“I love ‘River’s Edge.’”
― Jon Watts
“I think it helps if you have a clear vision of what you want.”
― Jon Watts
“Have you ever seen the video of the kid with the Spider-Man pinata? He just sets the stick down, walks over, and gives the Spider-Man pinata a hug. He doesn’t want to hurt his Spider-Man. He loves him! And I think that’s a universal feeling towards Spider-Man. You just can’t help but love him.”
― Jon Watts
“I think every kid is a ‘Spider-Man’ fan at some point.”
― Jon Watts
“There’s this great panel – I forget what the actual comic is – of Spider-Man in the rain holding an umbrella and eating some Chinese takeout. It’s like, that’s the essence of ‘Spider-Man.’”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“My friends and I have always been trying to make movies, at every moment. We’ve tried so many different angles and approaches. But when it happens, it happens, and you just run with it.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“I love the movies. Everyone always says the same thing about the shared cultural experience, seeing things on the big screen, the church of the cinema… But on top of all that, as a filmmaker, I love having people be trapped in a movie theater, forcing them to watch what I made.”
― Jon Watts
“I think saying ‘a John Hughes movie’ is just shorthand for a lot of people to say ‘a coming-of-age story,’ because I think, when you’re of a certain age, that’s what John Hughes means to you.”
― Jon Watts
“’Clown’ started as a fake trailer for a nonexistent movie.”
― Jon Watts
“It’s just this feeling of when you’re a kid, you have these ideas about the world and about people in your life that don’t always hold up as you get older and start to realise that things are more complex than you might’ve realised. That’s always a big part of a coming-of-age story.”
― Jon Watts
“If Spider-Man is your ground level superhero, I wanted to come up with a ground-level villain. I wanted to figure out if I could turn a regular guy into a super-villain.”
― Jon Watts
“I feel like what we’ve done in ‘Homecoming’ is really scratching the surface with Spider-Man.”
― Jon Watts
“I wouldn’t say that I was a Spider-Man super fan.”
― Jon Watts
“I loved the idea of Spider-Man as a kid, and I loved the Todd MacFarlane run in the 1990s, and the first Raimi movies were released when I was in film school. Those were big.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“What I love about movies is, no matter how many people are involved or how complicated the process is, at the end of the day, it’s just what’s inside of that frame. It’s going to be people sitting in a movie theater watching one shot at a time. And that’s my focus.”
― Jon Watts
“I think it would be great to have more female directors making huge-budget movies.”
― Jon Watts
“There are so many great John Hughes movies covering so many different genres. You can pull so much from him.”
― Jon Watts
“I had no problem relating to Peter Parker. He feels like he might be in way over his head but is desperate to prove himself.”
― Jon Watts
“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.’”
― Jon Watts
“’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.”
― Jon Watts
“It’s such an amazing team working with both Marvel and Sony, and I have the support of just the very best technicians in the world.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“When you’re getting to do what you want to do, you just assume you’re going to hit a point where someone is like, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Strangely, that never happened.”
― Jon Watts
“I’ve always pre-vized my movies, just on my own. Even when it was, like, zero-budget things, I used this programme to do storyboards because I can’t draw that well.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“My attitude is one movie at a time. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“I think ‘Badlands’ is my favorite movie because it reminded me of where I was from.”
― Jon Watts
“The movie I made with my friends in my hometown based on a dream becomes a stepping stone to ‘Spider-Man.’ I wish I could say this was an amazing, calculated path but… It’s so weird.”
― Jon Watts
“I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I’m afraid we’re going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I’ve had that dream a long time.”
― Jon Watts
“I only realized I could potentially make movies after seeing ‘Ed Wood.’”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“’Welcome to the Dollhouse’ is great. Even though it’s about a girl in middle school, to me, that feels like the most honest reflection of what being a kid around that age feels like.”
― Jon Watts
“I have a tendency to check out when the stakes are too high in a movie.”
― Jon Watts
“I didn’t even think anyone would want to make ‘Cop Car,’ and then I didn’t think anyone would want to distribute ‘Cop Car,’ and then I didn’t think anyone would want to see ‘Cop Car.’”
― Jon Watts
“A great thing about kids is they’re just themselves and can’t help it a lot of the times.”
― Jon Watts
“It’s really cool to do, like, a ‘Harry Potter’ evolution because you can really take your time with the character development: really, like, don’t rush past the implications of great power and great responsibility.”
― Jon Watts
“Big movie or small movie, you make this thing, and then you show it to people, and you just hope they like it. You hope it works.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“Sundance is like a genre.”
― Jon Watts
“That’s why people love Spider-Man: he’s the most grounded, relatable of superheroes.”
― Jon Watts
“I was definitely the kid who was the chicken, who didn’t want to say the cuss words.”
― Jon Watts
“Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you’re playing with time, and you don’t have that ability where someone can pause at home. That’s such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don’t really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.”
― Jon Watts
“It’s all about making an experience. You go to the movies to see something you’ve never seen before. You want to get different people out there with different voices. So you see awesome huge spectacle or just a small unbelievable story you’ve never seen before.”
― Jon Watts
“You go to the movies to be transported. That’s the responsibility of filmmakers and the people that hire the filmmakers – to try and find new dreams we can all share together.”
― Jon Watts
“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.’”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“Something I learned early on in my career is there’s no use trying to fool anybody about what you want to do on a project where there are other people involved, rather than your own thing.”
― Jon Watts
“’Cop Car’ was made with all of my friends. I wrote it with my best friend.”
― Jon Watts
“When you’re writing something to direct, you just write exactly what you’re going to do. You don’t have to write it in a way for other people to understand or interpret.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“I liked writing with my friends and making our own little stories. Making a movie like ‘Spider-Man’ never even crossed my mind.”
― Jon Watts
“Talking to someone you have a crush on is as scary as fighting a super-villain.”
― Jon Watts
“When you make a movie for a really low budget, it makes you really strict. You have to plan things down to the tiniest detail.”
― Jon Watts
“Since being at Marvel, I’ve been watching everything over and over and over again, all the movies, and seeing how all the movies connect has been very satisfying for me.”
― Jon Watts
“I love Cameron Crowe’s ‘Say Anything’ and ‘Almost Famous.’ I think those are really great coming-of-age movies.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“On an independent film where you’re working with just a handful of people, you don’t have to explain anything because no one cares. You can do whatever you want. There’s no one there to tell you not to do it.”
― Jon Watts
“For me, there’s a deeper genre appreciation for what a coming of age story can be about. To apply that to a superhero world, for me, that was very exciting.”
― Jon Watts
“What’s nice about having kids close to the age they’re playing is that you can actually capture awkwardness.”
― Jon Watts
“Every film you see in film school takes on a heightened importance in your life.”
― Jon Watts
“By having Spider-Man exist in the same universe as the Guardians of the Galaxy… C’mon, that opens up so many possibilities!”
― Jon Watts
“There’s a lot of similarities, I think, between a thriller and a comedy because it’s all about tension. It’s about building tension and setups and payoffs and misdirections and surprising people and sort of pushing the boundary.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
“People know the broad strokes of what it’s like to be Spider-Man, but I wanted to really get into the details.”
― Jon Watts
“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.”
― Jon Watts
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