Behind the Scenes is a custom video product produced by Ankler Media executive producer of brand experiences Jennifer Laski. This video is presented by Prime Video.
When the Spider-Noir team was presented with the idea of releasing their Prime Video comedy series in its intended black-and-white version, with a separate option to have all the episodes in color, it opened up a whole new world.
“We had prioritized black-and-white,” says co-showrunner and executive producer Oren Uziel of the show, which focuses on a 1930s private eye named Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage) who also happens to be Spider-Man. “We had all these stills from old movies to see what exactly they would look like, and we were adding grain to make it look as true to what those movies looked like. But there was just as much care and attention put into making sure the color version was unique and should be jaw-dropping.”
“The colors of the walls and the costumes and everything pop in this sort of old photochemical way that doesn’t feel like a modern photograph,” says executive producer Christopher Miller. “It’s really fun to watch the second time through, so you can see some things you didn’t see.”
Miller, executive producer Phil Lord and Uziel are longtime friends and collaborators — having previously worked together on 22 Jump Street (which Lord and Miller directed and Uziel co-wrote). When it was decided that exploring the Spider-Noir character would make for an interesting concept for a television series — after Lord and Miller featured a Peter Parker variant of the superhero, voiced by Cage, in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — Uziel was at the top of their list because of his love of the noir genre.
“He came up with a take that was so clearly rooted in a deep understanding of what noir is, not just like the aesthetics of noir, but what it thematically is,” Miller says.
“And the emotions of noir,” Lord adds, “that the dilemmas that people are in are impossible, and there are no good answers.”
“He was obviously the person to do it,” says Miller.
Uziel approached the material by focusing on his own journey in the film industry. “I love it so much, but also it’s like you get excited about a thing, you put your heart and soul into a thing, and then there’s always somebody just kind of kicking you in the teeth,” he says. “It’s a tough business, but at the same time, I would never really quit. My passion for it hasn’t dimmed at all. I like the idea of a character like that: He gets punched in the face over and over again, and just keeps coming. It also sort of mirrors perfectly to noir, which is the guy who’s always winning but somehow losing in the process.”
To create the 1930s world of Spider-Noir for the screen, Uziel relied on his key collaborators, including costume designer Trayce Gigi Field, production designer Warren Alan Young and cinematographers Darran Tiernan and Peter Deming.
Field “really had to meet a big challenge of trying to find costumes that were really vibrant colors that made sense in color, but also held up in black and white,” Uziel says. “Often, when you shoot specifically for black-and-white, it’s one color palette, and so it was really a complicated task for her, and she worked so hard.”
Young, meanwhile, built countless sets with precise period detail. “If it’s Ben’s tenement apartment from the 1930s, when you walked in there, it somehow had 17 layers of paint — and it was all period appropriate,” Uziel says. “ It felt real, because it was real.”
During production, Uziel, Tiernan and Deming often talked about what it might have been like for the cinematographers on classic film noirs to have had access to modern technology available to the Spider-Noir crew.
“That’s the game we were playing: making things look and feel like it was from back then, but then what can we do now when the cameras are actually smaller, and we actually can light with more powerful lights that don’t make as much noise,” Uziel explains. “It’s just so many games you can play to recreate it, but also add to it.”
Then there’s Cage, who brings the world to life with his performance. It’s the first time the Oscar winner has appeared in a television series.
“I remember when we were going to come up with a list of names for who could play Spider-Noir and the first person mentioned was Nicolas Cage, and then we were like, let’s forget the rest of the list,” Miller says.
“His idea was to play it like a spider who was trying to be a person,” adds Lord. “No one’s ever had that take before. It’s so smart.”
“Only Nicolas Cage would do this,” says Miller.
All episodes of Spider-Noir are streaming on Prime Video.
