Edgar Wright, director of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” and most recently “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” recently spoke on a conference call to a group of students about the challenges of adapting the comic book properly for film, the process of orchestrating music for the film and the effect that “Scott Pilgrim” has had on legions of fanboys just a few months after its release.
Q: Were you always a fan of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” comic books, and if so what were your major concerns translating the comic book into the movie?
Edgar Wright: I just started reading it as soon as it was published in 2004. I read the first volume when it came out and I was already in conversation with Bryan Lee O’Malley. He wrote the book before the second one was published, and so we were already working on the film as he was writing.
So I think very early on we figured how we weren’t going to be able to translate the entire book into the film, and how to make the film different and stand alone as its own piece. I just tried to involve Bryan with each step and there are great things that are in the book that are not in the film.
Q: How would you say that the Internet and the Internet community have helped “Scott Pilgrim” thrive beyond its initial theatrical run and made it this almost cult following that some have paralleled to “The Big Lebowski”?
Edgar Wright: All I can say is that it’s really interesting just hearing people’s stories on the Internet of how many times they saw it.
Through Twitter and Facebook, you hear lots of stories about people who saw it, and they saw it many, many times and dragged their friends to see it and became evangelists for the film. There’s one guy in Seattle who’s seen it 31 times and he photo blogged his ticket stubs to prove it.
I would hope it’s helpful when people are talking on the Internet about their responses to the film. A lot of film sites these days spend twice as much time talking about box office prospects and box office results than they do about the films themselves, so it’s nice to then also hear the fan’s response to just the material really.
I feel as if the Internet has been very kind to me over the years in terms of all of the things I’ve done: “Spaced,” “Shaun of the Dead,” and “Hot Fuzz.” I’m very overwhelmed by the response I get to the film from fans, and that means everything to me.
Q: Could you just talk briefly about how your relationship with Nigel Godrich came about and how he ended up doing some of the score elements for “Scott Pilgrim?”
Edgar Wright: We met through mutual friends about eight or nine years ago, and we had various mutual friends and then we became very good friends. We had always intended on doing something together. We were both fans of each others’ work.
And then “Scott Pilgrim” was the first thing that came up, and he was the person closest to me that I wanted his advice on how to pull off the music. And we got involved in that, in that capacity in helping get the bands together that contribute to the sound track.
Doing the score, I think, was just a challenge to him because he’d never done it before, and I thought it’d be great. So it’s his first ever score, and I think he found it very challenging doing it, something like the one thing in music that he hadn’t done. But I think he’s done an amazing job.
Contact the reporter at vburnton@asu.edu
