SPIDER-MAN’S UPSIDE-DOWN KISS

It’s one of cinema’s most iconic kisses, but the making of Spider-man’s snog was far from romantic. Spidey (Tobey Maguire) and M.J. (Kirsten Dunst) lock lips during a deluge, him hanging from a fire escape above, her with feet planted firmly on the floor. As the heavens open, M.J. peels back the mask of the mystery man she doesn’t realise is her school friend Peter Parker and exposes his mouth in order to seal their affection.

The press of her lips to his may have inflamed audiences watching Sam Raimi’s 2002 hit Spider-Man but for Maguire it was akin to ‘practically suffocating’. Harnessed upside down with the blood rushing to his head, his passionate scene was further complicated by overhead sprinklers sending driving rain down onto the sound stage and both actors. ‘There was rain pouring down my nose,’ he recalled of the scene, ‘and then Kirsten pulls the mask up… and it’s blocking the air passage there, so I couldn’t breathe. And then she’s kissing me, blocking the air passage there, so there’s nowhere else to breathe. It was really tough, actually. They’d yell cut, and I would be [gasping for air], totally out of breath. It was torture. It makes you realise how important oxygen is.’ Maguire endured by ‘sneaking little breaths’ out of the corner of his mouth during takes.

Raimi clearly felt it was worth the discomfort to nail a scene that has become more famous than the film in which it appears. To prep Dunst for the clinch, the director had given her a scrapbook of famous kisses before the night shoot on the Warner Bros. backlot (the alley is still there, next to the ER set, and can be seen as part of the studio backlot tour). ‘I just wanted to let her know that this was a very special moment for the movie, and I wanted to communicate it in some way, that some moments can be remembered for a long, long time if they’re done right,’ Raimi said of the moment. ‘I just wanted to gear her up, to let her know that she’s going to be great in this, and that I wanted some of her Kirsten Dunst magic in that moment. And I think, once we had that meeting, she turned her head around to it and put on her performance magic, which Tobey did, too. They really made something special.’

Raimi’s scrapbook worked for Dunst. ‘That made me realise how romantic and special Sam wanted this to be,’ she remembered in a recent interview. ‘Even though it wasn’t necessarily feeling that way with Tobey hanging upside down.’ Despite the difficulty of achieving the moment, Dunst is as taken with the final product as any audience member. ‘I’m proud to be a part of that. It looked like a great kiss,’ she admitted.