The trio of writer/director/stars from The World’s End were all over Comic-Con with a party, roundtables and even a breakfast event to promote their latest film. I got several questions in with director Edgar Wright to bring you this early interview. The film reunites Wright with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also co-wrote the script with him. We’ll keep it spoiler-lite, though Wright didn’t mind discussing the details of the film’s threat.
I didn’t ask about Ant-Man because Wright hates getting asked about future projects. I learned that from interviews years ago, but with this “Cornetto” trilogy wrapped up with the third film, I was able to get some hints about Wright and the “Spaced” trio’s possible future together.
CraveOnline: This is the end of the unofficial trilogy, but do you imagine you’ll still be crossing genres in future films?
Edgar Wright: I think everything that I do will have an element of two different genres. I think a lot of the films I really love combine two different things and I think that’s not something I’m going to go away from. This has become like an unofficial trilogy, but once we realized we were going to do a third one and try and tie them all together, we wanted to make it a very definite wrap-up on certain themes. I know that we’ll work together again. It just might be something completely different.
READ: CraveOnline calls The World’s End “a remarkable, thoughtful comedy with memorable characters.”
And you’re so good at comedy, I’m not asking this because I want you to stop, but I’m curious: as a filmmaker, do you have any ideas that are away from comedy completely?
Yeah, I do actually. I’m actually developing a horror film that’s not funny in the slightest. It’s funny, whenever people ask me, “Oh, are you ever going to do a feature of Don’t,” I say I would rather do a straight horror film to be honest.
Did the threat, which we won’t give away, go through many different forms before you settled on what they are?
No, very early on I had this idea, and I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler, but I always found androids scary as a kid. Things like Westworld and Stepford Wives and the Autons in “Doctor Who” used to really creep me out. But also as a kid, if you ever did this with action figures, Action Man or Star Wars figures or even Barbie dolls, it was easy to take the heads off and take the arms off. I always find that whatever action figures I would have, they would at some point have lost legs and arms and heads. So there’s just this great image of seeing these kind of dolls without heads and arms, but they won’t stop fighting. That was something I thought it would be extremely creepy and vivid to have these almost like fighting dolls essentially.
Did your Scott Pilgrim experience pay off in the fight scenes?
Yeah, what was really nice about doing this film is it’s obviously a return to Britain and working with the cast again. I brought a lot of the crew from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz to Toronto to make Scott Pilgrim so there’s actually a lot of British crew on that. Then two people, Bill Pope the cinematographer and Brad Allen the stunt choreographer, an American and an Australian came to the UK to work on this. So that was really nice because then it was actually a combination of all the relationships I’ve had with crew over the last 10 years. There’s crew members way back from “Spaced” and then Bill Pope who shot The Matrix. I thought I’d bring an American cinematographer to shoot twelve pubs because pubs by their very nature are not very cinematic. I was thinking, “Let’s get the guy from The Matrix to shoot a pub. Let’s make this really shitty boozer look cinematic.” So I thought let’s get a foreigner’s eye on British boozers.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
