BTS Spider-Noir

IBC

The Marvel universe series is designed to work both as a gritty monochrome detective story and as a stylised, visually saturated comic book world. 

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The familiar webbed crusader is given an adjacent character and origins story as a world weary gumshoe in between-the-wars New York for Amazon MGM’s series expansion of the Spider-verse.

Nicolas Cage plays Ben Reilly, aka The Spider, whose characterisation as “70% Humphrey Bogart and 30% Bugs Bunny” is about as accurate as you can get.

He arrives, in the pre-credit sequence, with a backstory that makes clear he is knackered and basically wants to hang his mask up for good. It’s this version of Spidey rather than as invincible superhero that sold editors Jennifer Barbot and Eric Kissack.

 “When [showrunner] Oren Uziel pitched to me, he said it was his chance to deal with his fears and insecurities about getting older,” recalls Kissack, who cut episodes xx and xx. “I immediately connected with that. My issue with superhero stories is the lack of vulnerability. It puts me at a distance. My favourite action movie is Die Hard because when John McClane is taking a punch or walking barefoot across glass, you feel his pain. Nick did such a great job being weary — someone who’s ‘over this’ but still feels responsible because he has this power he doesn’t want.”

Fellow editor Jennifer Barbot agrees. “I didn’t come in with years of attachment to Spider‑Man, so I could approach it purely as a story. I loved that we see Ben Reilly ageing, struggling, imperfect. I relate to that. I struggle in my own life, so I like seeing characters I can identify with represented on screen.”

Editorially, this meant amplifying moments of awkwardness and strain during action sequences. “We spent a lot of time amping up his pain in the action scenes — the grunts, the awkward landings, his physical exhaustion,” says Kissack. “He doesn’t fly effortlessly. He flies and then crashes. That was my way into the character.”

Stylistically, the show is remarkable for being presented in identical cuts with a genre-homage monochrome and a Looney Tunes Technicolor.

“It’s never been done before to have something that simultaneously would be in black and white and in colour,” Barbot says. Early in post-production, the team debated numerous approaches to monitoring dailies. “At one point we talked about just desaturating our TV and then we could see it in black and white,’” she recalls.

Irish cinematographer Darran Tiernan established the look shooting the pilot plus episodes 2-4, 7 and 8. He says, “Film noir cinematography is really about the psychology of what’s going on, telling the story in a visual and graphic sense. It was clear to me that we needed to go back to using older fixtures and rewire my brain accordingly.”

He chose to limit the use of softer light LED sources for older lighting equipment such as  Mole-Richardsons, Fresnels and other hard-light sources for deep contrast and sculpted shadows. He shot on Sony Venice 2 in RAW format to which one monochrome and one colour lookup table (LUT), devised with Picture Shop colourist Pankaj Bajpai, was applied on set.

To ensure consistency, they built a miniature studio where costume, production design and other departments could preview fabrics, textures and set elements under the exact lighting conditions and colour palette used on set.  

“Once we discovered the recipe, everyone was moving in the same direction,” Tiernan says. “We would monitor in black and white, except for focus pullers who required colour. Even before we'd do a take, I'd be flicking between them to see. Within a few days, you get very used to that because this is the way we are creating this world.”

Visual effects were created in colour because colour imagery contains more detail for compositing and effects work.

“When I edited, I only edited in black and white,” Barbot explains. “Sometimes we would go in for VFX reviews and that would be the first time I would see it in colour.. Suddenly the alcove is blue and orange! Then we’d apply the black‑and‑white LUT for the noir version and bring it into the Avid.”

This distinction began to affect the pacing of scenes. Barbot notes that certain shots simply “played better” in black and white. Wide atmospheric compositions featuring shadows, steam, silhouettes, and dramatic lighting often lingered longer in the monochrome version because noir imagery thrives on texture and visual contrast. In colour, those same shots could feel different - sometimes more like a Dick Tracy styled comic-book.

Barbot says she prefers the monochrome presentation because of how it intensified the noir atmosphere. “I hope everybody watches it in black and white first, then colour. The black-and-white imagery heightens the cynicism, darkness, and ambiguity, particularly during the introduction of arch villain Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson). All the shadows are in the background of that shot. It’s a very strong feeling.”

Kissack agrees that the two formats almost felt like separate shows. “The colour version feels trippier to me,” he says. “It was Influenced by early colour photography and [Alfred Hitchcock's 1958] Vertigo to become deliberately bold and psychologically expressive. It feels like something you haven’t quite seen before.”

While he admired the vivid costumes and production design visible in colour, he found the black-and-white version more emotionally immersive. “The black and white allows me to settle a little bit more into the story and the performance. I find it more engrossing.”

The film noir canon from the 1940s and ‘50s were an obvious source of editorial inspiration - The Third Man (1949) being one of the project’s key references. However, both editors quickly realised that simply copying classic noir pacing wouldn’t work for a modern audience.

“We did a lot of experimenting in terms of whether a 1930s style pacing would work in a modern piece,” Barbot explains. Early cuts that leaned too heavily into slow noir rhythms felt dated. “We settled on an blend where there’s some ’30s pacing that’s a little bit slower, but then there’s the rat-tat-tat of modern movies as well.”

Kissack cites romcom His Girl Friday (1940) as a major influence, particularly for dialogue scenes between Cage and Karen Rodriguez, who plays Reilly’s secretary and sidekick. “That kind of quick rat-a-tat dialogue was something we really tried to emulate,” he explains. “The hardest part was figuring out how much was pure noir and how much was modern. We weren’t making a slavish copy.”

This challenge came to a head when conceiving the show’s score. Initially, the editors temp-scored scenes with classic noir compositions from the likes of Sunset Boulevard or Vertigo. “That didn’t quite fit, but neither did straightforward modern scoring,” Barbot says. “We were searching for a hybrid approach that might match the show’s fusion of genres.”

The breakthrough came when editing episode 1’s ‘Dream a Little Dream’ number sung by femme fatale Cat Hardy (Li Jun Lix) in a smoky night club. “There’s sequence drums to it and a more modern production and this became the tonal blueprint for the entire score,” says Kissack. “It was a nod to lushness of the music of the past, but with more modern elements.”

For Barbot, this became the emotional centrepiece of the series and her favourite scene to edit. “It was romantic and beautiful and slow. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to make the scene feel dreamlike through less literal editing choices. It didn’t need to feel like a fast music video.”

Because much of the show depended on unfinished effects, editorial often had to construct sequences working closely with VFX.  The opening of the pilot, featuring The Spider swinging through Manhattan, required extensive storyboarding and collaboration between editorial and visual effects. Barbot worked with storyboard artist Jim Martin, gradually transforming static images into animatics.

The final fight in the pilot proved particularly difficult because temporary effects could only suggest the final imagery. “You have to use your imagination,” Barbot explains. “We had many conversations about how long to hold on shots. Long enough to appreciate the effects and understand the action, but not so long that it drags.”

One sequence in episode six was especially experimental. This is a surreal fever dream resulting from the drugged mind of Ben Reilly which Kissack built in the edit in collaboration with visual effects supervisor Nordin Rahhali.

“Nicolas was filmed on a green screen kind of waving his hands around, just being Cage,” according to Kissack. “We had no idea what it would be. We spent two months figuring out what he was looking at.” Salvador Dalí’s concoction for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound was the major visual reference.

With fellow editors Geraud Brisson and Tirsa Hackshaw, Barbot and Kissack worked with showrunner Oren Uziel, executive producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Although Lord and Miller were often busy with Project Hail Mary, their occasional visits to editorial provided valuable outside perspective. Kissack jokes that after spending months immersed in the material, editors sometimes become blind to obvious trims or improvements. “They would come in and be like, ‘Oh, just lift that line,’” he says. “And we’d be like, ‘Oh … of course!’”