How did Jon Watts land Spider-Man: Homecoming?

Let me share a few interesting things I learned from attending Q&As with Jon Watts and Jake Schreier at the Mediterrane Film Festival this week:

1) Watts was a music video director who landed his first feature length movie by making a fake trailer for YouTube that states "From Master of Horror Eli Roth" and "Directed by Eli Roth" hoping that would make it go viral. Roth called him up and instead of suing him, offered to produce it. Took 3.5 years to be released but that's another story.

You can watch the fake trailer of Clown below.

2) The reason Watts "inexplicably" got the gig for a huge Marvel movie (Spider-Man: Homecoming) when the biggest movie he had made prior was an indie film (Cop Car) is because as soon as he heard that Marvel were thinking about rebooting the franchise without Andrew Garfield, he spent 6 months sending them weekly unsolicited storyboards and ideas. When Marvel started looking for directors for the project, they invited him over just for a chat, and ended up offering him the whole thing.

3) Jon Watts, Jake Schreier, and Christopher Ford were college roommates.