Justin, I’ve heard you call Across the Spider-Verse the world’s most expensive independent art house film. As directors, can you talk to me a bit about how you foster an environment like that, and the desire to maintain that freedom in a project like this?
Justin K. Thompson: When we set out to make something that was unique and set apart from [the first film], but still lived up to the legacy of that, we knew we had to try and do something really radically different than we’d even done on the first film. We sort of threw out the book and said, “Let’s just think about this as a complete story, as its own film. How can we build from the ground up? Could Miles’s world look even better?”

We added a ton more to Miles’s world, and then thinking [about] our characters and what we were trying to say with them internally, we built all these external things that you’re seeing on screen around the characters. We thought about who they were as people, who they were as characters, how we wanted the audience to feel about them and hopefully get the audience to feel something that these characters couldn’t express with words—that you could actually be immersed within the feelings and the emotions of these characters.

JDS: I would say that was an active rule we had: it has to look like the thing that’s in the book. It can’t get vanilla-ed out and have all the edges shaved down. I will say, I was paranoid once Into the Spider-Verse started doing what it did critically. [Kemp and Justin] and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller gave me the 1950s slap across the face and said, “Wake up, man! This is the permission. Now we have permission to do the things we wanna do.” I was like, “Oh, all right, here we go.”

KP: It sounds simple, but I don’t think people realize how hard it is to do, to just make sure that it stays personal. This film was personal to all of us. We didn’t wanna be beholden to anyone’s expectations but our own.

I understand that these characters are iconic and they have a great history, and lots of people might expect lots of different things based on the comic books or even the first film. We didn’t want to be held in by any of that. We had a story that felt personal to us, that we were excited about, that used these characters that not just everyone else loved, but we loved them. We felt like we had a right. It’s like when people say, like, “Are you thinking about the fans?” Well, we’re thinking . We’re fans too.

It’s a story we’re trying to tell. Again, that sounds like a very simple thing, but when you’re dealing with something that so many people have so high expectations for, it’s actually really hard to block it all out. I tell people all the time: I don’t see what we do as making “content”. That’s kind of a dirty word to me. When I say we wanted to make a little work of art, that’s not being flippant. I think the film stayed really personal. It stayed really small, in that the only people we were really concerned about winning over were the other people in the room.

On my first watch in theaters, I seeing Spider-Man 2099 on screen, and then you started to see a bit of his backstory and his world, and I thinking, I’m getting hardcore [comics artist] Rick Leonardi vibes even in this scene. As a fan, there’s just so many levels that it goes so deep, the love of the characters. It’s so gorgeous.
JDS: I think we’re lucky that we are all of a generation where that stuff was happening. 2099—I can when that book dropped, everybody went, “Whoa, what the heck is this?” It was the first real foray into something that felt very different for the Spider-Man universe. Just being able to scratch at that and peel that back and expose it to new people that weren’t aware of it. That was a thing that landed at a very specific time and exposed people to that was exciting.

JKT: For the deep-level fans, we did bring on Rick Leonardi to work with us, and our special effects team developed a tool with him to actually simulate his line work and the shading, and he was giving notes on it. For us, it was like being kids back in the comic book store, being fourteen years old again, and being like, “Look at Rick Leonardi’s drawings!” And then, “Look, now they’re moving!”

Have you seen The Prince of Egypt from DreamWorks? I watched it for the first time, and I was blown away by how stunning that movie is. I was listening to the behind-the-scenes, and Jeffrey Katzenberg was talking about something that I hear from the production of these movies, which is that pushing [of] the envelope for creative freedom of the animators, and seeing how far they can go.
KP: I mean, you can only push the boundaries as far as you want when the fans show up for the end result. So honestly, the fact that people actually showed up for this film the way that they did, I really hope that opens the doors for more people to take these kinds of big swings. I hope people understand that you can only take a big swing if you actually show up for the end result. Appreciating it in hindsight years down the road isn’t going to enable people to do more, because there’s a lot of big risks you’re taking, and it’s been really humbling to see the fans globally really just show up for this film. That’s a big deal.

JDS: We cite The Thing a lot, in of a film that has reached an incredible cult status, and people recognize it for the amazing feat that it is. It didn’t quite do what it was meant to do when it first came out, but it gets that recognition over time.

The icky part of it is that we’re artists that are also working in the business of selling these films and making sure that people come out to these films. So the fact that so many stars aligned on Spider-Verse and, like Kemp said, people came out to see it. That’s the sweet spot; that’s our little Goldilocks right there.

JT: Going back to what you were saying about Katzenberg and the animators on Prince of Egypt, because it is a beautiful film—I think the animation in that film, they did do something that was very different at the time… On this film, the reason why the animation probably stands out is [due to] Alan Hawkins, our Head of Character Animation, and his team of animators. We really encouraged them to dig into the story with us, and find within their own lives ways that they could express the movement, the expressions, the physicality of those scenes in a way that was personal to them.

They did so much footage where they would show us take after take after take after take, and they would show us all these different versions. Sometimes we’d have a mosaic [of takes] on screen, and we’d say, “Okay, maybe take the first half of this take that you did and the second half of that take you did and combine them together.” But they were really personal performances of these animators.

We literally made rules: don’t use the moves that you’ve used on other films, don’t look at the past, don’t look behind you—just look at your own life, and bring that to the film. I think that’s one of the reasons why these performances combine with these incredible performances that our voice cast gave us, why it is such a moving experience, even for me. I was shocked when I’d be in dailies, and I would see Hailee [Steinfeld]’s voice come out of these [characters], and the subtlety that our animators were able to get into these characters.