What follows is an excerpt from that interview:
Quint: Do you think with the recent massive success of Fast Five, a film whose whole marketing campaign revolved around big, real stunts, that studios might turn away from their more CG-intensive stuntwork?
Vic Armstrong: I think that started already. The last few films I’ve been involved with, Green Hornet, Thor and now Spider-Man, the first thing said when we go into meetings is “We want make this as real as possible. We don’t want it to look like a CG fest,” etc, etc. We spent weeks and weeks on Spider-Man getting Andrew Garfield and the stunt doubles to fly for real rather than just having cartoon characters whizzing around the screen. There’s some great stuff on YouTube of Spider-Man flying down 12th Ave. underneath this big, gothic archway, viaduct.
There’s a whole resurgence in doing things for real, which is how we like to do it. I’m not kidding people… we don’t cheat, but we don’t do things for real in the movie business. You don’t jump off a hundred foot building, land and walk away from it, but we can make it appear that you can. We’ve always used different tricks in the past, whether it be a stuntman landing on boxes and, with clever editing, you cut and see him land on the road. Things like that. To me, that’s no different to using CG in a movie to take out a pipe-ramp or to take out an airbag that you’re falling towards.
Quint: How was that experience overall? Did you find it rewarding? From the man-on-the-street pictures and videos that have been coming out it looks really sharp from my perspective.
Vic Armstrong: I’m very, very happy with it. We did everything we set out to do and that’s all you can ever hope for. I’m very, very pleased with what we attempted and what we achieved. I really think it’s going to be a good movie.
It is a reboot. They don’t like to call it that, but it is a reboot. We went in at ground level and just changed everything; changed the actor, changed his approach to it and got some great, realistic modern parkour, skateboarding, flying… everything in it.