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Amazing Spider-Man 2's big eyes matter, says Andrew Garfield - SciFiNow

Amazing Spider-Man 2’s big eyes matter, says Andrew Garfield

Director Marc Webb and star Andrew Garfield on Spidey’s new costume in Amazing Spider-Man 2

Spidey's lovely big eyes in action in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Spidey’s lovely big eyes in action in The Amazing Spider-Man 2

2011’s The Amazing Spider-Man introduced an unexpectedly contentious item of debate among fans with the costume as arguments bristled over the shape of the webslinger’s eyes.

For The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the filmmakers have worked hard to bring them in line with the enlarged peepers drawn by artist Mark Bagley in the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man, which launched in 2000 and ran until 2009.

“It’s such big question, this eyes thing,” Garfield says, “because in the process of making like such a small choice, it’s so vast. There’s a universe in that choice. And the responsibility that you feel to what shape the eyes should be, that can make or break a Spider-Man fan’s experience of the whole movie.

“If the eyes aren’t right, but everything else is right, that person’s going to come away and go online and be like, ‘The eyes sucked. I couldn’t see anything else. The eyes sucked for me. It wasn’t what I thought Spider-Man should be!’”

Marc Webb, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone at a press conference
Marc Webb, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone at a press conference

As it is, creating Spider-Man’s oversized eyes has not been an easy process.

“Far from it,” says Webb, “creating those eyes was a long, long, long process. I remember about a week before we started shooting we finally got them down – they looked so great. Then Andrew put them on and he couldn’t see a thing! He was walking into walls, which is very inappropriate behaviour for Spider-Man. Frankly, the first time around, I don’t think we nailed the costume at all,” the director adds.

“But this time, we want to be iconic, the Spider-Man we know and love with those big eyes. It’s a very difficult thing to achieve, but it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.”

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is due 2 May 2014, while The Amazing Spider-Man is out now. Order it now on DVD for £10 and Blu-ray for £14.99 from Amazon.co.uk. Read our massive behind-the-scenes feature here and find out more about the comics that inspired the film with new digital magazine Uncanny Comics. Thwip thwip.