Comic Book Resource have been talk­ing with Sam Raimi. I have extracted the Spi­der­man 4 parts of the inter­view for you here, though I rec­om­mend read­ing the full arti­cle as it gives an inter­est­ing insight into the thoughts and processes behind Raimi himself.

Do you have any incli­na­tion yet towards whether you’d like to pro­duce or direct the next Spider-Man movie, or is too early to call?

Sam: I think that’s going to be up to Sony Pic­tures, and I think that it’s too early for them to say, actu­ally. But cur­rently I’m work­ing on… well, not now, but as soon as the writ­ers strike’s over… I’m going to begin work­ing with a writer on the screenplay.

Is it impor­tant to you that the story fol­lows on from the first three? I mean, how impor­tant is inter­nal con­ti­nu­ity to you? Can you go Evil Dead-style and change details a lit­tle bit, maybe change the story up a lit­tle bit?

Sam: If I was writ­ing it I would have a very strong opin­ion about that, but we’re hir­ing a writer to come up with his own take. Sony was will­ing to go either way, we’ll just have to wait and see what the writer comes up with. I think anything’s pos­si­ble, though.

I mean, there’s been so many dif­fer­ent ver­sions, it doesn’t have to fol­low the movies that we’ve made. I’d very much like to see Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, so I have a per­sonal inter­est in that, but cer­tainly anything’s pos­si­ble. Spider-Man’s such a big char­ac­ter in the comic books that he could endure a lot of dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions. You could start over or you could start with a dif­fer­ent aspect of the story than I’ve focused on in the pic­tures I’ve made, we’ll just have to wait and see what the writer comes up with.

Do you think the story will still be inter­est­ing if Spider-Man moves on and gets mar­ried? Because within the world of comics, a lot of writ­ers com­plain that once he got mar­ried the sto­ries weren’t as inter­est­ing, and the movies seem to be head­ing towards that. As some­one who’s a mar­ried man and has a fam­ily, what do you think of this idea that he can’t be inter­est­ing once he’s married?

Sam: He’s most pow­er­ful to me as an ado­les­cent. The thing that Stan Lee cre­ated that was so spe­cial was that he was a very young char­ac­ter, and he’s a kid try­ing to deal with these fan­tas­tic pow­ers. The idea of being mar­ried coun­ters that a lit­tle bit. It’s a place of accepted respon­si­bil­ity ver­sus being on the road to learn­ing respon­si­bil­ity. It’s asso­ci­ated with adult­hood ver­sus being the ulti­mate kid who’s a super­hero. So it’s not that you couldn’t tell a good story with a mar­ried Spider-Man, but my favorite Spider-Man is the unmar­ried one.