SPOILER ALERT: This interview includes details about Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
As Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues its record-breaking swing at the global box office, director Destin Daniel Cretton has had little time to process the whirlwind. The latest Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures collaboration opened to $360 million domestically — the biggest North American debut of all time, surpassing Avengers: Endgame — and $932 million worldwide, quickly cementing itself as one of the biggest launches in box office history.
Even as audiences still vigorously debate the film’s ending, Cretton, during an interview with Deadline, teased that the conversation regarding Spider-Man’s future might spin new webs of ideation. “I don’t want to stop that conversation by putting my opinion in the middle of it,” he said. “Knowing there will be another movie, that conversation will continue in the writer’s room as we figure out —if we figure out —what we’re going to do next. What’s so cool about these movies…the fans are so engaged. Everybody on our side is listening to everything. Those are conversations we’ve had in the writer’s room as well, and I think it’s fun that everybody is participating not just in analyzing this movie, but potentially in creating whatever happens in the next one.”
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Following what’s been dubbed Jon Watts’ Spider-Man Home trilogy, Cretton inherited a Peter Parker, still reeling from the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, as a hero carrying grief while trying to convince himself to survive on his own without his friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) or the love of his life (Zendaya). Not to mention, all while juggling the emotional turmoil of a powerful telepath (Sadie Sink) who is also experiencing a great loss. Those themes of isolation and emotional suppression became the foundation for Brand New Day, shaping Tom Holland‘s performance and the film’s most intimate moments.
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Below, Cretton opens up about the addition of Jean Grey, his visual style and navigating the friendly-neighborhood Spider-Man through a dark web toward healing.
DEADLINE: Before we really get started, this film is almost at $1 billion worldwide, and it’s only Monday.
DESTIN DANIEL CRETTON: Pretty crazy.
DEADLINE: And now it’s on its way to Imax. How are you coping?
CRETTON: I feel pretty good. [Laughs.]
DEADLINE: So, Brand New Day launches us into a new era for Spider-Man and explores darker emotional themes. Was there an idea or a sequence that became the film’s north star, where you finally felt like you understood what your Spider-Man movie was?
CRETTON: My north star happened on our first day of shooting with Tom Holland in an actual scene. Our real day one was up in Glasgow, but that was all action. The first dramatic scene we shot was Tom bringing flowers to Aunt May’s grave. We spent most of the day shooting that montage. I think we covered five different time periods, changing his outfit, changing the bruises on his face. We did rain, we did snow — it took the whole day.
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At the end of the day, we were getting ready to wrap, and I thought, “While we’re here, we should shoot one version in case we want to use it at the end of the movie.” It wasn’t planned or written that way. I asked Tom if we could find a new outfit and have him bring flowers to Aunt May at the end of the movie. He did it once, then came up to me and said, “I’m just going to try some dialogue.” I said, “Great.” So we mic’d him up, and he squatted down, gave the flowers to Aunt May, and said the lines that ended up in the movie.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I was just letting him improvise. But as soon as he said, “You’d be happy to know that I’ve decided I’m not going to do this alone anymore,” that statement became the north star of the entire movie. Now it feels obvious that’s where the movie was always headed, but at the time we shot it, we didn’t really have that simple core idea yet. We worked backward from that point and realized, “That’s where we’re going.” To me, that’s the entire movie right there.
DEADLINE: The depiction of Peter’s transformation with the black eyes, gruffer voice and heightened powers and senses is all anyone can talk about online. How did you and Tom work together on conveying this visually and through your directorial style?
CRETTON: It was all about balance because Peter Parker is definitely in some ways, at least it seems in this movie, that he’s drifting to the dark side. I don’t think that’s actually what’s happening, but it seems like he’s drifting to the dark side or losing himself. And the balance is that it’s still Peter in there, and it’s still Peter Parker, and it’s still a Spider-Man movie. So we definitely didn’t want the tone to just suddenly become Batman or Venom. It still has to feel like a Spider-Man movie. But that’s just all Tom and watching him play and find the right tone and find a tone that does allow Peter to go to some surprisingly dark, heavy places, but without losing Peter Parker completely.
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As far as the camerawork goes, we were designing our shots and our lighting right alongside Brett Pawlak, my DP. We’re designing it from the point of view of Peter. And so you will see his emotional journey shift throughout the movie. And when it does, so does the cinematography. There are times when we start to dip into the visuals of what could be considered a monster movie. And there are times where we purposefully take a lot of light out of the frame. So sometimes you barely see the red and blue of his suit and all you see are those big white eyes. And that to me was, I mean, it was really fun for us, but also it was wonderful that the studio championed that. We kept wondering if the dailies going back to the studio, I was going to get a call and get yelled at. But everybody was very, very, very happy with the dailies and I felt very supported.
DEADLINE: What was the technically challenging scene that kept you up at night?
CRETTON: Many, many scenes kept me up at night [laughs]. To create these action sequences, they go through so many different renditions to find something that doesn’t feel like pure chaos, to find the emotional arc of the action. It’s not just Spider-Man punching a bunch of ninjas. Finding the emotional story within each of these action sequences takes a lot of time. There were many nights where I was looking at the previs, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it and why it just felt so boring to me. I don’t gravitate toward action just because the choreography is cool or because the kick is brutal. Mapping out what the story beats are, what the motivations are, and what the action is doing to Peter, that was a big part of what kept me up at night.
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And then, obviously, there are so many really big emotional scenes in this movie. Trying to find something that felt relatable all the way through, even in the third act… it’s kind of a big swing to have a third-act climax with two people sitting on a bed having a conversation. Until we had that scene, I was up all night. I was like, “I don’t want to have this movie that feels so powerful emotionally and then suddenly end with just a typical climax of Spider-Man versus ninjas.”
At that point, our screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, was doing pages. We talked through that scene, he wrote a draft, and I read it to my wife in a coffee shop. Both of us just started bawling. When I read that scene, I was like, “OK, that is the climax of our movie.”
DEADLINE: Let’s get into the Jean Grey of it all. What conversations went into making her such a significant part of Peter’s story?
CRETTON: We wanted to get away from having a villain who just felt typical because this was really Peter Parker’s journey. We wanted a villain who reflected what he was going through. Even before Jean Grey came up, the idea was that the reveal would be that she was just a young telepath. At the time, we didn’t fully know who we could use because we hadn’t talked to Kevin yet. We were going through different options, and Jean Grey was clearly a very good one.
Then we started digging into the different versions of Jean’s backstory in the comics, finding runs that talked about her sister. We were trying to mine something that really helped us create this mirror of Peter Parker. To us, both characters experienced very clear trauma and had loved ones taken from them. The difference is that Jean really had one person as her community, and that person was taken away. Peter, on the other hand, had a community that rallied around him after Aunt May was killed. Aunt May herself embraced him when he first realized he was different and had these powers. She was there for him.
That became our north star too later on for: How do we build that throughout the movie, and how does it culminate in a scene that’s really just two people sitting on a bed talking?
DEADLINE: I read somewhere that you worked with Sadie Sink before as a young teen?
CRETTON: I did. I worked with Sadie when she was about 14 or so when we made The Glass Castle. Before she left set, I asked her what she was doing next, and she said, “Oh, I’m going to go on this show called Stranger Things.” I was like, “Oh, cool. Good luck.” [Laughs.]
When we started talking about the character of Jean Grey and her name came up, it was just like, “Oh, hell yeah.” Even back then, she was a very smart, very dedicated actor with so much talent at that age. Coming into this, she was kind of the outsider entering a cast of actors who all know each other and are all very good, and she just killed it. She’s so emotionally present, she’s so professional, and when it’s time to really go there, she goes there. I think her performance is so powerful and really makes this movie something special.
DEADLINE: Where did you want to leave Peter emotionally before audiences see him again in the larger MCU?
CRETTON: I think Peter Parker deserves to have some hope. He’s been through a sh*t ton. [Laughs.]
DEADLINE: Yeah, to say the least.
CRETTON: I’ve always tried to practice this in my own life. I don’t want to be oblivious to the reality of pain, to the reality that life can really hurt and be very unfair. But I also don’t want to be so jaded that I miss the fact that life also has so much potential, and that you can have genuine, educated hope.
That’s the journey I wanted Peter to go on. It’s a little therapeutic making a movie like this. You start with a character who’s in a place that I think I can relate to, and I hope other people can relate to at the beginning of this movie. You watch him face that pain. You watch him learn to stop avoiding it. When he forces himself to stare at those moments, I think it redefines the pain for him, and it redefines what this community of people has done for him in the past, even though they’re not with him anymore. It goes from pain to strength.
When I see him make that turn and start looking outside of himself, really choosing to reconnect with the people around him, it gives me hope. I don’t know where he’s going to go from here, but I feel like the title, Brand New Day, is what the movie arrives at by the time we cut to black.
DEADLINE: Considering the success of this film and the way you’ve embedded your pathos into Spider-Man, is it safe to say that you’re interested in returning to do the next movie?
CRETTON: Sure. Are you offering me a job, Destiny? [Laughs.]
DEADLINE: I don’t know how much time you’ve had to pay attention over the weekend, but the ending between Ned and Peter has sparked what feels like the debate of a decade . There’s some theories going around. Care to debunk the ambiguity about the remembrance?
CRETTON: Do you really think you’d want me to answer that? [Laughs.]
DEADLINE: Look, I’m here for the fandom online. You do whatever you’d like.
CRETTON: Listen, we’re definitely not trying to torture people with ambiguity. I feel like what’s very clear is the emotion you’re left with when we cut to black. To me, there’s a very clear feeling of joy — just enough — and then you cut to black. I have seen the theories, and I love the theories. I think they’re so cool, and I don’t want to stop that conversation by putting my opinion in the middle of it. Knowing there will be another movie, that conversation will continue in the writer’s room as we figure out — if we figure out — what we’re going to do next.
That’s what’s so cool about these movies. The fans are so engaged. Everybody on our side is listening to everything. Those are conversations we’ve had in the writers’ room as well, and I think it’s fun that everybody is participating not just in analyzing this movie, but potentially in creating whatever happens in the next one.
