Drake Bell and Sara Paxton in Superhero Movie Courtesy of The Weinstein Company

The story focuses on a teenager, Rick, who is bitten by a scientifically mutated dragonfly and develops super powers. Of all the superheroes that you could have picked to skewer, why Spider-Man? You reference Spider-Man, Batman, X-Men, and Fantastic Four, to name a few. How do you decide who to leave out?
By and large, we try and choose things based on what we think will be the funniest to send up. And there's something so earnest and sweet and old-fashioned about the Spider-Man story, because so much of it is a love story and it's a coming of age story. There's the uncle who dies, and the girl who lives next door, and this kid coming to grips with powers that he can't control. It gave us the strongest character. And I think in some ways the Spider-Man movies are the strongest of all the superhero films that have come out recently because they have that kind of very identifiable humanity in the middle of it all. Batman offered us some great pathos and the backstory of the family dying. X-Men, I think, is a little more of a fun side-trip to me. Same thing with Fantastic Four. In the end we did want to sort of tell the story of one hero and not sort of do the mish-mash version.

A lot of spoofs rely on one-liners, and I think the average viewer would assume that it's easy to come up with them. How hard is it to write stupid dialogue?
It's really hard. It's so much harder than it appears. Everything about spoof is deceptively difficult. It all looks pretty easy, [but] the first time I sat down to work on any of it, I was shocked at how difficult it was and how rigorous the process was. The audience understands that these characters to a large extent aren't real, that they're living in some sort of alternate universe, and that there's going to be a joke in the next five or six seconds. You don't get the benefit of actual human characters. And you don't get the benefit of a pause or a serious moment. It is relentless. It's sort of the cinematic equivalent of doing stand-up in front of a very demanding crowd. It's hard and exhausting work making these movies. In a regular comedy if you get people to laugh really loudly six or seven times, you feel good about yourself. [But in a spoof] you have to get the audience really laughing three times a minute.

Talking about stupid lines: "I am the way to happiness and the way to peace. I can unite cultures. I can eat planets." Who is the actor taking on the persona of Tom Cruise? Where did you find him?
His name is Miles Fisher. Our excellent casting directors, Mary Vernieu and Venus Kanani, sent him over and I was stunned. Casting has now, of course like everything else, been Internet-ized. So they record[ed] him, they uploaded [the video] to a site, I then logged onto the site, and watched his audition on the computer. And it's the first time I've ever just started calling people in and saying, "You have to see this guy's audition. This is unbelievable!" It was eerie. And when we actually filmed him I did these really long takes where the two of us would improv back and forth to get him to go into different modes. And we finished that first take, which is about three minutes, and the crew just burst into applause. He's impressive. What can I say? And a terrific actor.

How much ad-libbing goes on in a film like this? You can't give your actors too much carte blanche, I'd imagine.
In fact, there's very little ad-libbing that goes on. Everything is highly scripted and orchestrated because so much of it is technical comedy. There are either physical gags or sight gags and we sit and obsess over every little word when you're just doing dialogue exchanges, because there's a big difference between "Don't call me Shirley!" and "Why would you call me Shirley?" One's funny, and one isn't. And so there's not much ad-libbing. Although this is a very talented cast and when we did find moments where we think it would be good, we would let them go. And we picked those moments and it always works. We just have to know the right time to let them kind of do their thing.