How exactly could it have been worse? Well, they could have given a starring role to Jar Jar Binks, one of the most lavishly unamusing creatures ever to pass across a movie screen, but I can’t see how anything short of doubling its length could make Episode II as intolerable as Episode I. If anything to do with the Star Wars franchise can be called good news then it’s that this latest prequel is at least an improvement on The Phantom Menace (1999). Let the chat-room whinging commence.’Spider-Man’ is released on 14 June. “You’re right! With the next film, I’m gonna try harder to give something to the girls.”You read it here first. That’s for the boys to identify with.”Oh, God,” he exclaims in mock horror.

So I didn’t give anything to the girls? There’s a shot with Tobey’s shirt off.”But that’s the male wish-fulfilment scene, in which Peter wakes up and finds that he’s suddenly muscular and well endowed. This movie turned out to be pretty much all boy-watching, so I wanted to give the boys something to watch.” But what do the girls get?”Spidey! Isn’t he sexy?”I think he’s sexier for boys – it’s that whole homoerotic hero-worship thing.”Oh, really? That’s sad. A lot of superhero movies are about boy- and girl-watching: these incredible physiques, these skin-tight costumes. But, you know, he’s still a kid.”Something else about the film has been bothering me, I confess: why does Mary Jane appear in one scene in a wet T-shirt?”Well, it’s raining,” he says, sweetly and disingenuously.I know it’s raining, I say, but it felt slightly gratuitous.”Oh I’m sorry I guess I didn’t count on the cold. “It’ll be interesting how he deals with that drive.”Isn’t his rejection of Mary Jane a little cavalier?”I’ll tell you what – if he really respects the girl, perhaps he should’ve told her that he’s a superhero, and then let her make the choice with him about bearing that burden That might have been a more 2002 way to go. After all, this movie ends with him spurning the advances of Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), and he will surely need to lose his virginity soon, before that web-shooting problem gets out of hand.”We should probably let him have sex in the second one,” Raimi concedes. That this modest, goofball adventure wears its colossal budget and audience expectations lightly is attributable largely to Raimi, who talks about the project with an affection and flippancy that you couldn’t imagine from James Cameron, who for some years had developed the film.Raimi is already hard at work on a sequel, so I take the opportunity to enquire after his plans for Peter Parker’s maturity.

One of the miracles of Spider-Man is that, with the exception of a final half-hour that descends into an inventory of explosions, the picture has avoided becoming just another homogenous blockbuster. “I felt they were sanitising me,” he hisses.He shouldn’t worry. I thought, ‘They’re cleaning me up ‘cos they’re scared of what I give off.’”He maintains now that the teeth helped his performance, and you can see his point: when he smiles in the movie, you instinctively hold on to your wallet But the experience clearly rankles. We’re going to make them perfect.’ The studio had decided that this multi-millionaire scientist wouldn’t have these funky teeth that I have, with gaps between them. I got into the chair and said, ‘So you’re gonna make me these craggy teeth, eh? They gonna be broken? They gonna be metallic? Whadda we thinkin’ about here?’ The guy went pale and said, ‘No. “But here’s an example of going along with what you thought was a shitty move by the studio, and turning it to your advantage.” Shortly after his initial costume fittings for the Green Goblin, he was sent along to the dentist “I assumed it was for the Goblin’s teeth.