SAM Raimi discusses some of the technical issues behind making Spider-Man 3 and why he’s still an avid fan of the comic books and the franchise. The interview was conducted by Martyn Palmer and has been edited here…

When did you first fall in love with Spider-Man?
My brother, who is six years older than me, sat me down and explained who Spider-Man was and shared something with me that was obviously a great interest to him. I grew to love Spider-Man too and follow his adventures.

But it was really Stan Lee who created real characters with real journeys to go on. There was real dramatic interaction between the heroes and the villains and real lives that they were a part of. Instead of kids looking up to an older man, like Superman or Batman, he said: “I’ll make the kid the hero. “ And the problems he has are problems that kids can relate to the world over – with parents, friends, girls and homework, school and teachers and bullies and being the outcast. It all came from Stan’s original stories and where he placed the characters.

What can people expect from Spider-Man 3? What are the themes this time around?
I would say that the theme of the new film is forgiveness. It’s a lesson that Peter Parker has to learn in this third instalment of these Spider-Man films. He’s learned a great deal about responsibility and he’s learned about friendship and now he’s got to learn to quell his pride and listen to others. And through listening maybe a certain amount of forgiveness can be learned, because really he’s a creature of vengeance.

He has been an avenger ever since he lost his Uncle Ben to the hand of a murderer. And he’s been paying down the debt of guilt that he feels with that vengeance. Each act of bringing these other criminals to justice is pretty much something he should have done originally but never did. But that’s only so high a place to rise to.

When the picture opens he sees himself as the hero and he sees these others as sinners and he’s going to bring them to justice. A greater lesson for him to learn would be that he’s not completely without sin himself and that these criminals he quickly labels as the “bad guys” are not completely evil human beings. Through that understanding of collective humanity – that he isn’t just “the good guy” and they aren’t entirely “the bad guys” – comes the ability to recognise that some crimes are worth forgiving and that some people are worthy of forgiveness.

What were some of the biggest technical challenges this time around?
We’ve been trying very hard to outdo ourselves and we have had a great team of artists and technicians on the CGI and animation storyboard side. It’s really a team of hundreds of people that work on these pictures that are responsible for any improvements and I think they out did themselves this time.

There were about 900 different effects shots in total and each one was different and a different challenge. We had to figure out how to make Sandman. How do we make sand move a grain at a time in such a way so that it stacks properly? Sand, has a certain degree of repose, it doesn’t really stack at a 40-degree angle or a 20-degree angle. So there was a lot of things we had to learn about the materials we were shooting with and we had to shoot a lot of camera tests because we had to recreate the sand and create a character out of the Sandman.

And everything he did had to really feel like it was really made out of real sand as opposed to a CGI computer pixel. So a lot of research went into the movement of sand, the look of it, how it interacts with the light, how it falls, how it blows. I spent a lot more time photographing sand than I wish I had!

What about the Venom character?
It’s a story of Peter Parker’s movement into darkness, so we use the black suit as a metaphor: the darker he gets as a human being, the more the alien symbiote is drawn to him until he literally wears a black suit. When Parker realises that he’s being taken over by this alien life force, he eventually is able to free himself from it.

However, it finds a new host in fellow Daily Bugle photographer Eddie Brock (Topher Grace); transforming Eddie into Venom, a fearsome creature with similar powers to Spider-Man. Venom is made of this black liquid that comes to life and we had to figure out how that would move. Would it just flow like water? Would it be more solid? How could it have a persona if it just moved like water? It had to have menace.

So, there was a tremendous amount of animation tests to work out how something like that would come about. We tried to take what we had learned on the first two pictures and what all our artists had learned and stand on the shoulders of all the achievements made by all the other effects companies and all the technology that had been developed around the world and apply it to this picture at this time.

How has your relationship with returning cast members such as Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and James Franco evolved over the course of these three movies?
Our relationship has got better and better. It’s about friendship that has developed with people you have worked with constantly and trust more and more and have a shorthand and familiarity and a comfort level with. And that’s certainly how it is with Tobey and myself. When I say shorthand, that’s not to say things are easy. We certainly have our intense conversations but we can move past the mundane issues much quicker now and get to the heart of what the scene is about.

We are really not afraid to experiment with each other and we toss ideas back and forth. We trust each other, I think completely, and he knows that he can try things that I’m asking for that may seem way out there and I can let him experiment in a different way. And we both know that we are each other’s safety nets.

Three pictures is a lot to do together – certainly in seven years – and we’ve developed a very good friendship and a very good level of trust for each other. I think it’s a wonderful collaboration.

And how did new cast members such as Thomas Haden Church [Sandman] and Topher Grace [Venom] fit in?
It was probably easier for the new cast than it was for the others [in the past] because they had seen the previous two films and knew the direction and style of the pictures. They knew that we were after realistic performances and a real journey with the characters and that’s part of the reason why they signed up for it, I think. So it was a very easy process to incorporate them into the family of Spider-Man actors and they took to it very well and contributed a great deal, each and every one of them.

There’s been a lot of speculation surrounding whether you’d be returning to do a fourth Spider-Man movie. Can you shed any light?
I’m sure Sony Pictures is busy working on the fourth one right now [laughs]. But I’ve been so busy working on the third film I haven’t had time to think about the fourth one yet.

Read our review of the film

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