Andrew Garfield On AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2: “Blame Sony”

Everybody knows that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is terrible. Even the people who made it seem to have an idea that the movie is a load. But whose fault is it? For many of us we look at the script and say 'Oh, there's your problem.' Others look at the direction and say, 'Control your tone, guy.' But for Andrew Garfield, who plays Spidey himself, the true villain is Business Man.

I read a lot of the reactions from people and I had to stop because I could feel I was getting away from how I actually felt about it. For me, I read the script that Alex [Kurtzman] and Bob [Orci] wrote, and I genuinely loved it. There was this thread running through it. I think what happened was, through the pre-production, production, and post-production, when you have something that works as a whole, and then you start removing portions of it—because there was even more of it than was in the final cut, and everything was related. Once you start removing things and saying, “No, that doesn’t work,” then the thread is broken, and it’s hard to go with the flow of the story. Certain people at the studio had problems with certain parts of it, and ultimately the studio is the final say in those movies because they’re the tentpoles, so you have to answer to those people.

Having read one of the early drafts I have to disagree with Garfield on the script, but maybe he's talking about an even earlier draft. 

It's interesting that he doesn't talk about Avi Arad, who is largely accepted to be the problem with the Spider-Man movies at this point; I'm sure Sony being all freaked out and not knowing what the hell to do with the property didn't help, but everyone I talk to keeps bringing up Arad's name. Again and again. 

Garfield spins the whole thing back to positivity by saying that he really enjoyed the work, even if you didn't enjoy seeing his work. 

But I’ll tell you this: Talking about the experience as opposed to how it was perceived, I got to work in deep scenes that you don’t usually see in comic book movies, and I got to explore this orphan boy—a lot of which was taken out, and which we’d explored more. It’s interesting to do a postmortem. I’m proud of a lot of it and had a good time, and was a bit taken aback by the response.