established his hyperkinetic style with 1981's tongue-in-cheek horror pic, 'The Evil Dead', starring his schoolfriend Bruce Campbell. The critically acclaimed succès de scandale was followed by two sequels as well as 'Crimewave' (a collaboration with the Coen brothers) and 1990's 'Darkman', with Liam Neeson as a superpowered outlaw scientist. Following the ultra-stylised western 'The Quick and the Dead' (1995), Raimi made the quiet smalltown crime tragedy 'A Simple Plan' and the sports drama 'For Love of the Game' before returning to the supernatural with 'The Gift' (2000). The third instalment of his terrifically successful series of 'Spider-Man' movies is out this Friday.

I've always been interested in the camera and the effects of it – that's what drew me to film in the first place. My father would take home movies of the family and play them back and I was always amazed that you could capture reality and replay it. Backwards motion was incredibly cool. So the camera as a recording device was the thing that first thrilled me. Then I got interested in the moving camera. How does it affect an audience when a camera moves? What does the audience think when two shots are put together? And the pace of those shots, one after another, changing – how does that affect an audience? These are the questions I was interested in.

As I began making my feature films, it was a great adventure. It was about constructing something I saw in my head or I had designed on storyboards and capturing that on film. But even once you storyboard something, you didn't know the effect of it as a moving picture, of the camera moving, how the lens would change the image, or the effect of music and sound effects.

The making of 'The Evil Dead' was very down and dirty. The fact that it was 16mm, because we couldn't afford 35mm, was a great plus in that I could move the camera in very dynamic ways without having a very heavy camera to move. We had different versions of the 'shakycam': sometimes it was fixed to a long board with two guys on either end; sometimes I had it just in my hands on a very small board; sometimes I would strap it to the underside of my hand so that I could manipulate it in curves that conventional dollys couldn't achieve, swoop over things and dip down low. It was quite painful, though – even 16mm gets to be heavy after a time.

After 'Evil Dead', when we got a little bit of financing coming our way, I wanted to explore how to work with cranes and some of the tools I had seen being used on other films, but mostly I had more ways to achieve shots that I had dreamed up. I was able to make a special motorised rig to put Bruce Campbell on, to spin his body end-over-end while this device travelled through the woods and could ram him into trees and branches, which was quite refreshing. Whereas in the past I just had to hit him with sticks and slam the camera into him, now I had a whole device that could slam him into things. Money opens up wonderful worlds of possibilities.

Then with 'Darkman' I could hang people from helicopters and dip them into traffic. That was more a question of whether we could make a film that would pass as a studio film. I had never worked with a lot of Hollywood elements that were in that film. We had a guy who was a gun man, who simply provided guns and blanks. Before, we just had a real gun and we'd use it to blow holes in things. Every picture has been a learning opportunity for me.

With 'The Quick and the Dead' I tried to stay very close in the confines of the script. The camera there was just a tool to try and dramatise the gunfights in the most visually exciting and melodramatic way possible, making the audience feel the thrills and chills of the different moments in different ways. One was to let them ride the bullets, like a joyride. One fight, I wanted to see if I could use the technique Hitchcock had used in 'Vertigo' – zooming in and dollying back at the same time – to build a sequence of ever-increasing zooms and dollies to build suspense leading up to the moment of gunfire. I was experimenting in a hundred different ways.

Because I had done everything I could to make those gunfights as different as possible, I left 'The Quick and the Dead' feeling incredibly empty – like if that's all I'm doing, I don't want to do it anymore. So I stopped making films for several years after that. Then I realised I could still grow and learn new things if I began to focus on the actors in front of the camera – things that I had just moved around like pawns before because I was ignorant of the things they could bring to the picture. Now I became very interested in stories and emotion and actors and performance, to the point where, when I made 'A Simple Plan', I tried not to move the camera at all. I tried to allow the actors in the frame to tell the story, and I was very satisfied with that. That reinvigorated my appetite, and it still does to this day.

When I was trying to get the job of making 'Spider-Man', I just thought that I really understood the character and the heart of it, what made it work. I feel now that if I can understand the character I know how to direct the picture. I've got to know what he wants, what he's afraid of, what his weaknesses are, how he thinks – then I can direct it great. If I don't know those things, I can't even fake it.

Now I'm reaching a point with the 'Spider-Man' movies where I'm becoming re-interested in the camera again, especially with the possibilities of computer-generated imagery. I remember on the first movie, I was trying to figure out how we were going to make Spider-Man come to life and [special effects supervisor] John Dykstra was saying 'we could pull it off as a CGI character'. I said 'I don't think that we can, I've never seen a satisfying CGI character'. When, after a lot of tests and re-shooting and manipulation, we finally reached the threshold where I did believe it was possible, that was one of those moments where I was amazed and awed at what a computer could do.

Only on 'Spider-Man 3' did I think about a sequence that couldn't exist without the computer: the birth of Sandman. It starts under the microscope and it's about a living scultpure taking place, as if you could watch a piece of stone be sculpted by the wind over thousands of years. It's nothing I would have attempted or even thought possible without these six years of working with the computer animators. Now I feel the camera is another tool to help tell the story – not the only tool, as I originally thought it was, nor a tool to be abandoned, as I later attempted to do, but something to embrace in the right measure. I'm trying to find a synthesis of performance, story and camera all telling the story together.

'Spider-Man 3' is released on Friday.

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