How the director of British cult classics Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz has taken to Tinseltown. Sort of. Interview by
Steve Kilgallon.
Having seen Edgar Wright’s zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead approximately 10 times, I think I’ve worked out what it is I most love about the movie.
It’s not the way it simultaneously mocks yet reveres those undead classics, it’s not what it has to say about friendship, it’s not the constant undercurrent of humour and it’s not Wright’s trademark editing style.
It is, as someone who emigrated from Britain some 13 years ago, the way the movie so precisely observes the tiniest detail of how British life functions.
Shaun of the Dead formed the first part of a trilogy of such exactingly observed spoofs – followed by Hot Fuzz (a cop caper set in the English countryside) and The World’s End (an alien invasion pastiche based around the British boozer).
But now Wright has left the land he knows so well to deliver a classic bigbudget American love story/gangster flick – his well-received new movie Baby Driver – and The Guardian has duly written an article asking if this means Wright has been lost to Hollywood.
This has annoyed Wright. We’re in a dimly lit Auckland hotel suite at the end of a day of quickfire interviews to promote Baby Driver, and he’s more interested in knowing what to do with his 12 hours’ freedom in a city hehasn’t visited before, but this still exercises him on several levels.
For example, The Guardian story conveniently ignored The World’s End, shot entirely in North London, as it constructed its argument that Wright had left his homeland.
And the Baby Driver crew was mainly British and the post-production was all done in England. ‘‘It annoyed me a little bit,’’ says Wright. ‘‘So my answer to that was, have I been lost to Hollywood? Not quite.’’
Because also, principally, what is Hollywood nowadays? ‘‘That idea of going to Hollywood, it should be in italics, because not many films get made in Los Angeles any more,’’ Wright explains ‘‘... it’s a strange idea, that ‘I am going to go to Hollywood to make it big’, because you are not going to make a film in LA, the chances of that are pretty slim.’’
Originally, he wrote Baby Driver – the tale of a tinnitus-suffering getaway driver’s desire to leave a life of crime for love – for Los Angeles, a landscape he’s familiar with. But film funding being what film funding is, it changed setting to Atlanta, Georgia, and Wright had to do a complete rewrite.
‘‘And that becomes something you can become invested in, this kind of process, and making it feel like it is a great Atlanta movie,’’ he says. And so he brought the level of observational detail he could wring from suburban North London or the sleepy Home Counties. Wanting the locals to love it is important, he says. If he made a movie set in Auckland, he’d want Aucklanders to say it seemed real.
Wright used real street and restaurant names and even the coffee Baby (played by Ansel Elgort) buys at the end of every successful heist is from a local Atlanta roaster. He has his American friends check his scripts for any English slang, although one line was only excised just before the cameras rolled when star Kevin Spacey pointed out that Americans would call a Mercedes-Benz a Benz, not a Merc.
The detail extends to the way Georgians pronounce the name of freeways, dropping the ‘‘the’’. Wright even interviewed former convicts, in Britain and the US, and ended up hiring one, former getaway driver Joe Lawyer, as a script consultant and, ironically, to play a security guard.
You can’t, I say, really show your working to the audience. ‘‘I think,’’ he disagrees, ‘‘some people can see the level of detail.’’
Anyway, Wright isn’t lost to the British. Working for the first time as a solo writer, he says the peripatetic setup ‘That idea of going to Hollywood, it should be in italics, because not many films get made in Los Angeles any more... it’s a strange idea, that ‘‘I am going to go to Hollywood to make it big’’, because you are not going to make a film in LA, the chances of that are pretty slim.’ for Baby Driver was ideally suited to him. ‘‘It worked probably perfectly: to write a film in LA, shoot it in another city and edit it in London, even though it is a nomadic existence, which is tough in a different way.’’
Arguably, it could be lonelier because it’s only Wright’s second foray offshore (after 2010’s Canadian-filmed Scott Pilgrim vs the World), and again, only his second without regular collaborators such as Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. He says he’s fine about that, ‘‘it’s a freeing thing’’, and instead enthusiastically mentions the excitement of filming a scene with three Oscar winners – Spacey, Jamie Foxx and songwriter Paul Williams (who won a best original song Academy Award) who has a cameo as an arms dealer – all in shot at once.
He also seems to have made an impression on his new colleagues – Elgort talks about Wright’s very particular, exacting style, how he allows actors to watch rushes to see their character develop, and how it has led him to want to direct one day.
‘‘He’s very specific, and he’s not tiptoeing around, he tells you what he wants from you, which is nice,’’ Elgort says. ‘‘He’s a real director. He directs everybody and everything, the whole set, he is pulling all the strings. It is amazing to watch.’’
Everyone’s story starts somewhere, and relies on some good fortune, but Wright’s seems particularly so. Having shot short films on Super-8 throughout his childhood, as he developed an obsessive love and knowledge of the cinema, his leg-up came from a rarely seen feature debut, a Western spoof called A Fistful of Fingers, and a series of chance meetings with British comedy’s rising stars. ‘‘You don’t think it at the time, but there are definitely fortuitous meetings,’’ he says.
For example, he was editing that debut movie illicitly in the broom cupboard of a London production studio afterhours when a mate suggested they go see some stand-up.
On the bill was Matt Lucas (later to conceive Little Britain), and an emboldened Wright introduced himself after the show. Lucas became a firm friend, gave him his first television directing work, and was his pass into a British comedy set that included Pegg and Jessica Hynes (then Stevenson), who signed up then 21-year-old