EDGAR WRIGHT
‘I DON’T THINK MY IMPOSTER SYNDROME HAS EVER GONE AWAY.’
Edgar Wright is sitting in his Soho home, just a couple of streets away from where Thomasin McKenzie’s Eloise lives in Last Night In Soho. It’s first thing Monday morning but he looks fresh-faced and full of beans – so much so that Total Film comments on his Ready Brek glow.
“I’ve just washed my hair,” he chuckles. “I actually feel sort of exhausted having done a year of press between Sparks [documentary The Sparks Brothers] and Soho. I’m happy that Soho’s out in the world, and people are watching it, whether that’s at the cinema, or whether that’s at home. But at the same time, I’m like: now what do I do? I feel bereft.”
Ah yes, with Last Night In Soho now coming out on DVD and Blu-ray, it really is time to let go of the film he’s lived with since 2007, when he first started dreaming of twin cautionary tales – one set now, one in the ’60s – about talented young women learning of the terrible darkness behind London’s glittering lights. “It’s funny,” muses Wright, taking off his glasses. “Whenever Quentin does a movie, he immediately announces afterwards, ‘I’m going to do this on stage’ or ‘I’m going to do a kind of sequel’ or ‘I’m going to do a novelisation’. And I know what he means, because it’s diffcult to say goodbye.”
Well, how about we use this point, as his sights must begin to turn forward and rove for the next project, to look back at not just Last Night In Soho but his career to date? With crash zooms and whip pans, we can excitedly journey from his DIY comedy western A Fistful Of Fingers and reinventing the British sitcom with Spaced to getting cinema licked with the Cornetto trilogy: Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End. We can roll with the punches as we toggle through Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Capture him in motion as he pens The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The for Steven Spielberg. Take a screeching hairpin turn with radio blaring into the crime world of . Chart the hit documentary . And pore over, in minute detail, why Wright’s movie didn’t make the big screen.
