Edgar Wright has a strike rate that would make Ashton Agar blush.
In the last decade, the director released three films — Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim Vs The World — and all three achieved 'instant classic' status with legions of dedicated fans. His latest effort, The World's End, concludes the Cornetto Trilogy that began with Shaun and Hot Fuzz, and it's about a bittersweet an ending as you could hope for.
The film tells the tale of Gary King, an absolute train wreck of a human being played by Simon Pegg (a Wright regular going back to cult TV series Spaced). Once considered the king of the castle in high school, King has been unable to move on with his life, and his attempts to relive the past culminate when he gathers four of his old friends to finish off a pub crawl they started 20 years ago.
Naturally, because this is an Edgar Wright film, what follows is no ordinary pub crawl.
We caught up with the filmmaker/genius/Cornetto enthusiast to discuss the perils of nostalgia, the virtues of growing up without a VCR, and the appeal of the apocalypse.
{youtube}qlv32GnrodA|560|420|0{/youtube}
You hosted a screening of Shaun Of The Dead at the Astor Theatre in St Kilda last night. You must have seen that movie thousands of times — is it possible to get sick of Shaun Of The Dead?
I didn't actually watch it! [Laughs] Because I have seen it so many times. I introduced it, and then I came back for the Q&A. Simon and Nick [Frost] turned up as well to surprise the audience, which was great.
Shaun was a lovable loser, whereas Gary King, the – for lack of a better word – hero of The World's End, is almost David Brent-like in how unlikable he is. Was it a challenge to write such a cringeworthy protagonist?
Gary is a deeply flawed hero, but – without giving too much away – part of the film is about what it means to be human, and part of that is that humans make mistakes. So we were trying to create this extremely unlikely hero, and find some redemption for him, in a way.
He's almost like a horror movie villain, in the way that he's like a physical manifestation of that fear, that anxiety, of being stuck in the past. Is that fear of being like Gary King, of getting stuck in a particular stage of your life, something that motivates you to push things forward?
I think so! Even the fact that he's still dressed in his high school goth clothes... we talked about him as The Ghost Of Sixth Forms Past. He's like a goth wraith! What's nice is that you've got five friends, and four of them are grown-ups with proper clothes and everything, and then Simon shows up wearing his black trenchcoat, Sisters Of Mercy t-shirt, dyed black hair and sunglasses. So we wanted him to feel like he was The Ghost Of Christmas Past come to haunt them.
That's kind of what the movie's about, in a way — it's a cautionary tale about the dangers of looking backwards. Gary King is desperate to relive his glory days, and as soon as they do that, it starts to go badly wrong. They want to recreate this wild night, and they get a very different kind of wild night as their punishment.
Do you know people like Gary King in real life?
I think everybody knows somebody like that. The kid who was the king of the castle, but peaked at 18. I think most people have a friend like that. I think both me and Simon have a lot of sympathy for him in a way. We wanted to create this character that was a car crash of a human being, and find some way that he can snatch triumph from the jaws of defeat. And in a way, what the movie's about is people being happy where they are. At the start of the movie, at least, it doesn't seem like the adults are necessarily that happy with where they are. It only takes a couple of drinks for them to regress to their teenage dynamic.
You started to write this script decades ago, or at least a very different version of it called Crawl...
It's definitely not the same story at all, it's definitely not the same script. What it was is that I wrote a script when I was 21 that was about teenagers on a pub crawl, so it was somewhat like the first three minutes of this film. So it wasn't this story, it was actually something about teenagers. And then it occurred to me later, after having gone back to my hometown to film Hot Fuzz, it occurred to me that there was something richer and more interesting in the idea of adults trying to recreate their teenage glory years.
Yeah. This is the type of movie that has a lot to say about society and the homogenisation of civilisation. There's the running joke that all the bars they visit look exactly the same, for example. Do you think that Gary King's nostalgia is justified, to an extent? That things were better in the past?
I think what we try to do in the movie is show both sides of the coin. Hopefully that's one of the things that's funny about it, is that both sides have a point. You can side with Gary and say, 'The bars were better then and everything's kind of shit now'. On the other hand, the extraterrestrial forces in the movie see themselves as completely benevolent.
If you take, say, Starbucks as an example... it's easy to build up Starbucks as this huge ogre of globalisation. But on the flipside, the coffees they were replacing in the independent cafes were pretty terrible most of the time! [Laughs] I went on a road trip from New York to LA once, and I decided I'd only drink coffee from old fashioned diners. But I'd usually end up tipping the coffee out of a window. I'd go in there, pay them, patronise them, give them two dollars for a coffee, take a couple of sips and then just pour it out. When I finally got to the West Coast and Starbucks started cropping up again I was like, 'Oh, thank God for that!'
So I think, as a planet, we're very happy to be homogeneous, in a way. Just look at the way Apple can completely take over everybody's lives!
So in real life, it's not like aliens are doing this to us. We're doing it to ourselves.
We're just rolling over and taking it! We're like, 'Okay, fine, this seems more efficient. I'll just give you my life.'
{youtube}4lSzlTlYZs4|560|420|0{/youtube}
Are you prone to attacks of nostalgia? Are you one to romanticise the past?
Yeah. I don't know whether I romanticise it, but I am prone to attacks of nostalgia in the sense that I think back a lot. You know, nostalgia is a medical condition. I often wonder why, when I have a busy and full life now, I still think about my teenage years all the time; why I want to redo things from when I was at school or on dates. I'm fascinated by why I would be so obsessed. I think that's basically what propels the movie.
So that's Gary's obsession with recreating the past, and then on top of that... the twist in the tale, and I think a lot of people have had this experience, is returning to your hometown and finding that it's changed without you. Have you gotten older, or has the town changed? In the film, it's both. So that fit perfectly with the idea of doing a paranoid sci-fi film about your hometown not being what it once was. It just seemed really rich.
What we tried to do with this one, even more so than in Shaun Of The Dead or Hot Fuzz, is make the two genres — the character comedy and the sci-fi stuff — really dovetail together, so everything is intertwined all the time. And as they start to get deeper into the mystery, the alcohol itself is like a magic potion sending them back to their teenage years; they become looser and more juvenile and more silly as they go along.
You mentioned that you returned to your hometown to shoot Hot Fuzz. What sort of feeling do you get when you go back there? And now that you've made successful films, do people treat you differently there?
Well, they were very happy with Hot Fuzz, so that was a fun thing. A lot of people were very proud of the association. My parents actually moved away from there, though. My parents retired and moved away. They weren't from that town originally, either. So there's quite a strange feeling of suddenly having your hometown severed, in that, you know, if I went back to my hometown now, my family aren't there. That's an interesting experience in itself.
It's an anchor, you know, and part of growing up is having to actually let go of that anchor. So by my parents moving away from my hometown, it's like, 'Well, I guess I'm on my own now. I don't have this hometown to go back to. I have no reason to go back there.' And I think that's the thing with Simon's character, Gary, because he hasn't moved on, he'll always wax lyrical about this town. Whereas the other four of them think, 'this place is a shithole; why would I want to come back here? This place is a black hole, I have no reason to come back here.' In the end, Simon's character has to resort to emotional blackmail to get them to come.
All of your films have fantasy elements, but they're all set in towns that are more or less like the town in The World's End. Believable, real world locations. There's no Edgar Wright movie set on Pandora. Why is that?
I think it's just what I relate to. I grew up in a small town. Shaun Of The Dead is set in the London suburb in which I live. I'm looking at it from my point of view, you know? Especially with these three films. It's kind of why we made them a connecting trilogy, because they all have interlocking themes and overlapping themes, and we just tried to wrap some of them up for good in The World's End. And one of the things that links them is hopefully that relatability of not being set in a Hollywood environment or on an alien planet or in the middle of tourist-y London.
When I was a kid, films that were set in small towns tended to resonate with me more than watching Godzilla smash up Tokyo. I'd be more interested in things like Bodysnatchers or Stepford Wives; it was the things set in small towns that I found more resonant, you know?
Yeah. Speaking of your hometown, you grew up without a video player, which, you know... A) How did you live? B) How have you seen so many movies?
Good old network TV! Back in the day when they didn't used to play fucking quiz shows after midnight, most of my film knowledge came from watching films on TV. I didn't get a VCR until I was... I think I bought one eventually, because my parents just refused to buy me one, because they were broke. Eventually I got enough Saturday job money to get one.
But up until then I relied on what was on at my local cinema, which was very mainstream — there was no Astor near me, unfortunately — and, you know, whatever was on network TV. Which usually meant staying up late and watching Hammer movies long after midnight. A generation has lost out on watching Hammer horror movies, because they're not on TV anymore.
Well, I was going to ask you about that. Do you think the ability to watch essentially any movie, anytime, anywhere you want, takes away from the specialness of movies at all?
I don't think it takes away from the specialness, but it's funny... for a lot of directors my age or older, it's that thing where, when you were younger and there was less choice, you watched something because it was on. You eventually saw a wide variety of stuff because you didn't just watch what you thought you wanted to watch; you would watch a movie because it was on. So I think that maybe I have a breadth of film knowledge because I was just excited to watch a film, full stop.
Whereas now, with cable and streaming and everything else, you can just seek out the films that you think you want to watch. Do you know what I mean? Rather than it being put on a plate in front of you, like, you know, 'Eat your vegetables, you're watching this now'. It's interesting, because in a way, film programmers on the TV of old put your syllabus together.
{youtube}0Tmj6C3AeSk|560|420|0{/youtube}
Between The World's End, This Is The End, Pacific Rim, and let's throw Sharknado in there, there's a lot of apocalyptic fiction going around. Do you think it's as simple as 2012 stirring up talk of the apocalypse, or do you think there's more to it than that?
I think there's an element of that, maybe, but we had come up with the idea for this film back in 2007, way before the Mayan apocalypse. In our case, there actually is a bar called The World's End, so it had to be that title. We never ever wavered from that title. Me and Simon used to meet in this bar called The World's End in Camden, and I used to think it was such a weird sentence to say: 'I'll see you at The World's End.' So that became the ultimate destination.
In terms of why it's such a prevalent theme... I do have a theory about it. When I was a kid, I felt like a lot of sci-fi was a bit more optimistic. When I was growing up, the space race still existed. I thought, when I was a little kid, that we'd all be living on the moon by 2010, and of course that isn't true. I think because of that, and because of the knowledge that we may never get to other planets in our lifetime, and maybe there isn't anything else that is actually reachable in our lifetime, the focus goes inward. The focus is on us destroying ourselves. So it's a bit of a downer, but I think that's basically what it is. Most sci-fi and horror films are concentrating on smashing the world up.
But it is interesting. I feel like, and this is not by design, our film has come along at the end of a cycle where people are starting to tire of the world being trashed.
So I guess in that sense it's a little bit like Shaun Of The Dead, when you guys weren't planning for it to come out amongst a wave of zombie movies, but it just worked out that way.
Yeah, that was just a coincidence. Yeah, absolutely. I think, in that case, me and Simon had got talking about it because the Resident Evil games had started coming out, and that got me and Simon talking about how much we loved George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead. That's what sparked that off. At the time we started writing Shaun, we weren't aware of 28 Days Later. When we found out, we were like, 'wait, what? There's another British zombie film?' I think those things just happen. But with our movie, it's a very specific vision, and it's essentially not an apocalypse movie, but a 'night that's gone wrong' movie that starts to get bigger and crazier.
This is obviously the end of the Blood And Ice Cream Trilogy. You've said elsewhere that this film draws a line under the theme of delayed adolescence that runs through all your movies. I guess what I'm wondering is, can you draw a line under that? Given how many film protagonists go through some sort of delayed adolescence, given that it's even a part of the Scott Pilgrim film, which isn't part of the Blood And Ice Cream Trilogy...
Yeah!
Is that a theme you can walk away from?
I think so. You know, a lot of movies glorify the man-child, especially a lot of American comedies. They sort of deal with that subject, but they never really scratch below the surface. I think in this one, we tried to be a bit more honest and frank about it, to the point where it veers into much rawer territory than something like Spaced. Although, you know, somebody said to me recently, 'Do you think this is a darker film than Shaun Of The Dead?' And I said, 'Well, he does shoot his mum in the head in Shaun Of The Dead, so that's pretty dark'. I think both of them are dark chocolate.
I think, for the moment, this is what we wanted to say on the subject. Without giving too much away about how it wraps up, I think we put our characters in a very final resting place, in terms of that theme.
The World's End is in cinemas from August 1.
