The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.
Claim: “I remember hearing once that in Spider-Man 2, the hospital tentacle scene was a vis effects test that they realized worked REALLY well, which was why you don’t see Molina outside of close cut ins until after the escape. I think I saw it on a DVD trivia pop up thing, but I was a kid. Is it true?” – @rivermets
Rating: True.
Context: One of the great tragedies of film’s pivot to streaming is the death of DVD special features. Unless a powerhouse director wants them, the miniature film schools that once taught Lord Of The Rings fans the beauty of forced perspective have more or less been relegated to YouTube or buried deep in one of Netflix’s menus. It’s a shame because now moviegoers miss out on fascinating details, such as the very real fact that Doctor Octopus’ (Alfred Molina) surgery scene in Spider-Man 2 was initially a test. On the 2004 DVD commentary track, which features director Sam Raimi, star Tobey Maguire, former Marvel Studios head Avi Arad, and co-producer Grant Curtis, Curtis confirms that Doc Ock’s surgery was, indeed, a test shoot. Namely, because they didn’t expect the tentacles to be so convincing and agile.
“This hospital sequence is actually the first scene we shot for Spider-Man 2,” Curtis says on the track. “It went from a test shoot to an actual shoot because in the beginning, we didn’t know what the puppeteers and the tentacles would be capable of mechanically and what we’d have to do with CGI. It started out as a massive test to see what is and isn’t possible with the tentacles. We realized the puppeteers had been working really hard, and they were so advanced beyond what we thought.”
“We thought, ‘Test or no test, we should shoot this.’ So it did morph into an actual shoot.”
Shot roughly three or four months before principal photography began, this scene—an Evil Dead throwback from Raimi—confirmed just how capable the puppeteers were at handling Ock’s unique anatomy. In an era before pre-vis, the scene gave the production a head start on how to think about the tentacles and how much CGI to use. As if to show how much things change in 20 years, Molina’s tentacles in Spider-Man: No Way Homeare mostly CG, with the actor being strapped on a harness and jerked around to indicate which way the arms are flying.
However, returning to the initial question, Curtis does confuse the scene’s intention by reducing it to a “test.” Thanks to the DVD, there is plenty of footage of the effects team, led by John Dykstra, figuring out how to get Doc Ock on his many feet. The surgery scene was a “test,” yes, but it was also always going to end up in the finished product.
“The scene was scripted and always intended to be part of the movie,” VFX Supervisor Scott Stokdyk tells The A.V. Club by email. Along with Dykstra, Anthony LaMolinara, and John Frazier, Stokdyk won an Oscar for the film’s effects and was there on the set when this moment was filmed. “It was part of a preshoot before the rest of the movie shoot that was intended to give a headstart to VFX development of Doc Ock.”
Since the scene served both purposes, the “test” featured actors, costumes, a chainsaw, full lighting, stunt rigs, and a wax floor for one poor nurse to drag her fingernails through. It also features Alfred Molina—”a true pro,” says Stokdyk—who spent the scene facedown on a gurney. “There were doubles for some shots, but he was definitely there.”
According to Stokdyk, the scene influenced Raimi’s process going forward with the rest of Spider-Man 2: “Sam did the same thing in Spider-Man 3, where he pre-shot the scene where Sandman comes out of the sand truck in the street. It gave him a scene to edit and some VFX shots to turn over early.” Today, all of this prep (and much of the final film) would be done using CGI, but we can thank proper production planning for making Spider-Man 2‘s effects so damn effective to this day.
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