You needn’t be gifted or amazing, just follow this advice.
Whatever your opinion of his Amazing Spider-Man movies, there’s no denying Marc Webb’s proficiency as a director. He’s been filming in some capacity since he was a kid and spent many years after college honing his craft helming music videos (regular clients included Green Day, Ashlee Simpson, and My Chemical Romance) before making his feature debut in 2009 with the hit romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer.
Now, following his two Spidey installments, he’s back to directing smaller movies, two of which arrive this year: Gifted, which opens in theaters on Friday, and Amazon’s The Only Living Boy in New York, which first hits cinemas in August. In the following collection of tips to aspiring filmmakers, he shares advice on working on different scales, making mistakes, the importance of collaboration, and giving actors freedom.
1. Always Be Creating
Webb apparently believes in the “ABC’s” of directing (and being an artist in general). In a 2012 video for AskMen, he shares five filmmaking tips, one of which is the common suggestion for aspiring directors to just start making stuff — and then always be making stuff.
With digital technology, you can go out and make films. I would just say go and make films. Always be making something. Whether you’re shooting or in pre-production or editing, you just gotta always be making something.
This shouldn’t be surprising given he’s been busy nonstop since college, directing music videos, then movies, working on pre-production for films he didn’t wind up doing (like The Spectacular Now), committing years to a superhero franchise, directing and producing TV (including Limitless and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), and now having two new movies in a single year.
Here is that AskMen video, in which he also goes on to tell of his own origins as a filmmaker as a kid with an 8mm camera:
2. Respect the Cycle of Superhero Reboots
What might seem a specific tip isn’t, not these days, and it surely won’t be in years to come. Webb’s work was and continues to be situated in a context of preexisting and previously planned Spider-Man movies as well as another reboot following his own. It’s important to recognize and respect the history and future, preferably by communicating with others in the cycle.
For example, before taking on the Amazing Spider-Man franchise, Webb needed to get the blessing of the Spider-Man trilogy director Sam Raimi, along with its star, Tobey Maguire. He told The Telegraph in 2012:
It was very important for me to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes. They were both incredibly generous and I feel they had finished the stories they wanted to tell and for me it was too exciting an opportunity to pass up.
Webb also met with James Cameron, who’d been set to make a Spider-Man movie long before Raimi, though most of the advice he received from the Avatar director was specific to shooting in 3D.
And of course Webb had to go to the source of the material, Stan Lee. “I wanted to get his blessing and to ask him questions that I thought were very important,” he says in the Telegraph interview, “but the first thing he said was, ‘What’s my cameo going to be?’”
They also discussed web-shooters, according to a 2011 Hero Complex interview. And more universally relevant, in a 2012 Huffington Post interview, Webb recalls:
I had lunch with him very early on, and one of the things he said was: “Put yourself in Peter Parker’s shoes — and whatever you would do, he would do. It’s all about relatability.”
Since leaving Spider-Man behind, Webb has also talked to Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts and passed the advice forward. From a brand new Collider interview, Watts says, bringing it all back around:
I know Marc Webb from music video days, and he gave me the best advice. He was like, “Just make sure to get lunch with Stan Lee. Definitely enjoy yourself.”
This tip could actually be extended beyond the arena of superhero movies, too. In a 2012 article on Hollywood mentorships, Webb is mentioned as having been very helpful to at least one aspiring filmmaker. “Marc Webb took me out to lunch and we talked music videos,” says director Jeff Stewart (Powerman 5000’s “Wild World” video). “He invited me to spend a lot of time on his sets and ask him whatever I wanted.”
3. Action Scenes Must Be Character-Driven
Relevant to Lee’s tip that the audience needs to relate to Spider-Man in spite of his being a superhero, Webb approached blockbuster filmmaking as still being very much about character development and point of view — in every type of scene, including those where spectacle would seem to be the focus and drive.
From the Huffington Post interview, discussing the Williamsburg Bridge scene in the first Amazing Spider-Man:
Weirdly, in the action, the same principles apply as in the other scenes. An action scene, at its best, has an emotional undercurrent. It’s about character development. At the beginning of the scene, Peter Parker is motivated primarily by vengeance; his crimefighting is incidental. At the end of the scene…there’s a reconciliation…the like of which Peter Parker realizes he’s never going to have. Andrew does a beautiful thing, he tilts his head to the side, and you realize there’s a kid behind this mask, envying that experience, envying that moment — but also letting it go. It’s one of my favorite moments in the movie, because there’s a real emotional connection to the action.
Webb believes the evolution of video games proved that people want to relate to characters even in action situations — to be in their shoes. During a keynote conversation he took part in at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival (via IndieWire), he explained:
In the popular games of the time, you could see the entire universe you were playing in. Your experience was more abstract. And then there was pitfall with Super Mario Bros. where the game-play was still that big thing, but you closed in the space. When that happened, sales skyrocketed, because the experience was more emotional. Your experience became more personal. Then first person shooters came around, and you were the point of view, and sales jumped again. It was a eureka moment for me, cause [(500) Days of Summer] is told all from one person’s point of view. Even the little fantasy sequences were renditions of his emotional life. That lesson has stayed with me through Spider-Man. Based on the idea that you want to give inner life to the character. That’s always a compass for how I shoot I scene, my work with the actors. It’s all about connecting the thought process of a character to the audience.
4. Be Your Own Critic
Of course, between his two Amazing Spider-Man movies, Webb realized spectacle still needs to be the greatest aspect of certain parts of a superhero movie. From the SXSW talk, he discusses how he didn’t take enough risks on the first one and why he had to go bigger with the second:
I hadn’t worked on that scale before. There was a moment deep in the post-production process where a giant lizard was chasing a man in a leotard, and I was like, “This is not grounded…I wanted [The Amazing Spider-Man 2] to be big. I wanted it to express that feeling you have when you read the comics. I didn’t want to shy away from that.
Similarly, around the same time, Webb admitted to Rolling Stone to making mistakes on the first Amazing Spider-Man:
I wasn’t efficient, and I made a lot of mistakes, honestly…Philosophically, the grounded quality of things was important for the performances, but I think it limited some of the visual effects. I wasn’t as confident in the process of animating Spider-Man. But there’s this idea about mastery: You just want to get better at all the things you do.
It’s not rare for Webb to recognize when he’s been wrong. His second piece of advice in the AskMen video is to be self-critical, in a constructive way:
I think it’s important to analyze your work, and be self-analytical without being self-loathing. I think it’s very important to criticize your own work, because people get really protective of it, and that’s not the best way to improve.
And he later doubled down on this tip in a 2014 fan Q&A on Twitter:
(cont.) Try to be self critical without being self loathing. -MW @YahooMovies @BlazePascua
5. Collaboration is Key for Artistic Freedom in a Studio Production
“Find collaborators that you find are supportive and interesting and are going to add value to your professional life,” Webb says in the AskMen video, as his third filmmaking tip there.
In a 2012 Amazing Spider-Man behind-the-scenes feature, Webb further discusses the benefit of collaboration. Here’s what he says on the topic:
Now the amount of access there is to equipment makes filmmaking an intuitive process that everybody has access to. The best part has been this spirit of collaboration with those artists who are trying to make something interesting and beautiful, and there is an intuitive, instinctual thing that happens that doesn’t feel corporate and doesn’t feel procedural.
You gotta keep being able to push forward, and you have to allow for moments of inspiration along the way, and if you can maximize and capitalize those moments, you’re in a much better position to create a piece of art that feels exciting and new and thrilling.
You can watch some of that interview and behind-the-scenes footage in this report on the video:
6. Give Actors Control
Related to his tip on collaboration is Webb’s approach to actors, to whom he grants a good deal of control. His many years directing music videos gave him experience with the technical side of filmmaking, but he hadn’t really worked with actors prior to (500) Days of Summer. So he let them do their own thing, and it worked. He revealed this in the SXSW talk:
When you’re trying to get a certain thing from an actor, you have to cede a bit of control. Otherwise, they lose the sense of authorship in their performance. What I’ve endeavored to protect as I’ve done bigger films, is to create an environment and let the technique take a backseat to the realness of a performance. My eyes opened when I did that movie.
Obviously that means he allows for improvisation. Going back to the issue of spectacle versus character in the bigger films, here’s what he said during an interview for Newsarama while promoting Amazing Spider-Man in 2012:
Of course it’s important to have that spectacle. I love that, it’s a blast, it’s fun! But you need to build it on a foundation of humanity. The biggest part of that is casting. And once you’ve found these incredibly talented people, I wanted to exploit it if I could. If you have Emma Stone in a movie, you need to let her be funny!
And boy did she… Andrew and Emma, they took the script and they would find what was under the surface and shine on top of that. There were so many things , so many moments that they improvised that made those characters really come to life.
There’s that scene in the hallway where he says, “Well I could, or we could,” and she’s like, “Yeah, either one!” But theres this line where she says, “You were touching up stuff?” And he’s like, “I’m not going to answer that.” Totally improvised! I was sitting behind the monitor, and I was like, well that’s kind of dirty but that’s amazing! It’s kids, it’s how they are.
Then there’s this moment where she grabs her folder and spins around — you cannot write that. Those things emerge when you have the spontaneity and you have two actors that are alive and in the moment.
Webb often admits that he’s not a funny guy, so ceding control and allowing for improvisation is important for him as far as directing comedy. He acknowledged this to Backstage back in 2009:
You can direct somebody to be funny; you can direct timing. But it helps if they have that gift already. And I think most comedians are intuitive, which is why they make good actors. You can tell immediately if somebody has that gift.
What We’ve Learned
Marc Webb is probably best suited for smaller-scale work, though there is still something to be learned here about making big blockbusters more relatable and focused on characters. You just need to improve on his attempts. He’s still learning, himself, and he fortunately will let criticism and self-criticism guide him in his improvement as a filmmaker. The above are mostly lessons he’s able to share with other filmmakers through his own discovery and experience of them.
And on top of them, he has a couple bonus tips involving personal enjoyment and health. First, in the AskMen video, he says to remember to have a pint every once in a while, but don’t drink too much, and in a 2012 Vanity Fair interview, his advice to someone reviving a franchise is: “Have protein in the morning; eat a hard-boiled egg in the morning. Try to exercise. Go out to dinner every once in awhile.”
6 Filmmaking Tips From Marc Webb was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.