Mark Webb

Born in Bloomington (Indiana), on August 31, 1974, Marc Preston Webb is the son of a biologist and a mathematics professor who ended up practicing at the University of Wisconsin. Thus, the family moved when the child was 18 months to Madison (Wisconsin). He graduated in English from Colorado College.

He directed his professional career towards the audiovisual field. Between 1997 and 2010, Web concentrated on making music videos for hugely successful artists like Green Day, Evanescence, My Chemical Romance and Miley Cyrus , among many others. His works were always distinguished by numerous humorous elements, and because she used to leave his signature in the form of a white lamb that appears in many of his videos. Getting to shoot a feature film one day seemed like an impossible dream.

But unexpectedly, the ‘indie’ producer Mason Novick, creator of Juno , and his partners, called him, because his videos had caught their attention, and they thought he was the ideal director to bring (500) days together to the screen , a project that they had underway based on a script by the also newcomers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber. However, at first, he was not tempted by the proposal since he found out that it was a romantic comedy, a genre that he does not particularly like. “Sometime between puberty and when I started paying taxes, I stopped believing in the world that the rosy-cheeked girls in pretty winter hats in these kinds of movies kept promising me. What did that world have to do with me?” recalls Webb, who left the script in a backpack for some time, not bothering to read it.

“When I sat down to read the photocopied pages that had been sticking out of my backpack for some three weeks of neglect, I really wasn’t expecting much. It was the title that finally got me. Needless to say, something started to make sense” , recalls Marc Webb, who felt very identified with Tom, the protagonist, a very young quixotic architect who makes a living writing greeting cards and who falls in love to the core with Summer, his boss’s new secretary. “I think we’ve all been like Tom at some point and that there’s been a Summer in our lives,” Webb recalls.

He recruited youngsters Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as leads , giving them very fresh performances. In addition, he stood out with sequences such as the musical number with cartoons, those of the protagonist inside movies for moviegoers, and the highly inspired finale. Not surprisingly, during its premiere at the Sundance Festival, it drew a standing ovation from the public.

With such a brilliant debut, it is not surprising that Sony executives thought of him when Sam Raimi , director of the trilogy started with Spider-Man , abandoned the pre-production of the fourth, due to “creative differences”, an official excuse that is widely used in Hollywood. , when there has been no understanding with those above. They planned to start from scratch and return the protagonist, Peter Parker, to the institute in search of the adolescent audience that packed the Twilight screenings . Of course, they had also thought to enhance the romance, which made Webb the ideal filmmaker for the job.

Aware that the commission had its risks (retelling an already known story was a huge ‘handicap’), Webb has put everything on his part in the effort. He has had on his side a team of writers that includes the prestigious James Vanderbilt ( Zodiac ), the hard-working youth stars Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone , and luxury secondary stars such as Rhys Ifans , Denis Leary , Martin Sheen , Sally Field , Embeth Davidtz and Campbell Scott . The Amazing Spider-Man marks Webb’s netless leap into big-budget cinema.