The Wright stuff

Writing exclusively for Total Film, ace director Edgar Wright explains how he used lockdown to fill in the gaps in his cinematic viewing.

People assume I have seen every film. They are wrong. A few years ago, I started making a list of movies that I’d never seen. It was an aggregate of different ‘Best Of’ lists, whether it’s the BFI Top 100 or an AFI list, or Cahiers du Cinéma, or Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, or the one that Martin Scorsese made for a fan listing 40 international films you must see. Not to mention David Thomson’s tome Have You Seen…?, and every movie mentioned in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre!

This list became, over the years, 1,000 movies long. So at the start of lockdown, I decided to dig in. I’m a terrible Doomsday prepper, because I’m not sure if I’ve got enough batteries or tinned food or toilet paper or water. But I did have an absolute shit-tonne of DVDs and Blu-rays of all these films, so I decided to crack my knuckles and say, “Let’s make a serious dent in this list.”

The first one I did was Martin Scorsese’s 40 international films. There were 20 I’d already seen. I watched the remaining half and found the process of watching all these international classics in quick succession in lockdown a really liberating experience – it was like I got to travel around the world.

I was watching Umberto D, or Sansho The Bailiff, or Rocco And His Brothers, or La Terra Trema. I had already seen Rome, Open City and Paisan, but only on a shitty TV at art college. So when I watched Germany, Year Zero and was

‘I find it fascinating when you arrive at the headwaters of an idea or tone’ Edgar Wright

knocked out by it, I said, “I’m just going to watch the other two in Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy again.” And watching them as a 46-year-old, rather than being 18 and watching them in a stuffy portacabin with the Venetian blinds down, was another experience.

Then I felt I had to do the BFI 100 list, which had some mindblowers and also a few that, truth be told, I couldn’t quite hold in the same regard. I actually still have three to complete, and they’re all long ones: Greed (five-and-a-half hours long), The Mother And The Whore (which is currently unavailable on DVD and Blu-ray), and Jean-Luc Godard’s 1988 TV series Histoire(s) Du Cinema, which runs 286 minutes.

Many of the movies I caught up on blew me away. I watched Last Year In Marienbad, which my mum and dad would always talk about as being the most baffling movie they’d ever seen – they saw it at college as a date, and couldn’t make head nor tail of it. I was knocked out. Not just, “Oh my God, the cinematography and production design is so incredible,” but also the great feeling of coming to a film later and realising you’ve seen everything that later riffed on it. There’s at least two Kubrick films that magpie elements of Last Year At Marienbad: a) The Shining, and b) the ending of 2001. I find it fascinating when you arrive at the headwaters of an idea or tone, and you think, “This is the first time somebody did this technique, this is the source.”

I’ve caught up on a lot of Ingmar Bergman films. Partly because, to be perfectly honest, I have a Swedish girlfriend! The Bergman movies I’d watched before had been the ones that were genre-adjacent, so I’d seen The Virgin Spring, The Seventh Seal, Persona, Hour Of The Wolf and Wild Strawberries. There are obviously so many more, so we had one weekend where we watched Fanny And Alexander, Scenes From A Marriage and Cries And Whispers. That’s a heavy meal, right there. And then I watched Summer With Monika, which is lighter. It’s funny and sexy, but still dark and twisted. I really enjoyed that.

Sometimes I got on a particular run of something, like films that have got Burke and Hare in them – Doctor Jekyll And Sister Hyde, The Flesh And The Fiends and The Body Snatcher – and there was a short run of prostitute movies, like Mona Lisa and Belle De Jour and Jeune Et Jolie. The other thing I watched a lot of, almost by design, was movies about a country picking itself up again. There was the Rossellini War Trilogy, and I watched Bergman’s Shame and Peter Watkins’ The War Game. And that in turn led to a bunch of post-war British noir films, like It Always Rains On Sunday.

I’ve made a dent in my list but it never ends. I recently bought Danny Peary’s Cult Movies book on eBay, which was a bible to me at art college. I read it again and thought, “Fuck, there are so many I still haven’t seen!” Come back to me in another 10 years and let’s see where we are, if indeed we are still here. I’m hopeful.

EDGAR WRIGHT’S NEXT FILM, LAST NIGHT IN SOHO, IS SCHEDULED TO HIT CINEMAS ON 23 APRIL.