Five Of The Most Interesting Quotes Plus The Full Japanese Amazing Spider-Man Press Conference

Over six months ahead of release, the Amazing Spider-Man press tour has already kicked off with Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone and producers Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach stopping by the tallest building in Tokyo for a press conference. You can watch the full 50-some minutes below, but here are the five of the most interesting quotes.

1.Matthew Tolmach announcing that Japan will get the movie first:

Japan is going to be the first territory in which we open Spider-Man… formally, we are opening in Japan on June 30th. That is our first territory, we wanted to announce to you formally today, that’s where Amazing Spider-Man begins.

2. Avi Arad on the new take on the origin and, tangled in with this, Gwen Stacy:

After three movies we finally got the opportunity to tell what really started Peter Parker on his journey: the fact that he lost his parents. He doesn’t know what happened to them, no-one talks about it. And around the world there are millions and millions of children in a similar position, children that were adopted… at the end of the day they want to know one thing “Who am I?”

So we found a very, very good story about the true origin of what makes a human being, what sets their destiny.

Then we got to Gwen Stacy. Not only a great love interest but actually a real intellectual friend, a real intellectual competition, a strong woman who represents our world today and our our world tomorrow.

This movie is driven from the Spider-man, Peter Parker point of view. It’s not like taking a picture and getting bitten by a spider. Peter is on a quest and it makes for an unusual movie in which peter carves his own destiny by looking for answers…

When Peter Parker gets his powers all it does is enhance his physical ability because his heart was always the heart of a hero.

3. Avi Arad on the role Doctor Connors will play:

We introduce our villain, Doctor Connors, and in the great tradition of Marvel, Doctor Connors is going to be connected to Peter Parker and in our case, even more interesting, into Gwen Stacy. Right there, the challenge to deal with a villain that is also a mentor. The only one you can look at and say “What really happened to my Dad?” That’s a very hard person to fight.

4. Andrew Garfield on the physical demands and possibilities of the role

As you can see, a lot of the stunts are practical and grounded in reality. That was something Marc, the director really wanted to make sure happened in this movie to set it apart for the previous ones, and in so doing he hired an incredible stunt team led by Andy Armstrong … they worked on Indiana Jones, all the old James Bond movies. They really were the best of the best and just being in their presence was incredibly humbling.

So I had about four months of training with them before we started doing any shooting, where I would exhaust myself every day and get into near-death experiences on the hour, every hour. It was fantastic and terribly challenging. And there were three great stunt doubles that I was working with as well, they were all very specialised in individual things and they make me look like I know what I’m doing.

I collaborated with them not only on the big stunt set-pieces but also on what happens to Peter’s body when he gets bitten, what happens to his DNA and how that effects the way he moves, the way he interacts with objects; the idea that he has spider DNA running in his system and what that will do to his sense of space, the sensitivity of his skin.

5. Emma Stone when asked if there would be anything like the iconic upside-down kiss in the first Raimi film:

You don’t want to know! You want to watch the movie and find out. And, it would be weird if we were like “There’s something iconic coming up.” You’ve got to decide if it’s iconic or not. But there is a nice first kiss, I will say that, and it’s different to the upside down one… and we liked it.