Best Of: 'Spider-Man' dir. Destin Daniel Cretton / Novelist Harriet Clark

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Support for NPR and the following message come from 20th Century Studios' The Dog Stars. Director Ridley Scott returns with a gripping post-apocalyptic thriller starring Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley and Guy Pearce, only in theaters and IMAX August 28th.

**Tonya Mosley** (0:17)
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley in Los Angeles. Today...

**Destin Daniel Cretton** (0:25)
What is happening to me?

**Harriet Clark** (0:27)
Did you miss me, Spidey?

**Tonya Mosley** (0:29)
The film Spider-Man Brand New Day continues to break box office records after having the biggest US opening weekend in history. Today we meet the film's director Destin Daniel Cretton. Before Marvel, he worked in a group home for at-risk teens, an experience that shaped everything he's made since then and became the movie Short Term 12
Also, we hear from Harriet Clark. She was 11 months old when her mother was a getaway driver robbery. The robbers were members of a radical offshoot of the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. For 37 years, Clark spent Saturdays visiting her mother in prison.

**Harriet Clark** (1:09)
She figured out how to mother me in some of the most difficult conditions possible.

**Tonya Mosley** (1:15)
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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**Tonya Mosley** (2:47)
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley.
At the end of the last Spider-Man movie, No Way Home, back in 2021, Peter Parker makes a choice. To save the people he loves, he had everyone on Earth forget he ever existed. My guest today, filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton, picks up the story years later in the latest Spider-Man, Brand New Day. Peter is still Spider-Man, but years after everyone he loves has forgotten about him, he's living almost completely alone. And when strange things began happening to his powers, there's no one in his life who knows him well enough to even know something is wrong.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:32)
What is happening to me?

**Harriet Clark** (3:33)
Did you miss me, Spidey?

**SPEAKER_6** (3:36)
I'm losing my mind.

**Tonya Mosley** (3:40)
I am totally out of control.
I gotta fix whatever this is right now.
That's Tom Holland as Peter Parker in Spider-Man Brand New Day, and it opened with the biggest debut in box office history. Director Destin Daniel Cretton came to Marvel from a very different kind of filmmaking. His first job out of college was at a group home for at-risk teenagers. He turned that experience into the 2013 film Short Term 12, which featured young actors Brie Larson, Rami Malek, and Lakeith Stanfield. Cretton went on to direct The Glass Castle and Just Mercy about attorney Bryan Stevenson's work Defending Men on Death Row. His Marvel debut was Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings, the studio's first film with an Asian lead and an Asian director. He also created the Marvel series Wonder Man. Destin Daniel Cretton, welcome to Fresh Air.

**Destin Daniel Cretton** (4:36)
Thank you.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:37)
Okay, 23 million people went to see this movie at the first weekend and a movie like this, I mean, it has enormous expectations. There of course, the studio expectations because this is a franchise, it's a brand. And in many ways, these stories have to carry each other from film to film, but there's something in particular that you have to bring to the film as well, your sensibilities as a director, knowing that you're stepping into an established story. Was there a moment or any time during the beginning of the process where you said, this is the film, and this is my stamp, my place in it?