Doctor Strange 2 Director Sam Raimi On Returning To Marvel And The Legacy Of Steve Ditko [Interview]

Your Spider-Man fandom was well-documented when you first made those movies, but were you a Doctor Strange fan growing up? How much of those early comics were you reading at the time?

Mostly I started with the Superman comic books and then I graduated to the Batman comic books. Then my brothers were reading the Marvel comic books, which were a little too complex for me until my brother pulled me aside and said you got to read Spider-Man, which I did love, but he also would read Doctor Strange, occasionally. He became my fifth favorite superhero.

Those early Stan Lee and Ditko Comics, they’re wilder, cerebral. They’re really psychedelic. How much of that impression did they make on you at the time?

Tremendous impression. I’d never seen anything like his illustrations for those fantastic worlds, so much scale and scope was put into those illustrations. Sometimes you’d open up a two-page Ditko landscape piece and it was incredible. In fact, if you saw the first 20 minutes of our movie, that universe where the movie starts is really based on what we call the Ditko-verse.

Were there any key moments or characters from the comics where you said, man, we’ve got to make sure this is in the movie?

No, that was really the look we were after. Everything else really came out of the storylines from the previous Marvel movies, as far as setting us up to where our movie would go. It wasn’t about, hey, let’s bring in a favorite character because we had so many characters that we had to service that there really was no room for anything else except to recognize what they needed and do them justice.

When you watch your “Spider-Man” movies and then you watch “Darkman,” they are clearly the work of the same filmmaker despite the differences in scale. Can you talk about the process of working with Marvel and what that is like compared to making those movies?

It was a really exciting thing for me to do because usually … I’m like if I was an architect, I would design unique buildings and try and scare them with this one and thrill them with that one. But this job … it’s more like this is an existing series with established characters and a fan base. And the job is to complete mile 16 of a bridge that had been under construction for 15 years. And it takes a different set of skills to do that. It’s got to work with what went before. It’s got to lead into what’s coming. It’s got to be handled to hold the same audience expectations that those other films did. It’s got a great bunch of challenges that are unique to this particular job and it was great to exercise those muscles.

Filmmakers like Taika Waititi, James Gunn, and Ryan Coogler, they insert pieces of themselves into Marvel movies. Are there moments here in this movie where you said, I got to make sure this part is purely Sam Raimi?

No, that was never the plan. It was always to do justice to that which existed and to make a great experience moving forward and to set up future films. I think just any time a director reads a book or reads the screenplay and tells the crew what the part of it is, that is their style imprint. Just looking at it through the lens of your own mind’s eye imparts your style to a piece, and your sense of pace about [how] the scene should run and focusing on what’s important and what’s dramatic — just those choices. Sticking with the Marvel universe, that really was how I approached it.

It’s been nearly a decade since you directed a feature and you’ve been busy since then, producing a lot of stuff. Was that an intentional break from directing or were you just keeping busy with other projects?

I had to refresh myself, I didn’t want to repeat myself. I didn’t want to do something that was stale. I felt like I had to experience the world again, [including] filmmaking, from these young filmmakers that I was producing. I allowed myself to be inspired by them. I raised my kids, learned from that experience, and spent a lot of time in the garden thinking. And when this call finally came in, I thought, I’m refreshed. I’m hungry. I’ve got a lot of new experiences. I’m ready to go back to directing.