You can’t really have Spider-Man without New York, so for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” the filmmakers wanted the city to feel like a character in its own right.
In a new behind-the-scenes look at the recent Marvel film, shared exclusively with Variety Australia, director Destin Daniel Cretton and his team reveal how they set about capturing an authentic New York – even when much of the production was taking place thousands of kilometres away.
“New York is always what Spider-Man is about,” producer Amy Pascal explains. “That’s his city, that’s the city he has to protect.”
Charles Wood, the production designer and brain behind the film’s sprawling set operation, adds, “And we found the character of this film, the tone of it, the look of it, in the city itself.”
While filming the entire movie on the streets of New York wasn’t practical, Wood and his team went to considerable lengths to bring the city to the UK. At England’s Pinewood Studios, he constructed a sprawling backlot designed to represent several different corners of New York, allowing the cast to work within physical environments.
“Charlie Wood is an absolute genius,” the film’s star, Tom Holland, says. “The backlot that he built at Pinewood Studios… I’ve never seen a set like it.”
Wood, whose credits include some of Hollywood’s biggest productions like “Project Hail Mary,” “Avengers,” and “Men in Black,” describes “Brand New Day” as one of the biggest undertakings of his career. “I’ve built some big sets in my career, but I would say this film is as big as anything I’ve ever done,” he says.
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That scale was part of a broader effort to give “Brand New Day” a more tangible feel. According to the filmmakers, Cretton wanted to use blue screen only where necessary, so large teams were formed across construction, painting and plastering, and tasked with creating as much of Spider-Man’s world physically as possible.
“Putting Peter Parker in the middle of it, putting Spider-Man on the street, it just made for a really old-school way of making movies,” Holland continues.
The production also turned to Glasgow to stand in for parts of New York, particularly for the film’s large-scale tank chase. The Scottish city offered a useful architectural substitute thanks to its grid system and historic links to the people who helped construct New York. “Many of the same labourers and architects and designers who built that city also built New York,” Cretton explains.
Beyond recreating the streets of New York, Wood and his team built some of the film’s key locations from the ground up – including the containment room where Jean Grey is experimented on. Wood’s team built the set in two different stages, with it beginning “pristine and perfectly clean and glistening white,” before being transformed and “destroyed” after Jean powers up.
They also created Frank Castle’s home aboard the Golden Girl, located in a working shipyard. Actor Jon Bernthal praised the level of detail that went into bringing the Punisher’s world to life, saying he was “in awe of this crew.”
“The attention to detail, the meticulous work that’s gone into each one of these sets. It’s really mind-boggling,” he says. “The interior of that boat will blow people’s minds.”
Visually, the filmmakers sought to balance realism with the heightened world of a comic book. The production design was deliberately restrained in places to allow Spider-Man’s familiar red and blue suit to remain the focus against a city filled with shadow, contrast, rain, wind and grit. Cretton “wanted it to feel very real within a graphic novel way,” Wood says, with the world heightened without pushing it “beyond the boundaries of plausibility.”
He continues, “New York itself is such a layered city. It has so much history to it and so many different cultures. Our greatest pleasure and our greatest task is to try and make what we build and what we create authentic. If you can create authenticity within the design of the look of the sets, Spider-Man could be where we are today.”
Check out the full behind-the-scenes video below.