Between their successes with LEGO, 21 Jump Street and Spider-Verse movies, it’s safe to say Phil Lord and Chris Miller know how to drive a filmmaking cast and crew. As Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse swung into theaters to a five-star review from CinemaBlend and one of the best opening weekends of 2023, they spoke to some of their movie making secrets. One thing that proved to make their Spider-Verse sequel better, was their philosophy to “listen” rather than simply tell during the creative process.
When CinemaBlend’s podcast ReelBlend spoke to Phil Lord and Chris Miller about making Across the Spider-Verse, they got blunt that if one’s aspirations are to get into filmmaking “because you like to be in charge, definitely get another job.” They shared a valuable example where listening made the web-slinging animated movie and one specific character in the movie better. In Miller’s words:
In an early version of the movie, Pavitr’s talk up was very different and a number of Indian-American and Indian-Canadian animators wrote us an email saying like ‘We think Pav can be better and more interesting and cooler’.... And so, we got together Indian and Indian-American writers for a roundtable and we’re like, ‘How do we make this guy more aspirational and feel like a kid in Mumbai today’ and out of that came a whole different version of his intro and opening.
If you’ve caught up with this week’s biggest of 2023 new movie releases, you can likely attest that Pavitr Prabhakar is an absolute scene-stealer in Across The Spider-Verse. The Indian Spider-Man originally had a completely different introduction scene that animators noticed and reached out to the writers/producers about improving.
As a result, Lord and Miller decided to meet with them and therein create a writers room to make the sequence more culturally specific and in their words just “better”, much of which Pavitr voice actor Karan Soni contributed to. Miller recalled the results, saying this:
It transformed the sequence. You could see that email as a speedbump, right? Or you can see it as an opportunity for the movie to get better. And it really did. It turned a sequence that people enjoyed into a sequence that people love. And, not just [for] Indian people, but everyone… But, that’s the thing about inclusivity is it is good for the audience, it’s good for the film, it makes the movie more entertaining for everyone. We often say that, people make the punitive case for DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), they need to make the affirmative case. Which is how much better everything gets.
While some filmmakers might have not batted an eye at the email, Lord and Miller very much paid attention to it and welcomed more people to the table to improve Pavitr Prabhakar as an on-screen character. What came from it was things like the funny Chai tea bit where Soni’s Spider-Verse character explains that the common phrase just translates to “tea tea” because “chai” literally means tea in Hindi.
You can check out the filmmakers speaking to the sequence in the video above. You can also watch the entire ReelBlend featuring Phil Lord and Chris Miller on YouTube. As Miller shared, they’ve found that having inclusivity initiatives in their movies not only makes their sequences better for the people being represented, but it also generally has made their movies better for everyone. It goes to show that inviting more collaboration and representation to major movies doesn’t just benefit underrepresented minorities, but general moviegoing audiences as a whole.
