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As you may have guessed from the shiny cover of the latest SFX (#221, in the shops on Wednesday 4 April) we have a major, all-new, interview-packed feature on The Amazing Spider-Man inside. And, as has become traditional, the SFX website is proud to present a couple of extracts from that feature.

First up, here’s producer Matt Tolmach on the film’s primary villain:

“Choosing the villain is always a huge conversation,” shares Tolmach. “The cool thing about Spider-Man villains is that they’re not just villains – they usually play a bigger dramatic role. In this case Peter has a very powerful relationship with [Curt] Connors [the alter-ego of the Lizard]. There’s a connection between Connors and Peter’s past. There’s something there that you’ve never seen before, and there’s also a sense in which there are two paths you can go down – the path of the hero or the path of the weaker man.

“We made a real concerted effort to tell a different story. And this is a villain that serves the story we’re telling about, ‘Who am I? Where did I come from?’ There are thematic reasons why Curt Connors is the right villain for this movie. Sometimes a movie is made or broken by its villain, and a great villain is somebody who is as inextricably tied into the story as the lead. They are often the personification of the thing that the lead is trying to overcome. And that’s what this is.”

Purists may be irked that the movie sheds the Lizard’s iconic croc-in-a-lab-coat visual. “Look, this is the big screen interpretation of it,” argues Tolmach, keen to defuse any potential fanboy ire. “You have to think about it – on the one hand we’re making a decision to tell a story that lives very much in the real world. That was a big part of the conversation – to ground it in our world, a world where there’s gravity, where the laws of physics apply. There’s a tangible explanation for how things are done.

“And in that world there has to be a Lizard. So how do you do that? You have to make the Lizard something that could come from this world. And that’s where you depart – literally – from the pages of the comic book. That said, I think purists will be very very happy about how we depict the Lizard.”

And here’s star Andrew Garfield on why Spider-Man is a metaphor for Internet trolls (bet you never thought you’d read that sentence!):

“You feel the power of it, the power of not being seen, the power of the mask. Peter becomes witty when he’s got that protective layer. It’s like he’s on a message board. He’s got the anonymity of the Internet within that suit, and he can say whatever the hell he likes, and he can get away with anything. He can f**k with people and there’s no consequences because nobody knows who the hell he is. We all know how powerful and potentially dangerous that anonymity is.”

UPDATED: 2 April

The Amazing Spider-Man is released in the UK on 4 July.