Kemp Powers (‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ director) on how the movie was approached as a standalone film [Exclusive Video Interview]

For Kemp Powers, coming on board to direct “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (alongside Joaquim Dos Santos and Justin K. Thompson) was a daunting task, especially considering how he views the first movie as a masterpiece. “I think it would behoove me not to even try to follow that up but just try to do something completely different. We were trying to create our own standalone film. It felt like a better attitude to have going into it than a traditional sequel,” he tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: Film Animation panel (watch the exclusive video interview above).

Taking this job also meant that he would constantly have people contacting him to remind him not to mess up the character of Miles Morales. Powers understood, though, how much Morales means to so many on a very personal level. “There’s a whole generation of young people who for them, my son included, Miles Morales is their default Spider-Man. You just want to handle it with the care and the thoughtfulness that we all felt like this character deserved.”

“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” which is from Sony Pictures Animation, is the follow-up to 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which won that year’s Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The film sees Miles encountering an immensely powerful new villain that forces him to reconnect with similar beings from alternate universes in order to defeat him. The film features the voice talents of Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Bryan Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson, Jason Schwartzman, Issa Rae, Karan Soni, Daniel Kaluuya and Oscar Isaac. Powers previously was a co-director on Pixar’s “Soul” and received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for “One Night in Miami…” in 2020.

Powers’s personal favorite Spider-Man from an alternate universe also presented one of the biggest challenges in the movie. “For personal reasons it felt really good to have Spider Punk show up in this film. He was a character that a lot of folks didn’t know anything about. His look was also one of the most challenging looks to land in the entire movie.” But as much as Powers loves Spider Punk, his heart will always be with Miles Morales and the fact that he’s able to progress his story in the movie is enthralling for him. “To get to that from that little adolescent to that teen who’s thinking about college. As a parent myself…there was something about visiting Miles at this point in his life that really, really excited me.”