Recipe for Success: How Three Directors Cooked Up Phil Lord’s Vision for ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’

It took the combined efforts of directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman to channel Phil Lord’s ground-breaking animated comic book vision into a film that captures audiences’ hearts and imaginations.

Many discussions about Sony Pictures Animation’s smash animated hit, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as expected, focus on the unique, stylized animation, an innovative mix of hand-drawn 2D and 3D CG elements integrated with throwback Golden Era comic-book graphic design and color.  As they should. Many other discussions, also as expected, focus on the story, a risky re-imagination of a venerated Marvel superhero, Spider-Man, told through the life and perspective of a 13-year old African-American / Puerto Rican kid from Brooklyn, Miles Morales. Also, as they should.

What gets lost in the din of celebratory, and wholly justified conversations about this groundbreaking film is how fundamentally difficult it was to weave these two separate but equally complex creative worlds together so deftly, so coherently, an artistically inspired combination that has wowed both audiences and critics alike. It’s a given that animation studios are masters of the visual realm, routinely producing dazzling, tantalizing and mesmerizing content audiences ravenously devour. But it required so much more than your typical, and increasingly difficult, mastering of the sophisticated medium of CG animation to create a film this unique. This enchanting. This good.

Which is why Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is so much more than a cool shiny new animated toy, though every animation fan surely loves playing with something new now and again, which in this case, isn’t just a bigger, brighter and noisier version of what they were playing with last week. The film’s true uniqueness is that it ever got made to begin with, that the studio trusted Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and a group of artists with the risky and costly proposition of throwing all their talent and ideas, along with some Marvel-inspired seasonings, into a creative Cuisinart and pulsing up something worth serving, something we’ve never tasted before, a mix of comfort food and haute cuisine you can serve either on paper plates or your finest china. It’s like garlic mashed potatoes smothered in sweet pea foam. Well, not like that. But like something else that tastes really, really good. That no restaurant has ever served before.

And, it took all the strength, skill and endurance not one, not two but three directors, Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman, could muster to make that meal a reality. And even then, for a large chunk of the production, they always worried about whether or not they had the right list of ingredients along with the best recipe for success.

According to Persichetti, doubts about the viability of the project persisted well into the production. “How about a year and a half,” he laughs when sharing how long it took for the team to determine if the film’s unique blend of story and visuals was doable. “The only stuff we had produced at the point we released that first teaser was what you saw in that first teaser. I will say this…if you step back and look at the period of time, from the release of that teaser to what we had in the final film, you’ll see a giant progression in what we were able to do. We had all these amazing voice actors, we had all these incredible performances, we had this really human story with a lot of emotionality and we were living in a world that was pretty stylized. But, we were really trying hard to figure out a language that allowed us to have our characters perform in a way that was expressive enough performance-wise, but also visually, to support the subtlety and the weight of Miles’ story. We really painted ourselves into a corner. A wonderful corner, but still, we had to figure it out quickly. We didn’t have a bunch of early successes that came easy. It was really hard to get a character not in a mask to look right, to move right, and to speak correctly.”

It took tackling a seemingly simple scene to generate the right mix of creative elements that gave the directors the overall confidence that had eluded them to that point. “The majority of our creative discovery took place on one of the first sequences that really landed an amazing performance,” Ramsey chimes in. “On the car ride to school, between Miles and his dad, when we recorded Brian [Tyree Henry, the voice of Jefferson Davis] and Shameik [Moore the voice of Miles], we were like, ‘Oooh, this material is great!’ We recorded them together in Atlanta and their performance felt really good. As we got into editorial and animation, we really focused on building the characters in that sequence and it all finally started to gel right there.”

For Rothman, finding a viable mix of visual elements fundamental to their stylized vision was a concern from the very beginning. “Very early on, we knew the elements we wanted to incorporate,” he explains. “We all loved and wanted to try the Batman style sound effects text on screen. We knew we wanted to put characters’ inner thoughts in thought balloons. And we absolutely knew we wanted to try comic book panelization in some areas to heighten key moments in the story. With that menu of elements, it just became an issue of where it was appropriate to use these them, as well as how we would deploy them.”

“It was important to find moments in the story where those elements would be additive, or surprising, rather than gimmicky,” Persichetti adds. “Because the last thing we wanted to fall into was gimmick. None of this was going to work unless it felt organic, that it felt a part of the story and conveyed the characters’ emotions and experiences. That philosophy ended up being our guiding light. Because there were so many elements being juggled, so many story lines, so many moving parts, we worked hard to make sure everything fit together properly. Things sort of evolved as we went along. And ultimately, it was just the process of iteration that every animated film goes through, which for us, felt like it was times 20!”

“Remember, the fundamental thing that drives the movie is that it’s a story about Miles Morales, a 13-year-old kid in Brooklyn, his Mom, his Dad, and his uncle,” Rothman continues. “That’s the heart of this film. Miles is a very sweet, smart, creative kid who has a lot going on inside. He’s at a juncture in his life where he’s trying to figure out who he is and what he wants to be. And, a lot of that is happening inside. He’s internalizing a lot. He’s not expressing a lot of what he’s feeling. So telling the story about Miles and his family is what drove a lot of the visual stuff. We’re trying different styles of animation, all sorts of bells and whistles, to express Miles’ state of mind. As an example, we open up the movie telling you about Spider-Man and you’re seeing a lot of thought balloons and hipper things. But we stop that for about 20 minutes when we’re just telling Miles’ story in a relatively natural way, though we’re still using animation and color in some extreme ways. Then, once he gets bitten by a spider, everything starts getting more stylized again. That was the rule we gave ourselves, that he doesn’t cross that visual threshold until he gets bitten by the spider. Then, we would try more elaborate stuff to let the audience join him as he expressed his state of mind or what he was experiencing.”

Not wanting things elaborate just for hipness sake, the directors only used stylized elements where they propelled the story forward. “We tried a bunch of stuff, but ultimately, we got rid of a bunch of stuff,” Ramsey notes. “We culled the stuff that didn’t make us feel anything. And the stuff that stayed was the stuff that added the right emotions to the mix.”

Through a combination of ganging up as a trio and the old “divide and conquer” approach, the three directors developed a team dynamic based on their individual strengths set against the requirements of handling any pressing production needs. “My contract said I could only work three days a week,” Persichetti jokes. “Oh, how we jest,” Rothman adds. “Though it sounds like it might not be possible with three directors, we really developed an overlapping creative collaboration,” Persichetti continues. “Without each other, this movie would not be what it is today. It wouldn’t have gotten done.”

“We do have general areas of expertise,” Ramsey notes. “I’ve directed a movie…I’ve directed animation, Bob’s a trained animator, so that’s an example of an area where we both overlap. But the demands of the schedule and the work that had to be done meant that after the first few months, I had to split off and get to storyboarding the third act while Bob shepherded the animation for most of the movie. Rodney had worked with Phil and Chris for ages, writing comedy, writing drafts for the script, but he would end up sitting in on art department meetings and digital reviews. All of us recorded actors. So, we all did everything as needed. Editorial was the place where all the material would end up getting collected. We’d review, debate, discuss and make changes, then iterate again and again and again.”

“And we’d argue,” Rothman laughs. “We’d be together, then we’d break apart and go put out whatever fires we needed to put out. But the thread that held it all together was that from the very beginning, we had a really clear and consistent vision. Thanks to the initial work that Phil Lord had done, the spirit that he managed to capture in the first treatments and very early drafts of the script, we knew where we were going so we had that to kind of help us hold it together.”

They relied upon their belief in the potential of creating something unique, despite the periods of doubt as to how that uniqueness could successfully end up on a movie screen. “From an early point, everyone recognized that there was tremendous potential in what we were working on,” Persichetti concludes. “We all knew there was something unique there, though we didn’t know how or if we would be able to make it work. But, it’s that feeling that binds people together. Not just us, but the hundreds of other people on our crew. You know, if you feel like you might have something special, then people join together, to whatever extent they can, and do whatever needs doing to try and make the project a success.”