CraveOnline: It’s a very sensitive movie to robots. We find out “robot” is a slur.
Edgar Wright: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like a racial slur. It’s like calling somebody a slave.
Did you find this out while you were researching it? Like, “Oh, we have to make that plot point?”
I think I knew that already, but then when we were writing it we researched it. I think it’s always a good thing to do, if you’re writing, is to look up the etymology of a word. Oh, yeah, robot means slave. Robot is the Czech word for slave. That’s where it comes from, that’s what it means, so it’s like they are servants. So then we had this thing where they saw that as a demeaning term. They saw themselves as free. It was a nice thing to play on that, because then even the humans, [when they’re] asking the humans, “Are you a robot?” They go, “No, no, no, no, no… I’m a free man!”
I didn’t know that about robots, and when I was watching it I thought, “Is that why they changed Robotnik’s name to Eggman?”
We say that, don’t we? The Czech word is “robotnik.” That’s where it comes from, yeah.
This is the third time you’ve cast Bill Nighy as a disapproving authority figure.
[Laughs] Well, he’s got the voice! He’s got the amazing voice for it. It was funny, when I told him… I knew he was busy and stuff. I remember in Hot Fuzz, he passed on it initially. He said, “I don’t really want to be in it. I don’t want to just do a cameo.” I said, “But it is, like, The Chief Inspector.” And then he changed his mind. And in this one I said, I have a part for you, and it’s a really big part. You’re omnipresent in the entire film, and even better, you don’t actually have to do a day filming. [Laughs] He did his session before we shot, so we had him playing [back] on set. And then he re-recorded some of it, but his voice was there on set, which was funny.
All the Cornetto films have one epic fence jump gag. Did you figure out what those gags would be a long time ago? Or were the different versions?
No, no, no. When we wrote Shaun of the Dead we had no idea there was going to be a second and third film. I don’t want to lie and say there were nine parts of a film series. We had no idea that there was going to be a second or third one. But once we did Hot Fuzz and we started thinking about a third one, we thought about ways of wrapping certain things up, you know?
There’s a trivia track on the Blu-ray and they clarified that you changed your aspect ratios and film stock a couple of times. Wait, not the ratios…
Not the ratios. We went from spherical anamorphic to [anamorphic].
Why was that important to you?
You get [other] lighting effects. You get better lens flare from anamorphic. So in an effort to save a bit of money on stock we started on spherical in the daytime, and then it starts to switch when they start getting drunk. That’s when we switch to anamorphic. It’s funny. People always think that lens flare is added in post, but all of the lens flares from the blanks are all real, shot on location. So those shots when Simon is running away from the blanks, the lights are real. They’re running with those lights on. When you saw those shots, even as they were happening, it looked really cool. Then when you look through anamorphic, all of the eyes are blown out, it just looks great. Those lenses really help with that. That was the idea basically.
In looking at the blanks and looking at the fights, it became very, very clear that you liked ripping the arms off of action figures and putting them back on again as a kid.
Yeah.
Was it He-Man? That’s what it was for me.
I didn’t really have any He-Man, sorry. I had Action Man, which is sort of a U.K. version of G.I. Joe, and Star Wars figures and stuff. I also had a Six Million Dollar Man. I remember taking his arm off and his head off. I had some of the figures from The Black Hole, believe it or not.
Wow.
I know, amazing right? I wish I still had them. So yes, exactly that. But especially Action Man. I used to pop the heads off, and then sometimes you just couldn’t get the back on. You’re left with dismembered soldiers and stuff. Headless and legless action figures. You got the head off and you couldn’t ever get it back on again.
All of your films have had serious themes, but they’ve been very whimsical. Is there a dead serious courtroom drama you have in the back of your head somewhere?
[Laughs] I’d like a straight horror film. I think that would be a real challenge, and really fun. I’d like to do something where I attempt to scare myself, you know? I think that would be a real challenge. I’d like to do that sometime, yeah.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
