I was going to be a chemical engineer - I was a science nerd - that was the plan. I secretly applied to USC and NYU and got a scholarship to go to NYU based on a dumb animated short I made. It was a huge shock to me and my family.
It doesn't matter whose idea it is or where it came from or when it arrived in the process. The best idea is the best idea no matter what.
Peter Parker is sort of our ground-level view of this Marvel universe. You know what it's like to be in the penthouse with Tony Stark or have this god-like view like Thor, and I want to show what it's like for regular people in this world.
There was a time when I just loved 'Indiana Jones' so much. I was in fourth or fifth grade, and I wore a fedora like that one to school every day. It was so dumb.
I wouldn't say I was a massive comic fan growing up, just because I now know people that really are, and I would never claim to be in that same category.
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.
We always talked about the sequel to 'Clown' being called 'Clowns,' like an 'Alien'/'Aliens' sorta thing, where you have multiple clowns. And just really make it, in the way that 'Aliens' was an action movie, do the same thing. Action-horror. That would be great.
I love 'River's Edge.'
I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.
People know the broad strokes of what it's like to be Spider-Man, but I wanted to really get into the details.
When we were kids, we would just go walking: just walk in a direction and hope that you were gonna find a crashed alien spaceship or buried pirate's treasure or something like that. You never did. You'd find, like, a coyote skeleton, something like that. That was the most exciting thing you'd ever find.
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.
To me, the best comedies get a little dark, and the best thrillers are a little bit funny. So I'm not exactly sure where I draw the line between the two.
I just remember having the President's Fitness Challenge when I was in elementary school and middle school. You had to do different activities, and at the end of it, I think you got a little pin or a badge. I was like, 'How do we incorporate Captain America into high school?' You would have the 'Captain America Fitness Challenge.'
'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.
I was definitely the kid who was the chicken, who didn't want to say the cuss words.
There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.
I've always been a very collaborative person, and I think 'Cop Car' and all the people I worked with who made it possible is a good example of that.
I'd been writing my own coming-of-age story, and I got to take a lot of that energy and a lot of those moments and themes that I wanted to explore in a much smaller film and then apply them to 'Spider-Man: Homecoming.'
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.
