Two Wrights Make a Wrong
by James Roland
The windows look like frames on a filmstrip as faces whiz left to right in a blur, folks staring out the train windows as it pulls into the station.
It slows down enough to distinguish individual people, revealing a man with sunken cheeks, a ghastly scowl, and a suit covered in blood. The effect is startling.
Life size decals of zombie torsos, plastered to the windows, create the effect of a subway laden with the undead. Amidst the ghouls, the hapless face of Shaun appeared, on his way to work in a white shirt with a spot of red.
That was the first time I saw Simon Pegg.
It was April of 2004 and I’d just spent three weeks bumming in a borrowed flat in Epping. Days consisted of filling my backpack with cheap food, riding the Underground to London, and finding all the things I could do for free. The marketing for Shaun of the Dead was everywhere, a punny title that riffed one of my favorite movies of all time.
The tagline “A Romantic Comedy. With Zombies.” earned the film an eye-roll from me, but after a week of exposure I decided it wise to spend some of my precious money on a British-made zombie film while I was in England. I found a poster and checked the date. It released on April 9th, my flight left on April 8th.
I consoled myself with seeing the Dawn of the Dead remake instead, which just happened to be in theaters at the time. If I had it to do over again, I’d call the airline and pay to extend my ticket.
When I finally rented the DVD, I was stunned with how good the film turned out to be. Not “good for what it is” or “good compared to what I thought” but genuinely, quantifiably great. The story takes standard zombie fare and remains true to Romero canon, while finding natural humor that twists the ideas in a new direction. The acting manages to be comedic without being self-aware and the film ranges from laugh-out-loud hilarious (Nick Frost winding the disposable camera for a second shot) to heart wrenching (Shaun killing his own mother). But most of all, it manages to be both funny and scary, an almost impossible task.
I Googled Edgar Wright and was surprised to find only one other film credit to his name. I read some blog comment about how good his show Spaced was and managed to download a single, low-res episode. It was fun, but hard to understand out of context, so I eagerly awaited his next film, Hot Fuzz, to see what else he had up his sleeve.
The film was more of a deconstruction than Shaun, veering into near-spoof territory in the final scenes, but it still showed a stunning control of editing and cinematography for such an early film in a director’s career (his third, after Shaun and the little-seen A Fistful of Fingers).
When Hot Fuzz hit DVD I snatched it up and devoured hours of behind the scenes footage and interviews, so when I heard a familiar voice behind me while waiting in line at the Hollywood Arclight Theatre, I instinctively spun around to say “hi” — not realizing why I recognized the voice until I was facing one of my favorite directors with my hand raised and my mouth hanging open.
He gave me the “I know you know me” look and I turned back to face the counter, not having a single thing to say to him that wouldn’t sound stalkery.
This is the first time I almost met Edgar Wright.
The second time was just a year later, at the 2008 Comic-Con. I’d scored an interview with Wright, Pegg, and Jessica Hynes for the American DVD release of Spaced.
I’d never been to Comic-Con and it was a last-minute decision to attend. The roads were packed with pedestrians, the public transit was overflowing with bodies, the hotels were all booked (not that I could afford them) and I didn’t know a single person in San Diego. As a result, I spent the first night sleeping in my car. The second night was unbearably hot, so I literally slept under a hedge in a park and woke up at 6am when the sprinklers turned on.
I ran my fingers through my hair, hopped on the trolly, and made my way to the convention center for the interview, hoping I didn’t reek of night sweat and fertilizer.
The staff ushered me to a small round table and there was my name and outlet … right next to a journalist from the BBC.
All I could think about was being asked to leave, like somehow they’d figure out I was living like a homeless person at night or I wouldn’t get a word in with real journalists at the table.
Hynes seemed bemused by the whole experience, not quite believing she was Stateside for a show she’d written a decade before. But Pegg is a commanding physical presence, with a bold gaze and broad shoulders, not at all the meek nerdling he often plays. When he sat down, the table fell into a vacuous silence. Not one reporter spoke, so I stepped into the void and asked them what it was like to dive back into the world of Spaced seven years after the last episode aired.
The result was instantaneous. Pegg and Hynes lit up, telling stories about writing in each other’s living rooms, a couple of twenty-somethings with no idea the successful careers they had ahead of them. (Pegg is the current “hey, that guy’s in everything!” Hollywood character actor and Hynes is a successful television writer and actress, most recognizable in America as the tenth Doctor’s unrequited love from the popular Doctor Who reboot.)
Throughout the interview, Wright pulled into himself, letting his actors take center stage. With the limited time he said very little, and it’s a shame I didn’t get to ask him a proper question.
Three years later, Wright released his first major film without Simon Pegg and Nick Frost: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
My review was glowing, but it wasn’t until a subsequent viewing on blu-ray that it finally hit home; Wright is one of the very best directors working today.
Scott Pilgrim is at first blush a silly, surface-level love song to video games and hipster slackers, but the craft is unparalleled by any movie since Kill Bill.
Any film deemed “good” has worked a miracle, weaving the disparate elements of light, sound, emotion, costumes, make-up, CGI, and dialog into a cohesive whole, but the way Scott Pilgrim integrates these things seamlessly, hanging important story points and tentpole jokes on moments that require all these elements to work, all while pushing the boundaries of these elements farther than most movies dare. That’s an utterly impossible feat, yet the film exists. It’s the definition of “movie magic.”
Re-watching the first two installments of the wonderful “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy” , it’s easier to see the mad genius underneath the silly genre trappings. Shaun of the Dead is not just a wonderfully executed zombie flick, it’s also quite a profound statement about accepting adulthood. Hot Fuzz is not just a ludicrous deconstruction of action films, it’s an unpretentious sermon about accepting people and things for what they are without judgment (and a primer in Michael Bay apologetics).
Scott Pilgrim also has a lot to say, though it does so with the brash directness of the video game storytelling it emulates. When Scott pulls a pixelated super sword from his own chest while a digital voice proclaims “Scott has unlocked the power of self esteem” there’s not a lot of room for debate as to the message. While the film wears its theme on its sleeve in bright, blinking, glowing letters, this is precisely the right choice for the story.
What makes Wright’s work to date so incredible is also his Achilles heel; his movies are so effortlessly fun that they might seem like fluff.
Which brings us to the statement that prompted this blog post, a quote about Wright’s latest film The World’s End from a fellow writer from the Movie-Moron.com forum:
Really disappointing. The laughs are few and far between and I didn’t like the absurdly over-choreographed fighting. Edgar Wright is forever destined to be a budget Sam Raimi/Quentin Tarantino hybrid.
I have three issues with this statement. One, it implies that being a blend of two amazing directors is a bad thing. Two, it suggests that Wright somehow stole from these directors (any more that all artists inherently steal from what’s been done before), and three, it suggests that working on lower budget films is a bad thing.
To date, Wright’s most expensive film was Scott Pilgrim, a story packed with visual effects which cost only 60 million. For comparison, that’s four times less than Man of Steel, a third of Pacific Rim, about half the budget of Elysium and twenty million less than Grown Ups 2.
The World’s End (which opens this weekend) cost just twenty million and boasts complicated fight scenes and many visual effects.
Wright has done more with less money than any current “big movie” director, except maybe Neill Blomkamp’s first film District 9. In a time when Spielberg and Lucas are harbingers for a bloated blockbusters apocalypse, this is surely a good thing. The fact that he takes these smaller budgets and makes some of the most creative and well-crafted cinema of our time, all the better.
If early buzz is correct, The World’s End looks to be a success for Wright and his cohort. With Ant-Man, his addition to the Marvel movie universe on the horizon, folks that complain about a lack of imagination or innovation in Hollywood these days should pre-order their tickets now.
James Roland’s work also can be found at Medium Cowboy: Essays on Story and Cinema
