Jon Watts

I just remember having the President's Fitness Challenge when I was in elementary school and middle school. You had to do different activities, and at the end of it, I think you got a little pin or a badge. I was like, 'How do we incorporate Captain America into high school?' You would have the 'Captain America Fitness Challenge.'

I've always pre-vized my movies, just on my own. Even when it was, like, zero-budget things, I used this programme to do storyboards because I can't draw that well.

There's this great panel - I forget what the actual comic is - of Spider-Man in the rain holding an umbrella and eating some Chinese takeout. It's like, that's the essence of 'Spider-Man.'

If you think about it, now that Spider-Man is in the Marvel universe, that means that Peter Parker was probably, like, eight years old when he saw Tony on TV telling the world he's Iron Man. And when you start thinking about it as a whole world like that, it gets really fascinating.

You get really scrappy when you're making things for zero dollars, and you just have to keep thinking like that. It's not like, 'Oh, we now have a little bit more money, let's do things differently.' If you just keep boiling it down to the simplest possible way to make it, I think that always ends up being the best.

On an independent film where you're working with just a handful of people, you don't have to explain anything because no one cares. You can do whatever you want. There's no one there to tell you not to do it.

I was going to be a chemical engineer - I was a science nerd - that was the plan. I secretly applied to USC and NYU and got a scholarship to go to NYU based on a dumb animated short I made. It was a huge shock to me and my family.

For me, there's a deeper genre appreciation for what a coming of age story can be about. To apply that to a superhero world, for me, that was very exciting.

There's so many great coming-of-age movies to steal from, and I feel like I just tried to steal from them all equally.

I had a recurring stress dream since I was a kid 10 years old. My friend Travis is driving, and I'm afraid we're going to get in trouble. We keep passing people I recognize, and no one is doing anything. Travis keeps driving faster. I've had that dream a long time.

I think saying 'a John Hughes movie' is just shorthand for a lot of people to say 'a coming-of-age story,' because I think, when you're of a certain age, that's what John Hughes means to you.

Film is a temporal medium as much as it is a visual medium: you're playing with time, and you don't have that ability where someone can pause at home. That's such a fundamental part of what makes filmmaking exciting to me. I don't really have as much interest in any other medium. I just like the control.