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Screenwriter Steve Kloves on the Dialogue and 3-D of Amazing Spider-Man

Screenwriter Steve Kloves is known for his work on the Harry Potter movies (all except The Order of the Phoenix), but apparently he also did some work on the upcoming Spider-Man reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man.

After director Sam Raimi decided to leave the proposed Spider-Man 4 and Sony began the process of rebooting the franchise, James Vanderbilt was hired to write the initial draft, and Alvin Sargent was hired to rewrite the script. Now we learn, from a Collider interview, that Kloves also did some writing on it.

I still don't know why I did it. I mean, honestly it was one of those things where they sort of asked me one day and I actually said "No," to my agent I said "No, I'm not doing that." I've only done that kind of work as a favor, and there were some people on that movie like [producer] Laura Ziskin, who sadly just passed, I knew pretty well and I knew her husband very well, Alvin Sargent. I knew Laura wanted the movie to be really good, and she lived with Alvin and Alvin brought such great depth to the Spider-Man movies. I mean if you watch the first one, you see Alvin all over it. I'm not comparing myself to Alvin Sargent, I'm just saying I knew that they wanted it to be really good. I also really wanted to write for Emma Stone, because I like to write for women and I particularly like Emma. So what I did basically was, I did basically character and dialogue, and that was enjoyable for me. So that was my hand in it. And I did a little plot work, but a lot of the plot was done.I enjoyed doing the dialogue and really concentrating on Emma's character very much, and then doing a little bit for Andrew Garfield's character.

Kloves was asked if his approach was to make the dialogue sound like it was grounded in "reality" or would sound like the "cartoony tone" of the Spider-Man trilogy. Kloves responded that he told the studio "I can't do 'shazam!' dialogue, that's not what I do."

So they said "Yes that's what we want, we want you to come in and write Peter Parker as a real character." I have to say, I went back and watched the first 15 minutes of the first Spider-Man... what was impressive about Tobey [Maguire]'s take was, Tobey's kind of a happy nerd. Like, he's a nerd but he seems kind of happy about it, he's taking pictures of Kirsten Dunst and he's weirdly cheeky and kind of forward, and it kind of works in a way. But Sam Raimi has that style that I think dovetailed to that pretty well, but it's a different time. I couldn't have done those movies. So I don't know how this is gonna turn out, but I wrote this very, very naturalistically. A lot of humor, but naturalistic humor, not jokes. But really trying to make them seem like real characters. I think Peter Parker's a great character, and I certainly think Emma's character is a fantastic character, Gwen. I wouldn't have done it if they wanted me to do, "Hey look in the sky!" I don't know how to do that, I can't do that. I realize that's the wrong character but...

Kloves revealed that The Amazing Spider-Man is "a real reboot" and complimented director Marc Webb on his previsualization of the script. "With this, what I saw in the pre-vises, Mark had designed it in such a way that you were really following Spider-Man as he was engaging in these action sequences, and it made it much more thrilling because you felt you were with him," Kloves said. The screenwriter also said that Webb "wanted to really shoot the movie in sort of pure 3D."

Mark was really, really schooling himself in the 3D of it all. I think he wanted to try and do it in a very sophisticated way. Mark's a really smart guy, he's a good guy, and he was really earnest about it. I have no question he was doing it for the right reasons.

The Amazing Spider-Man is based on the comic book character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and co-stars Martin Sheen, Campbell Scott, Annie Parisse, Julianne Nicholson, Irrfan Khan, Denis Leary, Chris Zylka, and Sally Field.