“Edgar Wright Saves the World” at the L.A. Film Festival

A blow-by-blow account of Edgar Wright and J.J. Abrams' conversation about "Scott Pilgrim," "Spaced" and more.

“Hot Fuzz” (2007)

Wright, Pegg and Frost would of course team up again for this cop spoof that initially stemmed from Pegg and Wright’s upbringings in England’s rural West Country. Wright said there’s a theme of “daydreamy wish fulfillment” in his work that he believes stems from growing up in a small town and watching films like “Dirty Harry” that “would feel like a sci-fi film to me, [since] watching a sketchy San Francisco would feel so alien to me as an environment.” After a montage of clips culminating in the famous “granny kick,” Wright explained the joys and oddities of shooting back home.

Wright: It would seem on a surface level to be a riff on “The Wicker Man,” but what it really came from is that I grew up in one town, Dorset, and then we moved to Somerset when I was six and even though I lived in this town for 13 years, we were still outsiders. My mom who’s a super-conspiracy theorist, was just obsessed with the freemasons in my hometown, that they were like behind all of the bad stuff going on. We tried to have a planning permission to have an extension built on our house and it got declined. She was like [under her breath], “it’s the masons!” And she was probably right.

The funny thing is that then I worked in the same supermarket. I was a shelf-stocker and the main manager, who’s no longer with us, but who Timothy Dalton’s character is based on, would be the world’s worst freemason because he would brag about it without saying what it was. My mom would know that they would meet in the function room of the Star Hotel on a Wednesday night and this manager would say to me on a Wednesday when I’d be stocking biscuits, “Gotta leave early tonight because of the Wednesday thing.”

The amazing thing was to go back to my hometown and essentially have [all the real-life freemasons] working on the film as marshals and helping us out.

“Don’t” (2007)

Abrams and Wright briefly touched on his fake trailer for “Grindhouse.” In a rare moment where Abrams talked about his own personal experience, he told the story: “I had this great writing professor in college and when he was younger, he wrote a harlequin romance novel, just like in paperback to make the $10,000 you get for writing one and he turned it in and they passed on it and they said, it was well written, but you didn’t mean it. There was something about ‘Don’t’ that shows that you mean it.”

Wright: I shot this immediately after “Hot Fuzz.” Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were doing “Grindhouse” and they asked me to do a trailer. I got a call from Quentin saying, “oh you just delivered the first pages of ‘Grindhouse.’” [laughs] Because neither of them had finished their scripts at that point. Once they were filming, we were filming “Hot Fuzz,” it all went very quiet and I remember talking to Eli Roth and both of us thought it had gone away and we really wanted to do it. And we were sort of whispering amongst each other, “tell them we’ll do it for free.” So I ended up doing my trailer for nothing and we shot it in two-and-a-half days and it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. It was like doing all the money shots, you didn’t have to really think what the plot is.

It was like watching those American trailers for Euro horror films where the voiceover guy and how they retitled it where you think watching it, what the fuck is this about? [Abrams asks if there was interest in turning it into a full-length feature.] I think if “Grindhouse” had done better, they would’ve thought about it, but in a weird way, it’s like you don’t want to have to write that film.

“Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World” (2010)

“Scott Pilgrim” creator Bryan Lee O’Malley was in the house and received an extended ovation that was only exceeded in the room when Abrams announced the audience would see nine minutes of footage, an extended version of the clip Wright unveiled during the MTV Movie Awards. (HitFix and Cinema Blend have more detailed accounts of the footage.) Abrams mentioned he’s already seen the film and “it’s spectacular, the balance of that kind of frenetic energy and emotion is really inspiring and fun to watch.” Wright would explain how he got involved in making the film and took questions from the audience, answering one in particular about how he kept the heart of O’Malley’s books while producing some awesome fight sequences.

Wright: I was given the book when we were doing the “Shaun of the Dead” press tour in the States like 2004, so when the first volume came out, two of the producers cornered me at a screening and said, “we have your next movie,” which wasn’t entirely true because I went off to make “Hot Fuzz.” They told me it was Cameron Crowe meets the Five Deadly Venoms. By the time I actually read the book, I had forgotten about that and was just enjoying the opening in a similar way to “Shaun” and “Hot Fuzz”; the book is great because it starts in a reasonably real world and then explodes into something else.

Bryan had never seen “Spaced,” but it reminded me of “Spaced,” at least in the sense of the level of reality is that these characters who have grown up on this particular media and video games and animation, that they would almost play out their lives in this way. In “Spaced,” we had a lot of fantasy sequences and dream sequences. “Scott Pilgrim” felt like the dream scene that never ends.

At its heart, it’s a romcom. There’s elements of this in the books, but me and Michael Bacall, who wrote the script, [were inspired by the fact that] a lot of the Hong Kong action films are structured in exactly the same way as musicals and a lot of the fight scenes in those films are like production numbers. You’ll have two people fighting like a duet and then you’ll have a big number where there are lots of people fighting. Jackie Chan is very inspired by Gene Kelly, John Woo’s favorite film is “West Side Story” and in a strange way, the fight scenes in this, we tried to make them almost dancey in a way.

You have this metaphor of jumping through hoops and how much are you willing to do for one person. The thing is, Scott Pilgrim is already dating her. He has already scored, essentially, but then it’s like how much is he willing to fight for this relationship to survive and how does he deal with the baggage and somebody who has a past and is he man enough to get over that and grow up and see through it. That’s what’s amazing about the books, the central metaphor of fighting to keep a relationship alive. That’s what intrigued me to do it in the first place.

[Additional photos: "Fistful of Fingers," Blue Dolphin Film Distribution, 1995; "Shaun of the Dead," Rogue Pictures, 2004; "Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World," Universal Pictures, 2010]

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