Spider-Man writers Far From Home explain the twists and turns

(This article contains annotations for "Spider-Man: Far From Home.")

When it came to creating "Spider-Man: Far From Home", the writers, Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, had a terribly complicated web to weave.

The film sends Peter Parker (and his superhero, Spider-Man, both played by Tom Holland) on a school trip to Europe, but "Far From Home" still has to face the end Tragic "Avengers: Endgame", in which Peter loses his mentor, Tony Stark.

"Far From Home" also features Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal), another superhero who seems to be on Peter's side, but comic book lovers will immediately recognize him as Mysterio, one of the heroes from Spider-Man. clbadic enemies. And there is also the issue of resolving the character strings introduced in "Spider-Man: Homecoming" in 2017, including Peter's incipient relationship with his clbadmate, MJ (Zendaya).

In a recent telephone conversation, McKenna and Sommers (whose previous collaborations include "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle") explained how they juggled these many arguments and proposed a twist. of surprise credit that promises to give a new direction to Spider-Man. Here are excerpts from this conversation:

Q: How did you come to the decision to present Mysterio as an ally working with Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury?

CHRIS McKENNA: One of the following: the most difficult with these films is to land on the villain. With Mysterio, there were versions of the story in which he was in the vanguard as an outstanding villain as Peter and Nick were pursuing in Europe while he was organizing these events, while explaining why he was doing it. which was a totally different third act. We used many different routes.

ERIK SOMMERS: But ultimately, given that Mysterio is so misleading, it was natural that it would lead to a narrative structure in which all of its identity was misled for a while. 19659012] McKENNA: There will be people quite familiar with comics who are going to make their way through it, but you can not worry about that when you're proposing a plot like this. You just have to hope that you can get by long enough so that when the revelation is made, people still have fun with the movie.

Q: And Mysterio uses enough comic book references, including a background story involving an alternative version of Earth, so that even super fans can convince themselves at the beginning.

SOMMERS: That certainly helped. Whenever we find ourselves with a surprise revelation or revelation of this kind of thing, we want to do everything in our power to protect and distract it in advance.

McKENNA: What we did not stop to say, is that he had to make him feel like a real character, so we wanted to tell him a tragic story with all the details of his arrival in another world, and to make sure the Elementals he fought felt like a growing threat to the Avengers. Obviously, everything was made of smoke and mirrors, but we wanted to make it as credible as possible, and what helped us was to make Nick Fury – the most paranoid man on the planet – who seems to be falling in love.

SOMMERS: If you think about what Mysterio does as a rogue, then a clever crook will use other people to help him sell his lie.

Q: On the final credit scene, we discover that Nick is not Nick instead, an extraterrestrial of "Captain Marvel" who has changed his form has been mistaken for Nick Fury during the whole movie.

McKENNA: Thematically, we wanted to have the most illusions and possible twists, and more. until the end of the film, we wanted you to question everything you've seen before. But that was certainly an idea that came later in the process, and it helped, because if anyone in the audience had problems with Nick Fury failing for the nonsense of Quentin, it was a nice safety valve to have.

Q: How much did Marvel reveal to you about the big twists of "Avengers: Endgame" when you started writing this movie?

McKENNA: We were like, "Wait, who's going? And how do they come back? We did not see "Endgame" before the first – maybe if we knew more about it in advance, we would have made a joke about Valkyrie riding a Pegasus, because you want to absolutely refer to that.

SOMMERS: You are given everything on the principle of the need to know.

McKENNA: The two main things we knew well were the five-year gap and the consequences it would have for people who do not get shot down. And, of course, the Tony of all this.

Q: The shadow that Tony's death casts on this film almost makes him an alternate version of Uncle Ben's Spider-Man comics. When Tony bequeaths a powerful gift to Peter in "Far From Home", he could just as easily be accompanied by a small note saying "Great power carries great responsibilities".

McKENNA: The other "Spider-Man" Of course, the films were about Uncle Ben and "Homecoming" alluded to it, but you're right: in many ways, the gravitas really comes from the relationship between Peter and Tony.

SOMMERS: It is presumed that there was probably an Uncle Ben and the pain of this loss persist, but it gave everyone the opportunity to create a new friendship between Peter and his mentor, Tony, and to make face the loss of it, very powerful and emotional event in his

Q: In the middle credits section, a posthumous video of Mysterio exposes Spider-Man's secret identity to the world. This is a major upheaval for this character. Why introduce it now?

McKENNA: The producers asked us to offer something that Peter sacrificed at the end of this film, and when we saw it as a band, it became a very scary idea. : "Oh no, we can not do that! So it's not a Spider-Man movie anymore!

SOMMERS: We have come to understand that because it scares us, you have to run to him.

McKENNA: This is a maneuver so audacious that it has become inevitable, especially with a delicate character like Mysterio, who is this dark father figure. Since the tomb, is it trying to give Peter his moment "I am Iron Man"? It's a lesson or a punishment.

Q: Mysterio also epitomizes Spider-Man for the crimes that he committed, which would start the next movie in a very different place. ]

McKENNA: We wondered if we were going as far as necessary at the end of the film. We played with the idea that Peter is the one who sacrifices his identity out of necessity during the final battle, so it seemed more interesting if Mysterio pushed him to do it, but every time we wrote a version where he was revealed to whole world during this battle, we had the impression that it diminished the victory. So before it became a label, it was really only the end of the movie: just as he feels that he's pretending to be Spider-Man, he's back to the skin of the carpet.

SOMMERS: We were really debating, Should we just reveal who Spider-Man is or should we frame him for something and turn him into an outcast? In the end, we decided that both were the way to go. It's such a triumph in the end because he has the girl and finally won a big shot in the city, so we want to knock him down as far as possible.

Q: The biggest surprise of the film is that the identity reveals its identity. is released by J. Jonah Jameson, the Daily Bugle blowhard played by JK Simmons in the original movie "Spider-Man" directed by Sam Raimi. Simmons takes over the role here, making him the first actor of a different set of films to join the current Marvel Universe under the same character.

McKENNA: These two ideas quickly came together. I do not know if it 's the director (Jon) Watts or someone else who said, "It should be the Daily Bugle, and it should be J. Jonah Jameson. idea hangs from "Homecoming": how do we insert our new version of J. Jonah?

SOMMERS: There was already an interest in possibly using JK When Simmons brought J. Jonah back, so it was decided that we were going to reveal Peter's identity in the end, instead of the final battle, and quite naturally that J. Jonah would have been involved.

McKENNA: Something floating in all this movie was the idea of ​​"false news" and how can you believe everything you see? We had imagined that Mysterio would turn Spider-Man into a villain, exactly as he had done in comics, and it looked like what was next related to this J. Jonah 2.0 under the name of Alex Jones of the MCU. [19659006] Q: With declining newspapers, it's amusing to see that J. Jonah Jameson has become essentially a YouTube personality.

McKENNA: This is the "Whiplash" version! It's a little less comic, we took it in a slightly different direction. But we are delighted that if this continues and we can work on the next one, we hope it will involve a lot of JK