In Profile: Edgar Wright
With conclusion to ‘the Cornetto trilogy’, The World’s End in cinemas from Friday, we take a look at the ascendancy of its director, Edgar Wright…
“They haven’t seen each other in 20 years but tonight they’re returning to their home town to finish the ultimate pub crawl. And this time they’re going to make it to the last pub: The World’s End.”
So goes the voiceover on one of the trailers for new Edgar Wright film, The World’s End. The first thing that strikes us about both the voiceover and the trailer is that, were this almost any other UK director, we’d likely have immediate misgivings about the quality of this product. The second thing? We’d probably never find out if those misgivings were misplaced because we wouldn’t be forking out the money to see it.
That this is a film by Wright however turns all of those preconceptions on their head; instead expectations for The World’s End – thankfully – are formed on the basis of the previous two instalments in the so-called ‘Cornetto trilogy’, Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Simply put, while his output is resolutely ‘English’, it differs from anybody you could call a contemporary.
How did he come to enjoy such a rarefied station? In 1994 he directed the Somerset-set Western, A Fistful of Fingers, but it was with turn-of-the-millennium sitcom Spaced (broadcast between 1999 and 2001) that many will first have come to encounter his flair for funny, authentic work, using pastiche and homage to great effect.
Created by himself, Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes), Spaced is that rare thing – running for just two series, it is a show which left its following wanting more. And, we’re sorry to learn, they’ll be left wanting – interviewed in the Guardian Guide recently, Wright said: “One of the reasons for me that there’s no Spaced 3 is that I don’t think you can pretend to be 26 forever.”
Post-Spaced, when Shaun Of The Dead – riffing lovingly on the films of George A. Romero while supplanting the action to suburban north London – came along in 2004, it proved the litmus test for the director’s budding movie career (he was just 30 at the time); garnering both critical and commercial acclaim (it has to date taken more than $30 million worldwide in box office receipts), it was perhaps even more successful than Wright and co-writer/star Pegg had hoped.
Bolstered by its success the pair considered a sequel, but plumped instead for a very rural-England take on the high-octane cop movie, in 2007′s Hot Fuzz. Again the action revolves around Pegg’s everyman character and sees him paired once more with best bud from Spaced and Shaun, Nick Frost. It’s a winning combination, one central to much of the believable emotion in all of the above.
Next up, and his only foray to date into American features, was 2010’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, adapted from Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels. If not quite a flop at the box office, the experience on Pilgrim means a return to familiar territory with The World’s End is a welcome one, likely both for him as much as his audience.
Having made a zom-rom-com (Shaun) and a shoot ‘em up (Hot Fuzz), Wright – quite logically if you think about it – has turned to sci-fi as a context to The World’s End. Well, that and a pub crawl; whatever the nature of the action, as with much of Wright’s work, it will be the humour and on-screen relationships that decide whether he has another success on his hands.
As Simon Pegg’s ageing Goth character Gary King remarks in the film, they’re “Just…friends on a night out having a good time”, which zombies, murderous scheming yokels and robots aside, is pretty much how it feels watching the best of the 39 year old’s output.
The World’s End opens in cinemas Friday 19th July
