What an unlikely life Edgar Wright has led. The young director of ‘Scott Pilgrim vs the World’ shares his thoughts on existential angst and summering with the Tarantinos
‘IT’S FUNNY. I’ve never talked about this in an interview before,” Edgar Wright says. “But I remember, when I was younger, coming across the word ‘solipsism’ in a Stephen King book. It triggered this existential crisis at the age of 14. If nobody else existed, how would I know? That was a real worry.” You sense the young director still pondering that crisis in his new film.
Scott Pilgrim vs the World
, based on an admired comic book by Bryan Lee O’Malley, stars Michael Cera – dweeb
de nos jours
– as a Canadian youth shouldering a hundredweight of largely imagined problems. He has acquired a clingy girlfriend. His gay room-mate wants him to move out. He longs for a pink-haired American woman named Ramona. Scott experiences, in short, all the usual traumas of young adulthood.
It is the style of the film, rather than its plot, that reveals the hero’s self-absorption. Life is lived as if in a comic book or a video game – Scott’s other worlds. Antagonists have superpowers. Onomatopoeic expressions – Wham! Crash! Blam! – litter the screen.
"It is a form of geek wish fulfilment," Wright explains. "Think about it. Plenty of people have learned to fly from playing flight simulators, but nobody has ever learned how to street fight by playing Tekken. We wanted to play with that idea." (For those not of this world, Tekken is among that class of video games known as beat 'em ups.) Scholars of Wright's work will, while watching Scott Pilgrim, feel themselves on familiar ground. Now 36, bearded with boyish, busy eyes, Wright first established himself as director of the cultish Channel 4 comedy Spaced. That series, starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson as two gloomy flatmates, was positively promiscuous in its distribution of pop-cultural references. Star Trekand Star Warswere everywhere about. In 2004 the team collaborated on the surprise hit Shaun of the Dead– comic zombies in north London – and, against the odds, Wright became an instant idol among the postmodern hipster community. Hot Fuzz, a pastiche of action cinema, followed in 2007.
"Yes. This film is, actually, more like Spacedthan anything else I have done since then," he agrees. "We had a clear idea with that show. It's about people procrastinating their lives away through popular culture. What if we filmed their banal lives in the style of a comic or a film? It's this very fanciful version of reality."
When did he know the show – and Shaun of the Dead, for that matter – had passed into the territory of certifiable phenomenon? Spacedites and Shaunies are fanatical in their devotion. "It's funny. I don't think many people saw them first time round," he says. "People saw Spaced on video or on reruns. I don't think all that many people saw Shaun in cinemas either. I guess I knew it had taken off when people like Quentin and Steven mentioned it." As you may have deduced, that's Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg he's talking about.
Working with Joe Cornish, one half of British TV pranksters Adam and Joe, Wright has been writing Spielberg's upcoming version of Tintin. It is rumoured he knocked together the script for Scott Pilgrimin Tarantino's garden shed.
"Ha ha! Yes, I wrote the second draft in Quentin's guest house," he corrects me. "At the end of the press tour for Hot FuzzI found myself at a loose end and decided to write in LA. I'd become friendly with Quentin after Shaun and he asked me where I was going to stay. I said I'd rent somewhere and he said: 'No, no, no. Stay with me.' I ended up staying for a year." A year? Good grief. I imagine Quentin popping down the garden every few hours with a tray of HobNobs. Then again, I suppose Tarantino has somebody to do that for him.
"No, no. It was the most amazing thing, actually. I remember Joe was there when we were writing Tintinand Quentin was writing Inglourious Basterds. The doorbell would go and he'd come in to try out some dialogue on us. He particularly read the Churchill bits to us, to get the Britishness right."
What an unlikely life Wright has led. No wonder he occasionally doubts the reality of the outside world. Raised in Dorset, he and his brother began playing around with a Super-8 camera when they were teenagers. His first experiment comprised a slow-motion sequence following various stuffed toys – including a teddy dressed as Superman – as they were unwillingly propelled through a second-storey window. It sounds like a characteristic early entry in the Wright oeuvre.
Years later, at art college, he somehow managed to knock together a pastiche western entitled Fistful of Fingersand got it screened at the Prince Charles cinema in central London. Wright makes no claims for the film's quality but acknowledges it launched his career. Matt Lucas and David Walliams, later to create Little Britain,were fans and helped Wright get work at the BBC.
"To be honest I felt like I'd screwed up with Fistful of Fingers," he says. "But I got another chance. I essentially went to university at the BBC. It was a very high-profile way to learn the trade, but it worked. When I was at the BBC, I think, everyone presumed that I was the runner or somebody's son." Steve Wright's son, perhaps. "Yeah. Maybe I should have claimed that. It was very strange. Before I was 25 I was directing Alexei Sayle and Jennifer Saunders. I was the youngest guy there, and I guess it might have rubbed some people up the wrong way."
He comes across as an easy-going, overgrown fanboy, but, noting his rapid, unstoppable rise, one comes to the inevitable conclusion that there is a driven, steely side to Wright. Look where young Edgar is today. He is writing the next Steven Spielberg film. He is regularly seen out and about with Anna Kendrick, star of Scott Pilgrimand Up in the Air. The doubting solipsist must, surely, have to pinch himself from time to time.
“Definitely. But the funny thing is that people like Quentin and Steven turn out to be exactly who you think them to be. I still do pinch myself, though. It’s astonishing to meet all your directorial heroes. What I learned after Shaun of the Dead was never bad-mouth anybody. In this business you will probably meet them – and they will turn out to be really nice.”
When considering Wright's career, one question nags ever so slightly. Fantastically entertaining as his work is, the films and series all revolve around pastiche, parody and postmodern quotation. Is there an entirely straight piece of work bursting to get out? Where's his Tess of the d'Urbervilles?
"I guess Scott Pilgrimmight be as far as I can push that kind of film-making," he says. "I wouldn't do a film shot the same way again. But they are all really personal to me – even that thing about the teenage solipsist keeps coming through."
Stephen King has a great deal to answer for.
Comic book creations: A life beyond men in tights
Over the past few decades the scope of the comic book has widened far beyond the affairs of superpersons in tights. Of course, the underground comic, as exemplified by the work of 1960s tricksters such as Robert Crumb and Bill Griffith, always concerned itself with wider issues: sex, drugs, drugs, sex and so forth. But from the 1980s onwards the comic book began to stretch itself into all corners of experience.
Only the crumbliest fogey now expresses surprise at the existence of Joe Sacco's Palestine(a tale of the West Bank) or Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis(growing up in post-revolutionary Iran). Yet the comic book didn't quite escape its roots.
Scott Pilgrim, a series of black-and-white, digest-sized books by Bryan Lee O'Malley, shows how far the genre has come and how much it still clings to the geek aesthetic. Pilgrim is an ordinary young man from Toronto who, when not playing bass in a band called Sex Bob-omb, yearns for a girl named Ramona Flowers. Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life(2004), the first book in the series – and the basis for Edgar Wright's film – finds Scott going up against a series of Ramona's ex-boyfriends.
O’Malley expresses the concerns of real people through the language of video games, bubblegum pop and superhero comics. (A Bob-omb is an explosive beast from Super Mario Brothers.) Just when you thought the genre had escaped the trash continuum it gets dragged screaming back home.
