'Madame Web' producer on Dakota Johnson movie staying away from being a 'mindless spectacle'

Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson and directed by S.J. Clarkson, dares to push against the expectation of what a Marvel superhero is supposed to be.

Where to watch Madame Web: In theatres Feb. 14
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Tahar Rahim, Adam Scott, Zosia Mamet
Director: S.J. Clarkson
Runtime: 117 minutes

What is 'Madame Web' about?

Documenting the origin story of the Marvel heroine, Madame Web follows Cassandra "Cassie" Webb (Johnson) as she discovers she has the power to see, and subsequently change, the future.

The film actually starts earlier in time, with Cassie's mom who was killed when she was pregnant with her daughter, while studying spiders in the Amazon. The movie then shifts to 2003, Cassie is a paramedic in New York City, in her 30s, where she works with her colleague and friend Ben Parker (Adam Scott). She's a product of the foster care system and isn't particularly great at coping with emotional, family situations.

But one accident on the job sort of triggers her clairvoyance, which leads her on a journey to protect three girls, Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor), from Tahar Rahim's Ezekiel Sims. This villain is linked to the death of Cassie's mother, but now fears for his own mortality.

'What is a Marvel character? What should it be?'

For producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who famously worked on the Transformers movies and was responsible for Warner Bros. buying the Harry Potter film rights, and getting The Matrix made, he was particularly interested in working with Clarkson, who previously directed episodes of the Jessica Jones series.

"I really wanted to work with S.J., I loved her work and over the years she had turned down everything I had brought to her," di Bonaventura told Yahoo Canada.

After being brought on as a producer for Madame Web, di Bonaventura highlighted that what made the title character worthy of a feature film origin story was her "grounded" nature.

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"What I really like about the movie is, I feel like I can really be her, ... it's not that she doesn't have extraordinary capabilities, or an extraordinary aspect, but you really go on the journey with her of like, 'What is happening to me? What is this? How do I do this?'" he said.

Unlike some more recent superhero films, the look of Madame Web is more gritty and raw, not the shiny, clean-cut world featuring people with supernatural powers that we're used to lately. The space this story takes place in feels really tangible, centred around Cassie's lived experience.

"[S.J. Clarkson] and I were very much in sync with that and at the same time, sometimes people's imagination, what is a Marvel character? What should it be? In a way, we're almost fighting it, without necessarily fighting it," di Bonaventura said.

"But I think that one of the advantages I had in this was, having done the Transformers and done it as real as one can do crazy robots coming from outer space, that was where I could be a most help to S.J., was in the visual effects. How do we make it feel real that this weird thing is happening."

'You have to actually follow what's happening to the character'

Even the villain in the movie, Ezekiel Sims, still comes from a place of a lot of personal fear, which isn't typical of an antagonist in a superhero film.

"We don't have to deal with that, 'I'm going to take over the world,' which we've seen a thousand times, and it works every time, but it is such a staple that it was really nice to free yourself from that," di Bonaventura said. "Also, it made it very human, I think, the whole notion of his mortality."

"On some levels, you really can relate to him, and on other levels you're like, this is really terrible that he's going to kill these three young women. So I think it does bring a different experience with the villain as a result of that, and it gives ... the movie a personal angle, as it does for [Cassie] and as it does for the three younger women, but I think in particular, it's unexpected for the villain."

But ultimately, Madame Web is more of a story about Cassie than what many would think of as a "superhero movie," particularly the ones where you get the sense that the visual spectacle is more of a focus than the narrative or character-driven story.

"Having worked on a lot of action movies, and honestly, having done the other side of that, which is like, yes it's a mindless spectacle, ... you need a director who really understands story to get to this place in a way, who is more interested in the story, if you would, than in the stunt," di Bonaventura said. "Often, you get more interest in the stunt than the narrative."

"There's nothing like keeping the audience in the scene by doing something that you have to actually follow what's happening to the character."

An example of that is one particular scene in a diner, where some negligence from Julia, Anya and Mattie, the urge to dance to Britney Spears' "Toxic" on a table, puts them in significant danger. You know that's not something they should be doing, and the Spears song is certainly a fun addition, but it also provides a specific narrative purpose later on in the film.

"What's interesting is you get that companion scene later on when [Cassie] returns to the diner, ... which is a little more trippy and abstract, but you learned such valuable things," di Bonaventura highlighted. "You rarely return to the scene of the crime in an action movie and that's really fascinating, because it carries some different kind of weight to go back there."

Why we have 'superhero fatigue': 'They became consumed with this idea of a universe'

As Madame Web hits movie theatres, everyone is watching this film amid extensive discussions around "superhero fatigue," often specifically "Marvel fatigue." It has been particularly difficult for audiences to really latch on to recent Marvel projects specifically, largely because there's this feeling that there is so much content, and none of it has been particularly unique in a while. Visual spectacle alone isn't really cutting it for audiences anymore either.

"I think when you look at the first Marvel movies that came, they were really character-based movies, and as they became consumed with this idea of a universe, you got away from the characters, you start thinking about the world as opposed to the characters," di Bonaventura said. "So for us, in a way, it motivated us to go back to where they started."

"I loved [the first] Iron Man, ... same with Thor. I just remember those two really hooked me and these first ones did it differently. They were not concerned with, how does it link up to all these other things. So we really resisted the idea. We're in Madame Webb's story, that's what we're in. What's great about that is then all you are focusing on is the character. It's so important to decide what you are and I think, for me, I think when people talk about fatigue in any genre, but in ... particularly the superhero genre, it's because it wasn't really about the people anymore, it was about the fact that they were in this genre, which is not as interesting to me."