DOUBLE JEOPARDY WORDS JAMIE GRAHAM
Two young women with big dreams discover that London can be the stuff of nightmares in Edgar Wright’s disturbing, dazzling
Last Night In Soho.
Total Film cowers on set as Wright terrorises Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy in the horror event of the year.
t’s 8 August 2019, and Total Film is clubbing. Never mind that it’s only 5pm on a blinding hot summer’s day; inside the Inferno nightclub in Clapham, London, it’s day 56 of a 70-day shoot on Edgar Wright’s sixth feature, Last Night In Soho, and a Halloween party is in full swing. Orange lanterns hang from the ceiling. Paper flames ripple upwards from the floor. Black balloons shimmy in swirling dry ice.
“HERE WE GO! ENJOY YOURSELVES, LADIES AND GENTS!” booms first AD Richard Graysmark through a microphone, and 307 teenage extras dance to ‘Happy House’ by Siouxsie and the Banshees as the drums kick in and strobe lights pulse. Their leaping and writhing on the dancefloor is lent a jerky, stop-motion quality by the staccato lighting, and their costumes glare impressively, with 230 of the 307 outfits designed by the extras themselves. Wright will later judge a competition for cash prizes, and his work will be cut out given the craftsmanship of the horns, skeletons and pumpkin-orange fright wigs on display.
Dressed rather more plainly and standing out from the crowd is 19-yearold New Zealand actress Thomasin McKenzie of Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit and Old fame. She is playing shy Eloise, newly arrived in London from Cornwall to pursue her dream of becoming a fashionista. McKenzie wanders into the middle of the melee in a simple black dress, her kohl eyes peering from a whitened face. Behind her snakes the camera of Chung Chung-hoon, the genius DoP who lensed Andy Muschietti’s blockbuster adaptation of Stephen King’s It and Park ChanWook classics Oldboy, Thirst and The Handmaiden. It’s hard not to think of the famous shot that circles Carrie White and Tommy Ross on the dancefloor in Brian De Palma’s Carrie as the camera twirls around McKenzie. Red lighting soaks the set like blood from a bucket.
Eloise is dancing, arms above her head, and then she stops, stock still. Her shoulders heave and her breath hitches. Her eyes widen in terror. What she sees, dotted among the dancers, are the Shadowmen, grey-faced figures without eyes. They have been haunting Eloise’s dreams for a while now, but here they seem to have entered the waking world, closing in on her.
Tonight’s shoot will go through to 3am. At 7.30pm, snacks come out, with a couple of extras dressed as a vampire and Frankenstein’s frizzy-haired bride nibbling on pitta bread and hummus, olives and sun-dried tomatoes. The Shadowmen, designed by Edgar’s brother Oscar Wright (Wonder Woman, Solo: A Star Wars Story), drink through thin straws. They can’t eat as the only access to their mouths is a pinhole.
Graysmark takes to the mic again, getting everyone ready and pumping them up. And… action! Drums, strobes, McKenzie freezing in terror. Who are these Shadowmen and why do they lurk at the periphery of her vision? What are the other nightmares in her (damaged?) brain? And can Wright, the filmmaker behind Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and Baby Driver, change gears to truly unnerve viewers with a psychological horror movie?
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
Wright has been sitting on the idea of Last Night In Soho for almost a decade, letting it quietly percolate as he made The World’s End and Baby Driver (to say nothing of the film he almost made in between, Ant-Man). Then untitled (see boxout, right), the movie in his head offered him the chance to embrace his love of horror, most notably
psychological, emotional genre films like Repulsion and Don’t Look Now, and, equally importantly, British dramas of the 1960s.
“They’re always interesting as a time capsule,” Wright says on Zoom in July 2021, a full 23 months after Total Film was on set. The unusually long delay between the film’s shoot and release has been caused, of course, by the pandemic. “And there’s a particular subgenre of these cautionary-tale movies, usually written by men, which are about women coming to the big city, and wanting to be a star, and being roundly punished for the temerity of wanting to succeed.”
Wright’s addition to the subgenre would trace dual storylines, one set in the present day, as Cornish lass Eloise arrives in London to study fashion, and one in the 1960s, as wannabe singer Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy) meets manabout-town Jack (Matt Smith), who promises to open doors for her. Just how these plots intertwine is best seen for yourself, with Wright desiring that viewers experience the journey as Eloise does… one shock, thrill, gasp, wince and scream at a time.
Aware that Last Night In Soho was to be his first film centred on female protagonists, Wright co-wrote the screenplay with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (Penny Dreadful, 1917), who also, as a young, aspiring screenwriter, worked in The Toucan pub, a key location in the movie. (It should also be pointed out that the majority of the team who Wright developed the film with, from producers Nira Park and Rachael Prior to researcher Lucy Pardee, are female.) But the story is also a personal one, echoing elements of his own journey.
“On paper, it would seem like, ‘What have I got in common with an 18-yearold girl from Cornwall?’” starts Wright. “But in a strange way, her experience of going to London is not dissimilar to mine. That thing of feeling like the country mouse… It’s a very humbling experience. I love the city now, but it took me, like, a year to love it when I moved here. When you first come, it can be an incredibly unfriendly city.” He shrugs. “And there are other elements that are personal – I have this recurring time-travel fantasy of going back to decades that I never lived in myself.”
Not that Wright is fooled into thinking that London in the swinging ’60s must have been all excitement and thrills – it’s the darkness behind the glittering lights that his film seeks to illuminate. “I’ve worked in Soho for 25 years and it’s such a fascinating place,” he says. “It’s the epicentre of film and music and fashion. Certainly in the ’60s, and it still is now. And yet it coexists, still to this day, with the darker side – literally the underworld – in a way that was always very strange to me.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I mean, we literally show it in the movie… the most famous members’ bar in London, the Groucho Club, is directly opposite a walk-up [a flight of stairs leading to prostitutes’ flats] in plain sight. Soho is an exciting area, but obviously something to be feared as well. And also, the architecture is all the same. So even if the restaurants and bars and cinemas all change, the buildings have been here for hundreds of years. You can’t help thinking: ‘What have these walls seen?’ I’ve always had a very profound feeling about that.”
It was a feeling that was confirmed whenever he chatted to Terence Stamp,
‘That thing of feeling like the country mouse… It’s a very humbling experience’ Edgar Wright
Rita Tushingham and Diana Rigg (whom Last Night In Soho is dedicated to, it being her last film before she sadly passed away in September 2020), three ’60s icons who bring fascinating baggage – and great performances – to the movie.
“I’d say, ‘Oh, wow, it must have been amazing in the ’60s’ and there was always this answer where it was like: ‘Yes…’ That dot dot dot, to me, is almost the story of the movie.”
CLASS ACT
Back in 2015, Wright was on the Sundance Film Festival jury that gave Robert Eggers the Directing Award for The Witch. As Wright watched an 18-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy carry the weight of that extraordinary movie on her slender shoulders, he knew he’d found his Eloise for Last Night In Soho.
The two had lunch in LA, a general meet, and Wright wound up pitching the entire movie, selling her on the film and the part. Sorted. Only by the time he finally got around to writing the screenplay with Wilson-Cairns, TaylorJoy had starred in movies like Split and Thoroughbreds and by this point seemed like a better fit for the role of Sandy, the go-getting ’60s singer who looks and sounds fabulous.
“Anya is such a chameleon,” says Wright. “There’s what she’s like on film, and then also what she’s like when you see her in a fashion spread or on a red carpet.” Originally, Wright had envisaged the ’60s segments of the film being dialogue-free and playing more like musical scenes. But Wilson-Cairns had sold him on adding dialogue and beefing up the Sandy role so that we might fall in love with her. “So when I finished the screenplay,” continues Wright, “I emailed Anya, and I said, ‘Guess what? Last Night In Soho is coming your way. However, I would like for you to look at the part of Sandy.’” He laughs. “So I was a bit nervous. But to my delight, she emailed back and said, ‘I’ve read the script. I love it. I want to do it. And I’d love to play Sandy.’”
“Sandy was a bit more spicy,” recalls Taylor-Joy with a grin when Total Film catches up with her. “My initial instinct was just: ‘God, this girl doesn’t give a shit. She’s got balls of steel.’” It was a mindset that Taylor-Joy had to assume. “I’d finished Emma the day before, so I had to go straight from Emma Woodhouse to Sandy… and my first scene was the beginning of the dance sequence [in which Sandy first meets Smith’s Jack at the Café de Paris].
It was walking out, onto that platform, in front of 200 supporting actors. And so ‘Brass-balls Sandy’ became the way that I looked at her. I had to very much check any insecurities at the door.”
Smith grimaces. “At first, I thought, ‘Christ, I’ve got to dance? I’m going to look like a right burk,’” says the Northampton-born actor, who enjoyed trashing his Doctor Who image – or, indeed, that of Prince Philip in The Crown – as the sharp-suited, charismatic, toxic Jack. “But actually, we had a wonderful movement coach. I think it all came quite easily to Anya, but I’m no Travolta. But I thought, ‘If I can smoke and have a drink in it, then I might get away with it.’”
For McKenzie, playing Eloise was like looking in a mirror. “It reminded me of the journey that I was on in my life, and still am on, entering into the international film world and trying to figure out who I am, or to feel grounded amidst all of this chaos,” she reflects.
Wright being Wright, of course he provided his actors with a list of movies to watch in preparation (“I was like, ‘There’s 167 films on here!’” says Taylor-Joy), but McKenzie points out that soaking up ’60s cinema was only one aspect of the research.
“I was constantly listening to the film’s playlist, and when I was still in Wellington, I spent a lot of time with one of the head teachers at the fashion school,” she says. “She taught me how to sew, and how to sketch different designs. I made a couple of clothing items, and did a lot of drawing in my Ellie notebook.”
But nothing could prepare the cast for actually stepping into ’60s Soho...
THE NAKED CITY
“I think the film is a love letter to Soho in many ways,” says Smith. “I’m a Soho regular, and I think London really comes across quite beautifully in it.”
Taylor-Joy shakes her head in disbelief. “When we shut down Soho – like, actual Soho – it blew my mind. You realise how many people go out in London. Like, I used to be quite a party girl, and still I was surprised that people were out at five o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday. I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Go home!’”
“Central London is its own beast, and you cannot tame it,” shrugs Wright. “You might be able to close streets off for traffic for filming, which we did, thanks to the City of Westminster, but you can’t stop modern people coming into shots.”
The exteriors shot in Soho are astounding, with production designer Marcus Rowland dressing all of Frith Street and Bateman Street, and parts of Greek Street. “Satellites and modern stuff”, says Wright, were removed via digital work done at DNEG, but everything else was shot in-camera, including the staggering scene, teased in the trailer, in which Eloise weaves through ’60s traffic and under a gigantic Thunderball billboard to enter Café de Paris.
“We really shot that,” says Wright, explaining that they first rehearsed the complex choreography on an airstrip with tape marking everything out. “The one cheat is that it wasn’t the original Café de Paris; it was actually the cinema on Haymarket because the original Café de Paris is on quite a narrow street. That shot was done on a Sunday night. We dressed up that cinema with a real Thunderball marquee poster, and we dressed the restaurants around it, because the Steadicam follows Thomasin McKenzie out and does a full
360 around her, and then she walks into the Café de
Paris, which is all dressed,
and all of the period extras are there. So we had period cars all around there, including a period double-decker bus with a Typhoo advert, and an old-school green taxi hut. In the far distance – and this is, again, a credit to Tom Proctor and the team at DNEG – you’ve got a digital Piccadilly Circus. I think it’s brilliantly done.”
In fact, Last Night In Soho so brims and bristles with all of the brio that we’ve come to expect from Wright – camera movies, cutting, music – that you’re almost so intoxicated, so entertained, that you forget to be scared. Almost. But Wright’s movie is also emotionally distressing, as it should be.
“When I first read Soho,” says Taylor-Joy, “I was like, ‘It’s like going on an acid trip. You’re going to be bombarded with all of these images, and colours, and music, and everything’s a bit swirly. It’s like the floor is quicksand.’” She takes a beat. “And I was bang on! I think sometimes people associate being frightened with not having a good time, or not finding it enjoyable. That’s certainly not the case with this one. I think that people will be traumatised, but always with a really good soundtrack and very pretty things to be looking at.”
McKenzie sucks in a breath. “It was a very intense shoot, because of how physical and emotional it was,” she explains. “There was a lot of running away from terrifying things, and a lot of mental darkness in it. So I was really lucky to have my family with me in London to go home to at the end of the day.”
It wasn’t until McKenzie watched the finished movie that she realised “how much of a feminist voice there is throughout the film”. And though Wright is a tad uncomfortable when asked about it, he’s clearly made a psychological horror movie that speaks to the #MeToo era.
“I’m cautious about comparing the movie with the movement as it wasn’t the inspiration for it,” he says. “The idea came much earlier than that. But obviously there are many parallels with the stories that have had a light shone on them in the last four years. All the same things were happening back in the ’60s, of course, but the press or society at large were not talking about them, in the same way they’ve been rightly amplified now. There are many stories that have likely gone to the grave and those victims will never get justice. It’s absolutely part of the point of the film, to show that this kind of exploitation was extremely prevalent then, and to make us question how much has really changed.”
Like Soho itself, Wright’s film thrums with excitement and menace, beauty and ugliness, rapture and terror. It’s a night out you’ll never forget.
LAST NIGHT IN SOHO OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 29 OCTOBER.
‘It reminded me of the journey that I was on in my life, and still am on’ Thomasin McKenzie