Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
60 M PS E . O R G light to the camera came on, I had him read a scene with me… It was perfect! It was very interesting how the brain performed for the camera, but it didn't know how to perform to the microphone. EM: That is so interesting. KZS: Yeah, I found it fascinating. Very early in my career, I got to direct Charlton Heston. And he had a speech, and he was playing a character that might as well have been Ben-Hur. It was just a really wonderful, perfect role for him, because he'd played characters like that in the past. He had an entire page of dialogue, and he did it, and I looked up and I said, "So, I think here we need this, and here we need this," because I'm imagining the animation, and he's reading words on a white piece of paper. "And here he's jumping up on his horse, and here he's doing this, and here he's doing that." He took his piece of paper and flicked it, and excruciatingly stared at it for a very, very long time. And then he looked at me and said, "Why?" I thought to myself, "Oh shit!" Laughs. Swallow, take a deep breath, and tell him why. I said, "OK, well, here he's doing this type of speech to his kingdom. Here this guy died. Here this happened. Here he's jumping on his horse, so it needs more energy, and a little more sense of the effort of getting on the horse. Here it needs this, here it needs that." And he looked at me, looked at the paper, and an equally excruciating amount of time passed. And I'm like, "What is this guy's trip?" An equally excruciating amount of time. And he finally went, "Very well," and he put it down, and he did it perfectly. It was beautiful. It was perfect. We finished the project, and he went away, and it took me forever to figure out what happened. What the heck happened there? And I finally realized that I'm fairly certain what happened was that when I gave him all those notes, he re-read the script with the notes I'd given him, and agreed with me. But it was excruciating for the many years that I could not figure out what went wrong. But that was a very good learning experience. EM: Wow, from Charleton Heston! KZS: With my producers in the room with me! And I'm like, literally going, "I'm fired. I'm gonna be fired. I'll never do this again. Thanks Chuck." EM: A common thread I've noticed in your work is there's a deep humanity and vulnerability in the characters you help bring to life, no matter how unrealistic the situation is that they're in. How challenging do you find it to bring out this sort of humanity and Marvel's Spider-Man. Photo: Insomniac Games, Sony PlayStation, and Marvel Entertainment