You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead Was Brought to Life

By Clark Collis

As featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, MovieMaker, SYFY, Fangoria, Yahoo's "It List", SFX, Mental Floss, Total Film, Mashable and more!

How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?

You’ve Got Red on You details the previously untold story of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, the hilarious, terrifying horror-comedy whose fan base continues to grow and grow. After speaking with dozens of people involved in the creation of the film, author Clark Collis reveals how a group of friends overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to make a movie that would take bites out of both the UK and the US box office before ascending to the status of bona fide comedy classic.

Featuring in-depth interviews with director Edgar Wright, producer Nira Park, and cast members Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Bill Nighy, Lucy Davis, and Coldplay singer Chris Martin, the book also boasts a treasure trove of storyboards, rare behind-the-scenes photos, and commentary from famous fans of the movie, including filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, Walking Dead executive producer Greg Nicotero, and World War Z author Max Brooks.

As Pegg’s zombie-fighting hero Shaun would say, “How’s that for a slice of fried gold?”

• Language: English
• Publisher: 1984 Publishing
• Release date: Nov 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9781948221207

Book preview

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YOU’VE GOT RED ON YOU

Copyright © 2021 by Clark Collis.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of nonfiction. The events and experiences detailed herein have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author and interviewees, to the best of their ability.

ART DIRECTION & LAYOUT DESIGN: Shane Lewis / Desiree Lewis

COVER DESIGN: HagCult

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2021939684

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021939684

ISBN: 9781948221153 (hardcover)

1984 Publishing logo is © and ™ of 1984 Publishing, LLC.

1984 PUBLISHING

Cleveland, Ohio / USA

1984Publishing.com

[e-mail]

Contact the author at [e-mail]

FIRST EDITION

ISBN: 9781948221153 (hardcover)

9781948221207 (e-book)

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 2

BEST FRIENDS OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 3

SCRIPT OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 4

DEAL OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 5

CAST AND CREW (AND ZOMBIES) OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 6

SHOOT OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 7

PUB OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 8

RETURN OF THE SHOOT OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 9

RELEASE OF THE DEAD

CHAPTER 10

RELEASE OF THE DEAD PART II

CHAPTER 11

CORNETTOS OF THE DEAD

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IMAGE CREDITS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rosencrantz: Shouldn’t we be doing something… constructive?

Guildenstern: What did you have in mind?

—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard

Shaun: Take car. Go to Mum’s. Kill Phil – ‘Sorry!’ – grab Liz, go to The Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for all of this to blow over. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

Ed: Yeah, boy-eee!

—Shaun of the Dead, by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright

PROLOGUE

Simon Pegg paced around the kitchen of his home in the north London neighbourhood of Crouch End, waiting for the phone to ring. It was the evening of 26 March 2004, and the 34-year-old stand-up comedian and TV actor had just entered a new phase of his career – or hoped to have done so – portraying the title role in the low-budget horror-comedy film Shaun of the Dead.

Pegg had co-written Shaun of the Dead with the film’s director, Edgar Wright. The pair had previously collaborated on the TV sitcom Spaced, which starred Pegg and Jessica Hynes as two impoverished acquaintances who pretend to be a couple so they can rent a flat. Spaced rapidly developed a cult following, but the show left screens after just two seven-episode seasons, partly so that Pegg and Wright could concentrate on developing Shaun of the Dead.

The chances that the movie would get made, let alone be a success, were slim. There was no guarantee that Pegg’s small-screen fame would translate into box-office takings, and Wright’s sole previous movie, the comedy-Western A Fistful of Fingers, had been released for just one week at a single London cinema almost a decade earlier. British horror films were a rarity at the time, and zombie movies had long fallen out of fashion. They went quiet after Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, says Pegg of Jackson’s 1983 hit song and its John Landis-directed video. "Everyone had seen zombies body-popping, and it took the wind out of their scary sails. They became something of a joke, and the zombie genre went a bit dormant. It came back to life, if you’ll pardon the pun, with the Resident Evil games. And that’s what inspired us."

The decision to take time out to write Shaun of the Dead was a particular gamble for Wright, who was an in-demand TV director, even though he was still in his 20s. I was getting a lot of offers, he says. I was saying ‘No’ to all of it because I wanted to concentrate on the script. At one point during the lengthy process of getting the project off the ground, Pegg lent Wright money so his friend could pay his rent. I was completely broke and borrowing money off friends, Wright says. I still owe Simon Pegg £500. He refuses to let me pay it back because he wants to hold the debt over me forever. Absolutely true.

The interest is insane now, notes Pegg. I’m sure it’s more like £900.

Eventually, producer Nira Park secured the film’s budget from WT2, a subsidiary of the production company Working Title. Wright shot Shaun of the Dead in the summer of 2003 on location in London and at the capital’s famed Ealing Studios.

In the movie, Pegg plays Shaun, who works as assistant manager at an electronics store, where his younger subordinates treat him with contempt. At night, he and his best friend, a small-time drug dealer named Ed, hang out at a pub called The Winchester Tavern, close to their home in north London. Shaun’s fondness for the hostelry and his general fecklessness irritate his girlfriend Liz, who dumps Shaun when he forgets to book a restaurant table and then gives her flowers that were clearly intended for his mother, Barbara.

Heartbroken, Shaun embarks on a night of drinking at The Winchester with Ed. When the pair awake, they belatedly realise that they are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, with the streets of London full of the undead. After making the dubious decision that The Winchester is the best place to wait out the disaster, Shaun and Ed pick up Liz, Barbara, Shaun’s dreaded stepfather Philip, and a couple of Liz’s friends, and head to the pub. There, in traditional zombie-movie style, the group is gruesomely whittled down. At the film’s conclusion, the zombie plague has been contained and Shaun and Liz are living together in domestic bliss, with the zombified Ed dwelling in their garden shed.

Shaun of the Dead was due to receive a wide release in the UK, but its future across the Atlantic was less certain. Wright and Pegg had written a defiantly British movie whose hero, at least initially, fights the undead with a cricket bat. At that point, we never really thought it would come out in America, Park recalls.

The movie’s executive producer Jim Wilson arranged for American horror director George A. Romero to watch the film, in the hope that he would give it a buzz-generating quote. This all came from Edgar, says Wilson. He was like, ‘I want George Romero to see it.’ Wilson knew an agent in Los Angeles named Frank Wuliger who worked at The Gersh Agency, which represented Romero. With Wuliger’s assistance, the executive producer eventually got a print to somewhere where George Romero could see it.

The director was on vacation in Florida, and had watched Shaun of the Dead at 10 a.m. Eastern time at the Island Cinema in the small beach town of Sanibel. Now, Pegg was waiting in his north London home for Romero to call and give his verdict. I was in the kitchen in my house in Crouch End, the first house I’d bought with my then-girlfriend, now wife, says Pegg. I was pacing up and down like I was expecting test results.

Romero was a hugely influential figure in the history of horror. Together with a small group of Pittsburgh-based collaborators, the filmmaker had created the modern zombie genre with his low-budget 1968 directorial debut Night of the Living Dead. Previously, movie zombies had been depicted as the subservient tools of evildoers, an idea based on Haitian folklore. Romero’s zombies were a much more alarming species: revived corpses hell-bent on devouring the flesh of the film’s characters, who seek refuge in a remote farmhouse. Once bitten, the ghouls’ victims themselves transform into the undead and go hunting for people to eat. Though slow-moving, Romero’s zombies can only be stopped when they are shot in the head or receive some other significant brain trauma.

Night of the Living Dead was a box-office hit, and Romero returned to the zombie genre with 1979’s Dawn of the Dead, in which a quartet of survivors – a TV producer, a helicopter pilot, and two SWAT team members – hide away from the apocalypse in a mall. Six years later, the director revisited his undead universe again with Day of the Dead, about a group of scientists and soldiers attempting to find a solution to the zombie problem in an underground silo.

Pegg and Wright were huge fans of Romero’s zombie trilogy. For the most part, the pair had diligently followed the undead ‘rules’ laid down in the filmmaker’s saga when constructing their own tale. While Danny Boyle’s 2002 horror movie 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake – which was released in the UK shortly before Shaun of the Dead – depicted fast-moving ghouls, Pegg and Wright’s zombies were resolutely slow of pace. Edgar said that there was a certain fitness level you needed to be a running zombie, says Wright’s friend, Cabin Fever and Hostel director Eli Roth. With a slow-moving zombie, you can have old people, you can have fat people, you can have little old ladies. It’s a really astute point. The casting opportunities are much wider.

The pair regarded Shaun of the Dead not as a parody of Romero’s films but as a love letter to them, with the humour coming from the collision of this apocalyptic scenario with humdrum London life. I have, for many years, reiterated the fact that every zombie film, they’ve all stolen from George Romero, says Pegg. The cannibalistic viral zombie was entirely his idea, which was so brilliant and scary, and the most contemporary classic monster. They stand alongside vampires and werewolves, but those things have been around for hundreds of years. George came up with this in 1968.

Romero was a famously avuncular character whose benign disposition stood in direct contrast to the gory mayhem of his movies. Still, it was by no means certain that he would warm to a comedic retooling of his vision, even one intended as a valentine to the genre he had created. Night of the Living Dead’s distributor had neglected to add a copyright symbol to the film’s title card after the movie’s name was changed (from Night of the Flesh Eaters) at the last minute before its premiere. As a result, Romero and his collaborators lost out on a fortune. It was easy to imagine the director regarding Shaun of the Dead less as a valentine than as a dagger through the heart. Park, for one, was worried that Romero might come down against Shaun. Do we definitely think this is the right thing to be doing? she wrote in an e-mail to Wilson ahead of the Florida screening. "Might Romero hate it?

There was also the possibility that Romero might be irritated by the manner in which he’d watched the film. The director was accompanied at the Island Cinema by a security guard hired by Universal Pictures (which held the film’s American distribution rights) out of concern that the auteur might be tempted to bootleg the film. I remember thinking, well, George Romero’s not going to pirate it, says Wright. Even if he did, he’s the one person who’d be entitled to some share of the profits!

There was another reason why a thumbs-up from Romero was so important to Pegg. Shaun of the Dead was a very personal movie for its co-writer and star, one that mined his own life to an extraordinary extent. The troubled relationship between Shaun and his stepfather Philip echoed real-life issues that Pegg had had as a child with his own stepfather. The pub in the film was directly inspired by an actual London hostelry named The Shepherds, which Pegg had made a home away from home. Most importantly, Shaun and Ed’s friendship was heavily based on the bond between Pegg and his best mate Nick Frost, who played Ed in the film. Together with Wright, Pegg had written the part of Ed specifically for his friend, despite Frost having little acting experience. For Romero to give Shaun of the Dead a thumbs-down would be a rejection not only of Pegg’s film, but also, in some ways, of his life.

So Pegg waited and paced, and waited and paced.

And then, at last, the phone rang.

CHAPTER 1

ORIGINS OF THE DEAD

Edgar Wright was 10 years old when he saw the film that would change his life. More accurately, he was 10 years old when he saw half of the film that would change his life, before his parents sent him to bed.

The date was 16 February 1985, and the film was the horror-comedy An American Werewolf in London. Written and directed by John Landis, the movie received its British television premiere that night on BBC1, one of just four networks available to watch in the UK at the time.

An American Werewolf in London stars David Naughton and Griffin Dunne as David and Jack, a pair of backpackers from New York who get lost on the moors of Yorkshire while visiting England. Their wandering ends in tragedy when Jack is killed by a wild beast and David is badly mauled by the same ferocious creature. Naughton’s character is transported to London and cared for by a nurse named Alex, played by Jenny Agutter, with whom he begins a relationship after being discharged from hospital. David endures a nightmare in which members of his family are shot by monsters wearing Nazi uniforms, one of whom slices open David’s throat. He is visited by the grotesquely rotting ghost of his friend Jack, who informs David that he will transform into a werewolf unless he kills himself.

Unable to take his own life, David does indeed turn lycanthropic, murdering several people while in werewolf form. They, too, return as scarred ghosts to castigate their murderer and urge him to take his own life. After causing further werewolf mayhem in Piccadilly Circus, our tragic hero, still in animal form, encounters Alex, who tells David that she loves him. He is then shot by policemen and, in death, becomes human once more. Landis cuts from shots of Agutter’s weeping face and David’s naked corpse to the movie’s end credits, soundtracked by The Marcels’ jarringly upbeat 1961 version of ‘Blue Moon’. This conclusion is both surprising and merciless, as Landis leaves the audience no time to grieve for Naughton’s David or to empathise with Agutter’s Alex. It is also, in its own twisted way, unforgettably brilliant.

In time, Wright would come to love the ending of the film, along with many other aspects of Landis’ movie. Back in 1985, however, he was only able to dream about (and have nightmares concerning) the werewolf tale’s conclusion. Wright and his older brother Oscar had been allowed to stay up and watch the film because their mother and father, Leslie and Chris, knew that the two children were fascinated by science fiction and horror. The parents were both art teachers, and were mostly encouraging of their children’s interests. But they believed that the Nazi-monster sequence was too much for their offspring, so Edgar and Oscar were sent to bed, the sight of Naughton’s bloody slashed throat lasered into their formative brains.

At that point, my mum was like, ‘Okay, that’s enough! Bed!’ Wright recalls. The plan backfired, though, as Wright’s subconscious set about filling in the rest of the film while he slept. Because I hadn’t seen the end of the movie, I had terrible nightmares, he says. I probably had worse nightmares than if I’d seen the ending, because it was unresolved in my head. Wright was now more fascinated with Landis’ film than he had been before: It was a point of obsession.

Wright was born in the town of Swanage, on the south coast of England, on 18 April 1974. The first film Wright watched at the cinema was Star Wars, which his parents took Edgar and Oscar to see on its UK release in December 1977. Mum and Dad did a great job of feeding us the really creative stuff that was coming out, says Oscar, who is two years Edgar’s senior. "Star Wars left a huge impression – probably more on me than on Edgar, because he was, as Mum likes to say, in nappies at the time. I’d never been to a cinema before, and at that particular one, the walls were plush black velvet with pinpoint stars. Then the film started, and it was the star field with the spaceship coming over. I just thought that’s what cinema was – that the whole cinema was decked out like the film."

Soon after, Leslie Wright suggested a trip to see Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated movie The Lord of the Rings. "Mum was a massive Lord of the Rings fan, Oscar says. So when the Bakshi film came round, she basically told us, ‘It’s a bit like Star Wars’, and got us to go and see that. Edgar was a big Doctor Who fan, so we were loving all that sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I was feeding off a lot of the design stuff, and Edgar, I think, right from an early age, was working out how he could tell these stories. We went through a Dungeons & Dragons phase, and he became a very young Dungeon Master very quickly."

According to Wright family lore, young Edgar first showed an interest in becoming a director when comedy duo Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett – better known as The Two Ronnies – visited the area to shoot a portion of their 1982 TV movie By the Sea. That was the first film set I visited, says Wright. I sat on Swanage beach, watching them filming. My mum swears that I pointed at the director and asked, ‘Who’s that man?’, and they said, ‘Oh, that’s the director.’ I said, ‘I want to do what he does.’

When Wright was 7, his family moved 70 miles north-west to Wells. Technically a cathedral city because of the massive medieval church which sits at its centre, the settlement is a sleepy grouping of 12,000 souls in the rural heart of the West Country. For the most part, Wells offered little to distract the young Wright from his growing obsession with TV shows and movies. Wright’s parents loved films, and Edgar, listening in on Chris and Leslie’s conversations, learned about directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone. His mother also often talked about Busby Berkeley, the Golden Age of Hollywood-era choreographer and director, famous for the lavish dance sequences he oversaw for films like 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.

At the same time, Wright began checking out his parents’ record collection, listening to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Simon & Garfunkel, and various Motown releases. Wright’s obsession with movies and music combined in his love for the 1976 gangster musical Bugsy Malone. Directed by Alan Parker, with music by actor-songwriter Paul Williams, the film features a cast of child actors – including Jodie Foster and Scott Baio – playing mobsters and molls. When he was around 12, Wright even appeared in a school production of Bugsy Malone, portraying a member of the gang ruled by the character Fat Sam.

He started reading up on movies, poring over the magazine Starburst, which covered science fiction and horror films. "Starburst was so gory in those days, says Wright. I was 7 years old, reading descriptions of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery." It was via Starburst that he first became aware of An American Werewolf in London. Issue #40, published in the autumn of 1981, featured on its cover a photo of Naughton surrounded by the butchered victims of his character. It was the bloodiest image Wright had ever seen. The substantial review inside, by writer John Brosnan, similarly caught Wright’s interest. This is a revolutionary movie, Brosnan began. It pushes the art of the horror movie into new areas. It pulls off the difficult trick of revitalising the genre while parodying at the same time. Brosnan went on to describe the film’s plot before keying into one of its chief delights, the movie’s realistic treatment of the central character’s preposterous situation. These days, the idea of someone turning into a werewolf has become something of a joke, he wrote. It’s the stuff of old Universal movies… But what Landis does in his movie is say: right, we all know it’s a joke, but just imagine what would happen if you were forced to accept it as being true even though you didn’t want to.

Film magazines like Starburst and the horror journal Fangoria also introduced Wright to Romero’s zombie movies. There were a lot of films that I’d read everything about without actually seeing them, says the director. "I was obsessed by zombie movies just through reading Starburst, and later Fangoria. I would read about Romero films and want to see them. My mum and dad weren’t very well off at all, and they didn’t have a VCR. You have to remind young people that, back in those days before the internet, you could go years without seeing a film. If it wasn’t on your TV and you didn’t have a repertory cinema near you, tough shit. So I could maybe read about Night of the Living Dead at age 7 in Starburst, and then not actually see the movie until I was 15, 16. I read a lot about it through Starburst, and Fangoria, and books that I would get, like The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon and Kim Newman’s Nightmare Movies. I’d buy those books and just memorise them all."

As a teenager, Wright attended Wells’ Blue School, which housed around 1,500 pupils aged 11 to 18. At various points, he was taught by each of his parents. One day in class, Leslie Wright mortified Edgar by calling him ‘Pickle’, the pet name she used for him at home. Wright got a part-time job at the Gateway supermarket on Wells’ High Street, where he would work for five years. This employment accidentally kickstarted his interest in modern music, when a colleague slipped him a cassette tape of an album by indie-rock quartet the Pixies.

Neither Wright’s education nor his job prevented him staying up half the night should a film he felt he needed to watch receive a TV airing. He finally saw Romero’s 1968 classic when the film screened on television at a very late hour. It was on at 3 in the morning, he says. "I drank coffee before, so I could stay up until 4.30 watching Night of the Living Dead. Then I either went to school or worked at Gateway on three and a half hours of sleep." When Wright was around 14, he finally got to watch An American Werewolf in London through to its conclusion, at the house of a friend of his brother. Incredibly, Landis’ movie matched the expectations he had built up in his head over the years.

Wright’s consumption of films went into overdrive when he was around 15 and bought his own video player, using the pay from his supermarket job. As soon as I got the VHS, I went a bit crazy watching all of these movies that I previously hadn’t had a chance to see, he says. But it would still be several years before he had the opportunity to watch Dawn of the Dead. That wasn’t easily available on VHS, he says. "I think I saw Dawn for the first time when I was at art college." As far as Wright was concerned, both Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were worth the long wait. By the time I watched them, I knew everything about them, he says. You’d wonder if that would quell your excitement. But the films lived up to their reputations.

Around the same time that Wright managed a complete viewing of An American Werewolf in London, he also watched an episode of the British documentary series The Incredibly Strange Film Show. Hosted by movie-loving TV personality Jonathan Ross, the show detailed the careers of such cult directors as John Waters and ‘Godfather of Gore’ Herschell Gordon Lewis. But it was the final instalment of the show’s initial 1988 season that changed the way Wright thought about his own future.

The subject was Sam Raimi, the still-youthful director of 1983’s The Evil Dead. The epiphany was hearing about the making of that movie, Wright recalls. The show revealed how the teenage Raimi began his filmmaking career directing Super 8 comedy shorts with friends in his hometown of Franklin, Michigan. These home movies were inspired by the physical comedy of Raimi’s beloved Three Stooges and usually starred the director’s pal, the lean and handsome Bruce Campbell. Raimi conceived the idea for a film about a group of young friends who visit a remote cabin in the woods and accidentally unleash a supernatural force that picks them off in horrific fashion. On The Incredibly Strange Film Show, Raimi revealed how he had dropped out of school at the age of 18 and worked in menial jobs to raise the initial funding for the project.

The episode skipped over the actual shoot for The Evil Dead, which may have given Wright a rose-tinted view of how movies got made. A week into production, Raimi was flattened by a tree branch, and later in the day passed out cold. A large amount of equipment was stolen from the remote cabin in Tennessee where much of the filming took place. The original shooting schedule ballooned from six weeks to eight, to ten, and then finally to three months. For the last few days of production, Campbell, Raimi, and the few remaining crew members actually lived at the cabin, burning furniture that they no longer needed in order to stay warm.

The Evil Dead screened at the Cannes Film Market in May 1982. Among the audience at one showing was best-selling horror author Stephen King, who loved The Evil Dead and wrote a glowing article about the movie for The Twilight Zone Magazine, resulting in the film being picked up by New Line Cinema. The Evil Dead finally opened in America in the spring of 1983 and performed respectably, but the movie made more of an impact overseas, particularly in the UK. It became a cause célèbre when the British censorship board added it to the list of so-called ‘video nasties’. Raimi’s second feature, the 1986 comedy-thriller Crimewave, was a commercial failure, and soon afterwards the director went back into the woods with Campbell for 1987’s Evil Dead II. Essentially a more comedic remake of the original terror tale, the movie benefitted from a bigger budget and eye-popping effects – in one gross-out moment, literally.

The story of Raimi’s self-propelled rise, as related on The Incredibly Strange Film Show, had a seismic effect on Wright. I’d always been a film fan, he says, "but it wasn’t until Jonathan Ross’ documentary about Sam Raimi and the making of The Evil Dead that it really occurred to me that it was something I could try and do." But thanks to the aforementioned ‘video nasties’ panic, Wright couldn’t actually watch The Evil Dead, as copies of the movie were hard to find, particularly in rural Somerset. His first experience of Raimi’s ghoulish cinematic universe was watching, and being utterly thrilled by, Evil Dead II after the sequel was released on video.

Wright also fell in love with 1987’s Raising Arizona, the visually inventive kidnapping comedy starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. The film was the second movie from brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, who had made their mark with 1984’s modern noir Blood Simple and had co-written Crimewave with Raimi. "I saw Evil Dead II and Raising Arizona on VHS, says Wright. They’re sort of brothers from another mother. In the US, they actually came out on the same day. Joel Coen worked on the first Evil Dead [as assistant editor]. Sam Raimi and the Coen brothers were friends, they’d collaborated on Crimewave. Then the Coens make Raising Arizona, which takes what Crimewave was trying to do and perfects it. Sam Raimi, after Crimewave flopped, went back to do Evil Dead II and, I guess because his last film was a flop, Evil Dead II is absolutely go for broke. Evil Dead II and Raising Arizona were two VHSes that I just watched endlessly. Some people say that Shaun of the Dead is like Evil Dead II. I don’t really see that at all. I think it’s a very different tone, and even the way it’s shot is very different. But the thing about Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II that was incredibly inspiring to me – and a big influence – was the fact that they were comedies but they were shot with this incredible drive, and invention, and energy. Up until that point, comedies would usually be shot in quite a conventional way. I was so wowed by the ambition of both of them and how visually innovative they were on just every level. Those are the films that really got me excited about the form and the possibilities of it. Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II really instilled in me this idea of reaching for the sky."

Edgar and Oscar both began making short films after their father bought them each Super 8 cameras. I delved into animation, says Oscar. I got a Terry Gilliam animation book, and that set my synapses going. And Edgar was doing live-action stuff, filming his friends. Even as a teenager, the director took these shoots seriously. One day, when Oscar began larking around during a shoot, Edgar sent his brother home. I was there to help, but – mostly because I was messing about – my help wasn’t needed, says Oscar. It’s funny how seriously he took it, when it was just three of us in a field, basically. He’s got a very definite drive and vision. It’s something that all of his friends who made films with him – and me certainly – all lived with. I used to get asked, ‘How do you feel about your brother getting all this success?’ Both me and his close friends, all of us would answer, ‘There was no other way it was going to go.’ This is how we grew up. He would always organise things. He’s very good at steering the ship. There was never any doubt where this was going.

In 1989, the teenage Wright and his brother paired up as trainee projectionists at the Wells Regal, an art deco cinema, where Edgar had, predictably, become a regular attendee. The pair’s tenure at the single-screen picture palace was short-lived. I was fired from the Regal for being incompetent, says Wright. I wasn’t wrongly fired, but I was too young to be a projectionist. I was 15. The films were on these big tower reels, and if it was a longer film, I had to get someone to lift them up. Also, I didn’t know that I needed glasses. Wright’s inexperience became clear when he screened the Michael Caine-starring Sherlock Holmes comedy Without a Clue. I unscrewed the lens, and it fell off and landed on the floor, and I wasn’t strong enough to put it back in, Wright explains. "So Without a Clue played in complete soft focus. The next time, I put the trailers on backwards."

After the latter incident, both Edgar and Oscar were let go. I don’t think Oscar had done anything wrong, they just wanted to get rid of us, says Wright. "It was coming up to the summer of 1989, where there were a lot of big films, like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Batman. I think the boss of the Regal was like, ‘We cannot trust the Wright brothers with those two big hits, something’s going to go wrong.’ So he sacked us. Wright got another job at Wookey Hole Caves, a tourist attraction based around a series of limestone caverns situated three miles outside Wells. I was a car park attendant there, he remembers. So if somebody says, ‘Edgar Wright can’t direct traffic’, I can say, ‘Well, actually, yes I can.’ My summer spent in 1989 at Wookey Hole Caves puts paid to that."

Wright continued to watch new film releases at the Wells Regal, though, including another movie that would have a huge influence on his filmmaking, director Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster epic Goodfellas. I saw it with some school friends the first day, and then I went back a second time the following night on my own to try and process what I’d just seen, he says. It was the first time I’d ever seen a movie on two consecutive nights. I was just so knocked out by it on every level in terms of the scope of it, how it was directed, the use of music, the editing, the montage. Again, it just starts to fire up your synapses in terms of the possibilities of what you can do with the form.

In 1991, the charity Comic Relief hosted a short-film competition, prompting Wright to direct a three-minute stop-motion animation called I Want to Get Into the Movies!, which was designed to highlight the subject of wheelchair accessibility at cinemas. The crude but imaginative short finds a group of spheres racing up the steps of a movie theatre to attend an unlikely triple feature of The Sound of Music, Driving Miss Daisy, and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. The central character, a cube, is unable to use the stairs and is left behind. The short resulted in Wright making an appearance on the BBC1 children’s TV show Going Live!. It also won him a Sony camcorder, allowing him to become more ambitious in his future cinematic endeavours, including a cop comedy called Dead Right. It was a Dirty Harry-type film with 17-year-olds, says Wright. So it’s like watching a Dirty Harry movie with people whose balls haven’t dropped yet.

Wright attempted to bring to his films the visual verve of his favourite movies. "I would try to copy shots out of Raising Arizona, Evil Dead II, and Goodfellas, he says. I made this ‘Steadicam’ for my Video 8 camera, the one I won on Going Live!. The camera was screwed onto a ceiling tile, and then there was a cat’s cradle [made from] four pieces of string, and you would run along following people’s shoes and stuff."

I Want to Get Into the Movies! was screened in Bradford as part of the Co-operative Young Film-makers Festival, an initiative that showcased the work of fledgling directors. It was shown on the same bill as another stop-motion film called Chainsaw Morph Meets Yeg by Corin Hardy, also a teenager. My art teacher said, ‘I found a film festival and I want to enter your animation in it,’ says Hardy. I didn’t know what a film festival was. Both Wright and Hardy travelled to Bradford to