Jon Watts

“I loved the idea of Spider-Man as a kid, and I loved the Todd MacFarlane run in the 1990s, and the first Raimi movies were released when I was in film school. Those were big.”

“That's why people love Spider-Man: he's the most grounded, relatable of superheroes.”

“My friends and I have always been trying to make movies, at every moment. We've tried so many different angles and approaches. But when it happens, it happens, and you just run with it.”

“I've always pre-vized my movies, just on my own. Even when it was, like, zero-budget things, I used this programme to do storyboards because I can't draw that well.”

“'Cop Car' was made with all of my friends. I wrote it with my best friend.”

“The movie I made with my friends in my hometown based on a dream becomes a stepping stone to 'Spider-Man.' I wish I could say this was an amazing, calculated path but... It's so weird.”

“Big movie or small movie, you make this thing, and then you show it to people, and you just hope they like it. You hope it works.”

“You go to the movies to be transported. That's the responsibility of filmmakers and the people that hire the filmmakers - to try and find new dreams we can all share together.”

“You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.”

“For me, there's a deeper genre appreciation for what a coming of age story can be about. To apply that to a superhero world, for me, that was very exciting.”

“'The Onion' is an amazing place to work because it's a bunch of really smart, collaborative writers who aren't afraid to try crazy things.”

“It's really cool to do, like, a 'Harry Potter' evolution because you can really take your time with the character development: really, like, don't rush past the implications of great power and great responsibility.”

“It's just this feeling of when you're a kid, you have these ideas about the world and about people in your life that don't always hold up as you get older and start to realise that things are more complex than you might've realised. That's always a big part of a coming-of-age story.”

“What's nice about having kids close to the age they're playing is that you can actually capture awkwardness.”

“When you're writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you're going to do. You don't have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.”

“I think saying 'a John Hughes movie' is just shorthand for a lot of people to say 'a coming-of-age story,' because I think, when you're of a certain age, that's what John Hughes means to you.”

“Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you're playing with time, and you don't have that ability where someone can pause at home. That's such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don't really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.”

“If you think about it, now that Spider-Man is in the Marvel universe, that means that Peter Parker was probably, like, eight years old when he saw Tony on TV telling the world he's Iron Man. And when you start thinking about it as a whole world like that, it gets really fascinating.”

“I think every kid is a 'Spider-Man' fan at some point.”

“I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.”