Superhero Hype recently spoke with Sam Raimi, regarding his return to the Spider-Man franchise, here are some highlights….

On Making Spider-Man 4 With Tobey Maguire: I only wanted to do it with Tobey because my interest is in living the character with Tobey in a deeper way than we ever have lived it before. There comes with the familiarity a knowledge of a lot of the basics. I think it’s really going to allow us to delve deeply into him as a human being, which is really why I’m into it this time.

On the Criticism of Spider-Man 3: Do I take the criticism into consideration? Yeah, absolutely. All filmmakers want their films to be liked. I shouldn’t say that, but I definitely want my films to be liked by the audience. I don’t make an artistic type of picture that I can say to myself “Even if this crowd doesn’t like it, it stands as a work of art and will be appreciated years later or has meaning without the audience.” I simply am an entertainer and I make films for audience appreciation. When they don’t like it, I don’t have a leg to stand on. If a critic doesn’t like it, it’s like “Oh, he hates me,” or it’s bad, they don’t like it. Every time I get a bad criticism, I just try not to dwell on it but it’s very upsetting. You really want to please people.

On the Difference between Working on Spider-Man and Drag Me to Hell: With those “Spider-Man” pictures, which I love making, there’s still a lot of responsibility on the director’s shoulders–and the producers, everyone’s shoulders–because you’re dealing with a character that has been around for fortysome years, is much loved by people throughout the world and people not just have a sense of ownership of Spider-Man–rightfully so–they look up to him as a hero. Generations of people do, so you have to be careful with how that portrayal takes place. You have to have a lot of respect for the ownership of everyone, which they do have over that character. And so I was using the word “responsibility” of the responsibility to present him in a proper light. And that’s a great job, but it’s much more freeing to take a break from that and work with your own characters in a place where no one has any expectation of them because they don’t know them. You’re really free to do anything you want. So there’s a lot more freedoms that come with the independent picture “Drag Me to Hell.”