We decided that Miles’s school was around the corner from his house, because it let us say a lot of stuff very quickly. That was the intention behind Miles and his old school, and wanting to go back to it.
A lot of these sequences were grounded in conversations we were having about how a lot of the characters in the movie were fighting against inevitable change, and were seeking to go back to a comfortable place in the past that didn’t really exist anymore. We tried a lot of different versions of this scene, but sometimes the most down-the-middle structure works the best. He’s going to be asked to step into shoes that he feels he’s not ready for, he’s not going to know the words, and he’s going to feel very self-conscious and nervous about that. That’s the metaphor we’re going to be working with for most of the rest of the movie. We also liked the metaphor this presents: Miles is singing a song that theoretically he’s a little too young for and he doesn’t know the words yet. We heard it as part of a batch of songs that Republic Records presented to us. It turns out “Sunflower” is a massive hit song. We were in big trouble when we couldn’t use it anymore - we needed to replace one of the greatest songs of the year, and we had to do it in time to spend the three months we would need to animate that shot. We had a feeling it was because people knew the song, and they knew how he was messing it up. It was critical that the song gag landed. “Redbone” killed … until Get Out premiered. It got a big laugh in the preview screening a year ago, but there was one problem: The song we initially used was the Donald Glover song “ Redbone,” and we liked the double-layered joke of opening with a Donald Glover song because of his history with Spider-Man. We had this idea that if he sang a song that was out of his register, it would make the audience laugh. It’s just what a reasonably clever kid would say. There aren’t exactly jokes in this stretch, or any clever lines. We needed Miles to score a foolproof laugh at the beginning of the movie, right when you meet him. We start the movie looking at Miles, and then we end it with him looking right at us.
He doesn’t have all the tools, but he has spirit, and we fall for him because of that. In Miles, we have a kid who’s not ready - he’s not ready for school he’s not ready for this mission. The most important thing for this scene to communicate is that Spider-Man, as a character, is always punching up.
We see him drawing and making stickers we’re establishing that he’s a creative person, he’s an artist, who is able to create without feeling self-conscious or encumbered. We made a very deliberate choice to spend the first couple of minutes we’re with Miles really just watching him. In an elegant script, everything is deliberate, and everything is a microcosm for something larger: When you meet Miles, we see him singing a song with headphones on. Then we cut to Miles, and things slow down a lot. It’s like seeing an entire superhero movie in 45 seconds, guided by this very confident narrator. We open the movie with a montage that introduces the real Spider-Man. It’s a challenging introduction of a character: Our movie doesn’t work if you don’t fall in love with Miles Morales. But the audience loves Peter Parker, the Spider-Man they’ve got. With Into the Spider-Verse, we’re introducing a character who our audience already knows is going to become a new Spider-Man.
But for people outside of that world, he’s not very well known. Miles Morales, for fans of comic books and Spider-Man, is very well known. For this installment, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse writers Rodney Rothman and Phil Lord talk through the introduction of Miles Morales, the half-black, half–Puerto Rican teen stepping into Spider-Man’s suit. Once again, Vulture is speaking to the screenwriters behind the awards season’s most acclaimed movies about the scenes they found most difficult to crack.