By Fred Topel | Image property of Columbia Pictures.
Spider-Man 3
With such powerhouses as Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin at his side, producer Grant Curtis doesn't get to say much about Spider-Man 3. When he does, it's usually the most specific, nitty gritty tasks while the other two discuss broad themes of the productions. For example, Curtis had the details about a week spent shooting in Cleveland.
Producer Grant Curtis on Spider-Man 3's Nitty Gritty
"We had probably 100-150 crew members there," said Curtis. "It was a fairly sizeable crew. We shot a real extensive car chase sequence there. One of the things that appealed to us about Cleveland as not only the look and it did have some matching aspects obviously towards Manhattan until you go up too high with the camera. Especially we had a 10 block run of road on Euclid Avenue that they repaved for us as well. Cleveland rolled out the red carpet for us and that was obviously key. New York rolls out the red carpet for us as well but we just simply could not get a 10 block stretch or road where we could own it. And it was obviously a very dangerous sequence so we had to lock down 10 blocks and Cleveland was the best answer for us."
He also had the funny stories about studying the wonderful world of sand. "I think one of the interesting things and one of the first things we did on the entire production was we spent three days and we literally did nothing but film sand splashing, sand flying into stuntmen, sand pouring over ledges just to learn what sand did and what sand could look like. And then also take that knowledge and transfer that into the computer and then onto the screen. So we went through huge, painstaking events to learn about sand and to make sure that Sandman was what was in Sam’s head and it justified the character that was created by Stan Lee years ago."
Ultimately, he found that ground up corn cobs worked better than real sand. "It was also one of the early things that we did with Neil Spisak, one of our production designers, to just look at the different types of sand that were available and then the different substitutes of sand. As you can imagine, actual sand is very heavy and very dangerous to work with in the large quantities we did. One of the early things that Neil brought up was the possibility of the ground corn cobs. It was fairly early and it was one of those things that once we saw it, it matched almost exactly and it was a huge help to my production."
Spider-Man 3 opens to theatres on May 4th.
For the trailers, posters, stills, clips and additional movie info, go to the Spider-Man 3 Movie Page.
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