Across The Spider-Verse Director Considers It A Miracle That They Even Finished The Film

As with its predecessor, “Across the Spider-Verse” has three credited directors: “Into the Spider-Verse” production designer Justin K. Thompson, Pixar’s “Soul” co-director and writer Kemp Powers, and “The Legend of Korra” storyboard artist and character designer Joaquim Dos Santos. Speaking with Collider, the trio explained that it was only really thanks to their diverse and complimentary backgrounds that they were even able to finish the film in time (or, for that matter, finish it at all).

Naturally, given his background in translating written text into visuals, Santos indicated that he mainly focused on “taking what’s written and translating that and disseminating that to a crew that’s gonna add to what the script is already doing so well.” With Thompson similarly bringing his production design know-how to the table, that freed up Powers to turn his attention to the movie’s cast. It’s something he “really took a lot of joy in” doing, too, having collaborated closely with actors many a time before on projects both animated (like “Soul”) and live-action (including Regina King’s superbly-performed directorial debut “One Night in Miami,” which Powers wrote based on his original stage play).

Once the trio had gotten on the same page (“I think we all wanted to make the same movie from the beginning,” Thompson noted), Powers said they “split up into our specialty silos to execute those ideas.” He added:

“So that’s me going off and doing recording sessions with the cast, and then sitting in [the] edit with [editor] Mike Andrews and [co-writer/producer] Phil [Lord], and cutting it together, Justin going more into the visual, Joaquim — you know, we just conceptualized, worked on it together, and then kind of split up in order to actually execute it.”