Last August, a group of fellow journalists and I got to visit the London set of Spider-Man: Far From Home. In the upcoming sequel, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is planning to enjoy a European vacation with his friends, but his plans are disrupted when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) recruits him to battle rampaging elemental monsters.
Although he was unavailable during filming, several months ago, director Jon Watts was good enough to take some time to do a group phoner about the movie. During our conversation, he talked about why they chose to add Mysterio to the MCU, designing his costume, how Peter’s journey differs from Homecoming, and more.
Check out the interview below. Spider-Man: Far From Home opens July 2nd.
One of the things that I’ve kind of been most interested in is you are looking like you’re going to introduce some kind of classic comic character with our medley, and stuff like Mysterio, but they’re going to be twists and I was wondering kind of what comics you looked back on when you were thinking about those characters.
JON WATTS: Uh, I mean I was really going back to the very beginning. It was pretty clear that Mysterio would be the next villain with Jackal, just because he’s, you know, part of the original Rogues Gallery, he looks cool, and we’ve never seen him in a movie before. I wanted to do Mysterio. I just went back and read the original Mysterio comic and just started from that, and it’s good to remind yourself why characters jump out in the first place, and I want to try and tackle who he is as a person in the same way we did with Peter and the Vulture. I was going to start with the same place of inspiration but then see where our take on the world takes it.
One of the cool things about Mysterio is that his costume is very faithful to the comics. Can you talk about developing that look for him, and making sure it stayed true to his original appearance?
WATTS: Yeah, well, part of the visual development process is to start with what is the totally faithful adaptation and then see what happens when you go in various directions just to see if anything interesting develops. And we did that with Mysterio, we started with something that was very true to the comics, but as you’re developing the character design you’re also developing the story so as the story changes we kind of incorporate different elements of Mysterio’s story and see how that would affect the design of the suit, but surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, in the end it was basically a big circle to where we came back around to a design that was very true to the original that also could tell the story that we wanted to tell. I’m really happy with it.
One of the things I was really interested in was the kind of elemental monsters, and those designs, and so kind of on a developmental level, how did you get to the fact that was the direction you wanted to go in, and what kind of role do they play?
WATTS: Well because Mysterio is a hero in our world, I needed villains. And rather than… There are so many Spider-Man villains, for me, from the Rogues Gallery that I wanted to dig a little deeper than anyone might be expecting. And when you get into what might be a really cool monster to have Spider-Man fight, what would be a cool villain put Spider man up against. There is something so exciting about villains like Hydro-Man and Molten Man. That open up such amazing visual possibilities and pose such dangerous challenges for Spider-Man that I wanted to try and find a way to reimagine those characters that would be fun to watch and make for an interesting story.