Director of spider man far from home

Shortly before Spider-Man: Far From Home was released around the world, I got to sit down with director Jon Watts for a wide-ranging interview. Since I knew I was going to post the conversation after release, I made sure to ask him about specific things that happened during the film and after-the-credits. So if you’re curious about how they got J.K. Simmons to come back as J. Jonah Jameson, the decision to end the film with the world learning Spider-Man's secret identity, or having Nick Fury and Maria Hill as Skrulls during the entire film, you’re in the right place. In addition, we talked about whether he’ll return to helm the next Spider-Man sequel, if he ever wasn’t going to do Far From Home, casting Jake Gyllenhaal as Mysterio, deleted scenes, what will be on the Blu-ray, and a lot more.

Check out what he had to say below. And if you missed my video of Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon playing with therapy dogs while answering some fun questions, you can check it out here.

As all of you know, Spider-Man: Far From Home sees Peter Parker (Holland) looking to get away from his Spider-Man responsibilities by going on a European vacation with his classmates, but his trip gets hijacked when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) recruits him to fight against elemental monsters surfacing across the continent. The film also stars Cobie Smulders, Jon Favreau, JB Smoove, Martin Starr, and Marisa Tomei.

Collider: So the first one comes out, and it’s a huge hit. And I know when the first one was getting ready to come out, I asked Kevin Feige and he was like, "We're hoping to bring John back." Did you ever almost not come back, or was it always, "I'm doing the second one."

JON WATTS: Yeah. It was always. I mean, I think just not screwing up the first one was enough for them to be "Yeah, do it again."

Well there's a few filmmakers that have handled doing a few. Also, if I'm not misunderstanding this, it was always planned as a trilogy. Sophomore, Junior, Senior Year. Have you guys already talked about doing a third? Are you?

WATTS: No. I mean, the MO is just do one film at a time. Finish it. Get it out. And then start talking about what to do next.

At the genesis of this project, was it always this story? Talk a little bit about how this all came together, in terms of Mysterio, and making this the story you guys wanted to tell.

WATTS: Yeah. We started with two ideas, which were Mysterio, somehow, and a European vacation. And then, just using that as the jumping off point, trying to figure out a story within that was the challenge. Just locked ourselves in the writers room until we figured it out.

How early on did you know it would be Jake Gyllenhaal?

WATTS: Pretty early. But it was a similar thing with Michael Keaton where you're "That would be perfect, but is he going to do it?" Because Jake has never done a movie like this before. And, once we knew what we wanted to do with the character, Jake just seemed perfect because you can get the Nightcrawler Jake and you can get the leading man Prince of Persia Jake. And you get to have all the versions of Jake Gyllenhaal in one role.

You're making this before Endgame's come out, before the world knows what happens to Tony Stark. So, what is it like on set? How many people know what's going to happen in Endgame, and how many people are "There's just murals of Tony Stark everywhere."

WATTS: Well, we had to do all of the murals in post, because we couldn't risk someone taking a photo of this memorial mural for Tony Stark in Venice or in New York or anywhere. So we just had to do all of that stuff later, because it was on an absolute need-to-know basis. No one knew unless they absolutely had to, to understand a scene. We kept it very, very secret.

I was going to say, watching the film though, there's not many scenes of people talking about what happened. There's only Peter and Happy. There's not many.

WATTS: No, no. I mean, we wanted to let it be something that... You want to feel Tony's ghost without being so explicit about it. That wasn't a spoiler reason, that was just part of the story. I wanted it to feel like it was there and it's this thing looming over Peter and he's running away from it. But, no matter where he goes, it's there.

Image via Sony Pictures

I'm always curious about the first cut versus the finished film. Editing is the ultimate final rewrite. So, talk a little bit about being in post on it and what you learned when you first saw your first cut.

WATTS: You know, it's not that different. The finished film is pretty close to the Director's cut, which is a really nice feeling. I did the Director's cut and we screened it and, for the most part, it was all working. And then you just try other things out. You try a little bit of rearranging. You try out different jokes. You see if things play better. But we went through a little bit of a circuitous process where we tried a bunch of stuff out and then circled back to the Director's cut.

Deleted scenes?

WATTS: Yeah, there's some good deleted scenes in this one. There's just this very simple thing where we had Peter doing errands, getting ready for his trip. And it's going back to Mr. Delmar's, the deli, that's been rebuilt since it was blown up in Homecoming. And he has this very Spider-Man list of things to do. It's like get his passport, get the dual head phone adapter so he can listen to music with MJ on a flight, take down a giant gang.

Will the Blu-ray have a bunch of deleted scenes?

WATTS: Yeah, yeah. We put that together as its own little short film of Peter's list of things to do. And there's a couple of choice deleted scenes with Jake as well that'll be on the Blu-ray. I also, if we have time, I want to do a behind-the-scenes of how Jake and his crew pulled off all of the cons, the illusions. Because we did a lot of work on our end on what's actually happening behind the scenes and there's a lot of little hidden Easter eggs throughout the whole first half of the movie that, if you watch a second time, you can pick them out.

What's funny is, the MacGuffin of this movie is essentially a pair of Tony Stark's glasses. Did you ever think to yourselves "Do we want to have Peter calling Happy and saying, ‘Is there another way of getting into the Edith System?’" Or was it "Listen, this is a MacGuffin."

Well, what we wanted to do is have something that could represent Tony, and seemed almost like a little bit of a throwaway joke. You know? He's got these glasses, these glasses are powerful, he almost kills Brad on the bus. But I didn't want people to realize that that was going to be the whole impetus for Beck's con. I hope people didn't see that was coming. It just seems like a secondary little story plant and people aren't going to realize it had such massive consequences until the twist.

I think that if you're a comic book fan you know Mysterio. But I will say that I was, the whole time I'm "Oh, this must be a two-movie arc. There's going to be good in this, and then something's going to wrong."

WATTS:  Yeah, it's an unusual structure because basically 60 minutes in, that movie is over. Peter has had his own little arc and has finished and is ready to go back on the trip. You could roll credits right in the middle of the movie.

Speaking of credits, the mid-credit sequence. How did you get J.K. Simmons to return as J. Jonah Jameson?

WATTS: Yeah. That was always the plan because we knew that we wanted to reveal Peter's identity, and we wanted to bring in this idea of the news and not being sure exactly what you can believe or not believe. And it was always going to be him, but we didn't want to say anything to him or to anyone because we didn't want any press to leak out about it, via his agents or whatever. So we waited until the very, very last second and called him up, and he came by and he was, "Wait, what? You want me to do what?" It took him a second to understand, but as we pitched the idea he was totally on board and he really loved getting to be the person who finally outs Peter Parker.

Does this mean this is like the other Spider Man movies are like an old MCU universe? What are you thinking about that? Because people are going say he's done this before, what does this mean?

WATTS: Yeah. Definitely it raises some very interesting questions. I don't know that I have answers for them just yet. But, yeah, it does open up some strange possibilities by having him be the same person.

Obviously, do you talk about that with Feige? And is there some sort of plan? Or you're not just allowed to say yet?

WATTS: Not really allowed to say, but I would say that all options are on the table. That's how I like to think of it.

Image via Sony Pictures

So when did you film that sequence?

WATTS: Very, very late in the process. It was as late as possibly basically. We just set up a green screen in the conference room at Disney and he just came by. It was very strange for him too, because the first take he just launches right into that iconic character and I ruined the take because I couldn't stop laughing. It was so amazing.

What's interesting about this, is the ending of this film is very reminiscent of the first Iron Man. The end of the first Iron Man has Tony Stark saying "I am the Iron Man." Saying "I'm revealing myself." This movie has Peter Parker being revealed, but it's not by choice. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect?

WATTS: Well, yeah, it's a flip of that. He's trying to step up and be his own hero. He's trying to become Spider Man. But, because it's Peter Parker, nothing ever goes right. So he doesn't even get the opportunity to reveal himself to the world. Mysterio wins, essentially. And forces Peter to tell the ultimate truth to the world, which is so ironic coming from someone like Mysterio.

My only thing is I think it's very timely that you guys are dealing with deep fake videos. For me, I thought it was like that dude who downloaded the Mysterio video could be doing anything.

WATTS: Yeah. There's a lot of ways to interpret it and we kept it a little bit open ended, because it's Mysterio, you know, you want to end with as many questions as you do answers. But, yeah, in terms of just not being sure if what you're seeing on the news or online is real, it's definitely a very dangerous world that we're living in right now.

How much do you guys discuss "Okay, we better know where we're going in another movie,” and how much is it, "We will figure it out after the release."

WATTS: I mean, we definitely have ideas of where we want to go, but the goal is to just try to make this movie the most dynamic and entertaining experience possible. And if that means ending on a crazy cliffhanger and painting yourself into a corner, so be it.

The second post-credits scene is awesome. Talk a little bit about when you decided that was going to be a post-credits scene.

WATTS: Yeah. We had talked about including it as a body of the movie, but it made the most sense to be the very last little con in this movie about con men. Just one last little reversal. And we went back and forth as to whether or not we really wanted to do that or not, because it's such a crazy twist that makes you want to watch everything again. Because, once you realize that Nick and Maria aren't Nick and Maria, you can enjoy the movie in a completely different way. Everything they say takes on a different meaning when you realize that they're not actually who they say they are.

Was that one of those things that you came up with early on?

WATTS: Yeah. We came up with it early on, but there was always a debate "Shall we do that? Is it too crazy?" But it just ended up being so fun that we had to keep it in.

I think there's almost a lot of pressure nowadays, with the Marvel movies, to have your after the credit scene be awesome. Because everyone in the theater stays.

WATTS: Well, after we pulled such a gag on the last one with the Captain America thing about patience, I felt "Let's do some real tags this time."

Image via Sony Pictures

Were there other tags that you thought about doing, that almost came close? Did you film other things?

WATTS: No. No. I'm trying to think if there was anything else that was discussed. No, that was it. We moved around whether or not the J. Jonah Jameson reveal would be before or after the animated title sequence at the end. But, other than that, it was pretty much the plan.

Talk a little bit about the storyline in terms of, what's really cool, what I really enjoyed, is that you have actors that you have to put in this movie. You obviously have Ned, you have MJ and you have to find things for them to do. I loved the Ned storyline and it felt totally organic. So talk a little bit about that challenge of making sure you have things for the other characters.

WATTS: Well, you just always try to make it all about the same theme and look at it through Peter's eyes. And a big reason for pairing Ned up was, in the first movie Ned is Peter's guy in the chair, but in this movie we wanted to take things away from Peter and make him feel more isolated as he's dealing with this sense of loss. And by having Ned suddenly be paired up, not only is that a funny thing that seems like it could totally happen on a high school trip, just suddenly these two characters are completely in love. But it also helped to isolate Peter. He lost his confidant. He lost his guy in the chair. So now it was just him alone.

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

It's fun. You're getting ready to film. What's the sequence that you were absolutely dreading putting together because of VFX challenges or whatever those hurdles that you have to do on set.

WATTS: It was actually, everything was fun. This time I knew what to expect, as opposed to the last time when it was all brand new to me. I was worried about Venice, because when you're actually shooting in Venice the logistics are so complicated. But believe it or not when we went there and actually started shooting, it went smoother than any other location. Because they had everything completely figured out. The crews in Venice were just incredible.

So when do you start writing the third one?

WATTS: Pretty much we would start as soon as this one's done. It's got a quick turn around on these things.

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