Edgar Wright

Brian Reitzell

What we’re going to do is we’re going to play some clips. We’re going to talk about music. Talk about the clips, and afterwards, we’ll have some time where we can take some questions from you guys. There’s two microphones set up here so when we finish with the clips you can come up and ask your question in the microphone. I’ll give you more information as we’re moving along. So let’s get right into it. The first thing we’re going to see and hear is Busby Berkeley, 1934, Dames. Incredible. Which features the track “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

Edgar Wright

Yeah I’m a big fan of musicals. And Busby Berkeley was a choreographer that... Now some of the ’30s films that he did with Warner Brothers that were all shot in Los Angeles, I think Dames was shot in Burbank at the Warner Brothers’ stages. He’s an interesting character, Busby Bekerly, because he was actually not a dancer. He’s not one of the most famous choreographers ever. And he was a theater kid and then he went to the first World War. And in the first World War, one of his... He had two jobs, both which factor into his movies. One of them, he was a drill instructor, and he also did aerial reconnaissance. And then also when he was working on Broadway, because his mother I think was a Broadway actress, he would be in some plays but he would also kind of be around the stage. And so he pretty much designed some shots just by things that like.

A lot of the shots in his movies are things that you couldn’t do on stage. So you know, sometimes when you see musicals they sort of conform to the idea of the pro-senior march and what you can see. But Busby Berkley sort of like broke out all of that and gave us angles that you just can’t do on the stage, on a stage musical. So it’s interesting, not only was he a drill instructor in the army, which kind of factors into even a clip like this, but doing his aerial reconnaissance he became obsessed with overhead shots. And then also when he was hanging out literally in the rafters in these Broadway theaters, he’d look at the dancers like looking down. And not too many overhead shots in this one, but the other thing about something like Dames is a lot of those movies at the time another director does the drama bit.

Brian Reitzell

Right, he just does parts of it.

Edgar Wright

And he does these parts which is sort of like…

Brian Reitzell

The best bits.

Edgar Wright

The best bits of the movie. No disrespect to the director of the rest of it. But pretty much a lot of the ’30s Busby Berkley films they sort of have the same plot of like getting a musical together and all of sort of trials and tribulations of putting on a Broadway show stopper. And then you have music set pieces throughout. And at a certain point you have things which are entirely magical that are supposed to be on stage but could never exist on the stage. I mean the other things about these sequences is that nobody would really bother to do them at this scale anymore. If you were gonna make a music set piece in Busby Berkley style in this day and age, I’m sure you’d be asked to do it with CG or can we digitally multiply the dancers. So I think in this sequence there’s like 250 dancers, which if any of you work for the business, you know that that’s a lot of money [laughter]. But also back in those days, that was before they really had proper unions and hours…

Brian Reitzell

Right.

Edgar Wright

So when they used to shoot these sequences…

Brian Reitzell

You just fed them.

Edgar Wright

They just... These people were existing sort of on a diet of apples and working... I mean that’s not a scandalous accusation. Literally what happened is that back then they would be shooting for over 24 hours. They would still be shooting like it was a wild ’80s music video. And they are just kind of running and running until literally people fall over and die [laughter]. I’m not sure that anybody…

Brian Reitzell

Sounds like all the movies I’ve worked on.

Edgar Wright

I’m not sure that anybody died during the making of this set piece. But it is something that... I think some of these ones in this list. So we’ve got some clips from my work and a lot of clips of music of things I like in film. And a lot of them are things that made a big impression upon me when I was young. So even someone like Busby Berkley would be a name that my mother would say quite a lot. And before I’d necessarily seen the original movies, I’d certainly seen photos of them and I definitely seen them ripped off in other things.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

Probably the first time I saw a Busby Berkley style music number was in the Muppets movie. You know? So he’s one of those people where just his style and the way that he approaches it. As you notice, even in this clip, there’s not actually a lot of dancing. It’s really sort of about, like I said the drill instructor thing. It’s about the formations, and the shapes…

Brian Reitzell

The shapes.

Edgar Wright

The shapes that he makes with the dancers and their costumes…

Brian Reitzell

And the music.

Edgar Wright

And the reflections. Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

And the music. I mean this piece of music has been covered a thousand times. A very famous piece of music.

Edgar Wright

What’s amazing is that these, in lot of these musicals, these songs were written for the film. This song, “I Only Have Eyes for You,” which you’ve heard a million times, was actually written for Dames.

Brian Reitzell

Harry Warren wrote the music.

Edgar Wright

The two actors who feature in this is Dick Powell, who’s in a lot of these movies, and Ruby Keeler, who’s also in a lot of these movies. She’s also in 42nd Street. And as you will see in this clip, this is probably the most Ruby Keeler that you could possibly get in one sequence.

Brian Reitzell

Great. Let’s check it out.

Edgar Wright

Let’s watch a clip from Dames.

(video: Dames – “I Only Have Eyes For You” / applause)

Edgar Wright

It would be very difficult to do that today. That’s the thing. Even with today’s technology.

Brian Reitzell

The opening of the Chinese Olympics, right?

Edgar Wright

[laughter]

Brian Reitzell

It’s the closest thing you can get but that costs, like you said, zillions of dollars.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, I mean it’s... I always... When you watch those movies. I always just bowled over by the amount of work that went into it. It’s crazy. And back then in those days that they would… All of those dancers would be on contract so Busby Berkley would be running his musicals unit and I think he would just be shooting separately from the movie. So it’s kind of something that doesn’t really exist in this day and age. The idea that there is the musical unit of doing these amazing set pieces. He would be sort of operating on his own budget and his own cast of dancers. Almost completely separately from rest of film.

Brian Reitzell

Wow. OK, we need to keep moving. We’ve got a lot of clips. So now we’re gonna ping pong. We’re gonna play something of Edgar’s. And we’re kinda working a bit chronologically. So we’re gonna play something now from the TV series you did called Spaced [applause]. From the year of 2001, I believe. I’m not sure which episode.

Edgar Wright

This is from the second series, as we say in the UK. Not season. Second series of Spaced from 2001. There were only two series. I directed every episode and I guess we could talk a little bit about the clip afterwards. I think one of the things that happened with this show was... I was 24 when I did the first series of Spaced and... I know [laughter]

Brian Reitzell

And you were 50 when you ended!

Edgar Wright

[laughter] I felt 50 when I ended. Especially by the end of the second series. It’s very intensive cause we didn’t really have the money like bigger comedy shows and so it always... Everything is up on the screen. One of the things that happened with Spaced actually, prior to this, I’d gotten into the industry through doing... I’d done amateur films when I was a kid and then I’d gone to art college briefly. Not doing a film and TV course, but doing a sort of design course. And I kept making these kind of goofy movies... Not goofy movie like the Disney one [laughter].

Brian Reitzell

I’d like to see that.

Edgar Wright

[laughter] I directed A Goofy Movie [laughter]. No, don’t spread that around. How I got into doing TV was I made a film when I was 20 years old. A very, very low budget, silly, Western, that was pretty silly. Has anybody ever seen it? Did anybody see it? Did anybody see it at Cinefamily when we showed it a couple of years ago? Anyway, the thing is, it got released in theaters. It got released in theater, one theater.

Brian Reitzell

That’s all you need.

Edgar Wright

In London. But actually two of the guys... Two people that saw it were these two comedians, Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who went on to do Little Britain. And literally as soon as the film was on, they asked me to direct their first TV show. Which was a sketch show called Mash and Peas. And David had actually been to university with Simon Pegg. So I met Simon Pegg around that time and I went straight on to do another TV show, literally that next year when I was 21. I had Simon and Jessica Hynes in it. So then those two, on that show, got on really well. And then Spaced came around. It took them sort of three years to develop it.

So then we were shooting, I think we started shooting in ’99 and we did two seasons of it. One of the things that happened though, which kind of had a bearing on everything else. It was somewhere where there wasn’t really any music written into the script. Maybe there were a couple of thoughts of things. But it very quickly became clear that the series needed a vibe and at that time, on network TV, you had a sort of overall clearance thing where you could sort of clear just tracks, unless it was something major. Like you couldn’t clear the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, but things of a certain level you could pretty easily clear it for the network. So I sort of became the music supervisor on the show, essentially, because nobody else was doing it and it was a very small crew. A lot of the music of the time, so a lot of that big beat and lounge core stuff and some indie stuff found its way into the show. So I have sort of fond memories of whilst we were editing the show there used to be a Virgin Megastore around the corner, and I used to just go and rifle through the CD racks and find songs for the show. And usually it would be like something trying to find things that were like something else. So if we had some Fatboy Slim tracks in there it was like well, “What else is like Fatboy Slim? Oh, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Lemon Jelly,” all these other artists. But when I think of editing Spaced, I think of that sound that you don’t really hear anymore is the clacking through the jewel cases on CDs.

Brian Reitzell

You still hear that in my house.

Edgar Wright

Well, that’s something that I think of, that sound when I think of editing the show. I didn’t edit it. I edited some parts of it. Actually, this episode is one of the ones where I’m credited as an editor. In fact, the editor of this episode with me, Paul Machliss, is also one of the editors on Baby Driver, so I worked with him this far back.

Brian Reitzell

Cool. That’s great.

Edgar Wright

So this is a clip, this is probably from my favorite episode of both seasons, so we’ll watch a bit of Spaced.

(video: Spaced Season 2, Episode 5 – “Gone” / applause)

I like the idea that if you were doing an imaginary gun fight it doesn’t really explain why... If you were doing an imaginary gun fight, why would your gun jam?

Brian Reitzell

For realistic purposes, right?

Edgar Wright

I know. They mimed the gun fight and all of the things that could possibly go wrong. I love that sequence, but I never don’t laugh when the guy, whose name is Alex Noodle, starts spraying his blood.

Brian Reitzell

Alex Noodle.

Edgar Wright

Alex Noodle. Yeah, so yeah. That was an instance... I didn’t think necessarily, unlike some of the later sequences that we’re going to watch, I don’t think necessarily that we had that, maybe I had that music in mind. A lot of Spaced the music was put in afterwards. But then, I think in the second series, once we realized how well the soundtrack worked on the first one, there was some kind of like thinking ahead of things that could work in sequences. But it was a great experience because nobody was really telling me what to do at any point, especially…

Brian Reitzell

Or how to do it.

Edgar Wright

Or how to do it. It’s one of those things where you don’t realized how lucky you are until later, that you were sort of left alone.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

You know? The channel, because we were under a certain budget level, they would give us script notes, but then on the second series they would barely give us that. You would get notes where it would be like the only things that they would tell you is you can only say fuck twice and you can’t say cunt [laughter]. I don’t know why fuck twice and what a third one would do.

Brian Reitzell

That’s changed a lot now, though.

Edgar Wright

It was, I mean, it definitely changed a lot. The difference between U.K. TV and over here is on network TV, that’s why cable has never really taken off in the U.K., is because you can do those things on TV. And a lot of cable shows just get shown on network TV after 9:00.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

So, Spaced used to be on in between Friends and Fraser.

Brian Reitzell

Perfect.

Edgar Wright

My proudest moment was that, I think it’s the third episode of the first series, which starts with the zombies are killing episode, which ended up inspiring Shaun of the Dead in a way, and I remember vividly that the announcer at the start of it says, and Friends has just ended, so imagine you’ve just had Central Perk and then the announcer says, “Next up, Spaced, which features strong language and violent imagery from the start.” I was like, “Yes.” Immediately lose 50% of Friends viewers.

Brian Reitzell

OK. Well, that was interesting because…

Edgar Wright

It factors into the next one.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah. And also, I like the fact that it sounded like it went from licensed music to the gunfire, which became slightly musical and then there was a change in the tone of the music where it became more scored and more sort of sounding like the character’s kind of dying and so I don’t know how aware you were of it at the time, but you were developing... You were developing. 2001.

Edgar Wright

I think also it’s the shift in sort of, at first they’re sort of miming... They get much more slow motion towards the end. So it starts out with the track by the Blues Ends and then it ends up with, I think it’s “Adagio for Strings,” because it’s in Platoon. So that’s the kind of music from Platoon when sort of Willem Dafoe is like [makes arm movement] dying, like that.

So, you know, that was a little film reference in itself, the second part of the music. But, yeah, I think maybe the “Adagio for Strings” thing, maybe that was written into the script. I can’t actually remember, but it was something that definitely we’re thinking about that as we’re shooting that scene. I mean, I have only fond memories of shooting that. Because literally, if you’ve ever been to Camden in London, it’s literally like two minutes’ walk from the tube. It’s just funny. It’s like an alley round the back of the main high street. But yeah, it leads into the next clip in a way.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah. Epic. Ennio Morricone, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 1967.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. Well, there’s something interesting about how this was made, and maybe we’ll talk about this afterwards, but I’d say this is another director and a film that... My parents are both art teachers. They had no connections in the film business, but they were film fans, and there were various directors or films that I would hear about through my parents. They’d talk about Alfred Hitchcock a lot, you know, I remember my mum mentioning Busby Berkeley quite a lot, but also Sergio Leone was something that they talked about quite a lot. And so I think when these films were on TV I was probably allowed to stay up and watch them because they thought that they were somewhat appropriate.

But we could talk about sort of how this is made, but I think this is from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and it’s probably one of the greatest climaxes in cinema with score by Ennio Morricone. So let’s watch that.

(video: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Graveyard Scene / applause)

The thing that’s interesting about that, which I remember reading about, which sort of factors into even the next clip we’re going to show, and definitely to Baby Driver, is that Ennio Morricone had written that music before they started filming. So with that sequence they are playing that music on set, which I think sort of creates, in terms of... You know, because the actors, if you were getting them to kind of just stand there in silence, the actors might start to think, “This is weird,” the amount of pause or something like that. But because they can hear it and hear how dramatic it is and how it’s building it’s sort of adding to their performance.

So that’s something that... And in a lot of Italian films they don’t shoot any synced sound. They dub it all later, especially with a film like that where you’ve got American actors and Spanish actors and Italian actors. All of the sound is done afterwards. So they could, in theory, play that music and Sergio Leone would be yelling things during the take to tell them what to do. But it’s something as well... The other thing about those movies, and they’re probably some of the first Westerns I saw, so I’m slightly spoiled by seeing them first, but a lot of the Italian directors of that time didn’t have the budget of the American films, so they make up for it in style. So you have these movies that are like sort of pop art masterpieces where they’re going heavy on the style of the editing and the camera shots and the music because they don’t always have the budgets of the big American films. Although, that cemetery is built for the movie. That is not an existing cemetery. Apparently they got the Spanish army employed, so hundreds of Spanish troops to make that cemetery in like 72 hours. So that sort of cemetery exists only for the movie, which is an incredible set in itself.

Brian Reitzell

Wow.

Edgar Wright

But he’s, Ennio Morricone’s obviously one of the greatest composers, but a lot of those Italian filmmakers that use score like that, like another one, Dario Argento and the use of Goblin. If you’ve ever seen Suspiria, that’s another movie where the score is so heavy in the movie it almost dominates everything else. It’s another thing where you sort of can tell when you watch the movie it’s like the score is kind of done before and they’re just playing it over what they have.

Brian Reitzell

But it’s also very, like you were saying, the style of it is quite unique with the guitars, with the singing, with all the other stuff. You know, Morricone was doing like 12 movies a year, too.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

And he didn’t have ProTools. He had to write these themes then do all these variations of the one theme, but I think in like ’67, ’68, ’69 it’s incredible how many movies he did.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

I don’t know how you could do that without a computer, without, I mean they’re all real players, he’s sitting down and...

Edgar Wright

Yeah. And he’s also, Ennio Morricone in the later... There are some scores of his ’80s movies that are great, which are basically redone versions of his ’60s scores of films that he figures nobody has seen.

Brian Reitzell

That’s okay.

Edgar Wright

So his score for The Untouchables, which is fantastic, is basically the score for another movie called, I think, Revolver. It’s almost exactly the same score. But, you know, he kind of figured, quite rightly, he goes, “Nobody’s seen Revolver. Let’s just use it again for The Untouchables.” The best example of that happening, which is an amazing story... Has anybody ever heard of the silly, like knock-off Star Wars movie called Star Crash, with David Hasselhoff? It probably was on Mystery Science Theater. John Barry did the score for that movie and he did the score sight unseen. He had not seen the movie. He did the score before the movie and the score is pretty good. The score is the best thing about it and it’s John Barry, who is an Oscar-winning composer, but he had not see Star Crash and then he sees Star Crash and he’s like, “This film is terrible.” Cut to like seven years later, he’s scoring Out of Africa with Meryl Streep. “Nobody’s seen Star Crash. I’ll just use the music from Star Crash,” and wins the Oscar. So, if you ever watch Out of Africa, just think of it as the music from Star Crash [laughter]. The Oscar-winning music from Star Crash.

Brian Reitzell

They’re such similar movies. Now we’re going to play a music video that you directed, by the Manchester band, Mint Royale.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. This is a music video, I guess... I think maybe I’ve done in total like 10 music videos spread over like 20 years maybe. I guess the last one I did was in 2014 and the first one I did was probably in 1995, but I’ve only done 10 total and maybe in between like Spaced and Shaun of the Dead I did a couple of music videos.

When I was doing music videos in the UK, I was kind of hitting that point already where, I guess it’s around the time of file sharing, the budgets were just going down and so I had this weird thing where I was having more success with music videos as the budgets were getting lower each time. Like the first one I had done after Spaced was like a 60 grand video and then it was going down to sort of 30, 20, 10, 6.

Brian Reitzell

Make it on your phone.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, so this was one of the sort of cheaper ones, but like sort of what was interesting about this is that when I used to do music videos, I would usually do it to try something out, so if there’s something that I haven’t done and you basically come up with a treatment based on something that you would like to do and hope that the band agrees with it. There’s another music video that I did, “After Hours,” that was all in one shot on a steady cam and I did that because I knew in Shaun of the Dead I had written this scene that was going to be all in one and I’d never done an all in one steady cam shot, so I thought I’ll do a dry run on this music video.

This one is a bit different because this is basically like a dry run for the first scene of Baby Driver, however I didn’t write the Baby Driver idea for this video. I basically had that kind of like, sort of exam cramming thing where the night before I was supposed to hand in a treatment for Mint Royale I hadn’t come up with an idea that I liked and so I’d already had the idea for Baby Driver, like I had the first part of the idea of like the first scene, which we’ll see later on, in 1995 when I first heard the Jon Spencer Blue Explosion. I’d had the idea for the first scene and so knew vaguely what the rest of the film was, but I didn’t have a plot.

I definitely had the first scene and the idea of like the driver goofing off the music in the car, so I basically, in a fit of desperation, I wrote this treatment for this music video and it turned out well and there are lots of British comedians in it that you’ll recognize, especially if you’re fans of The Mighty Boosh and Spaced, but the thing was afterwards, after I had done it, I was mad at myself for a while because I thought, “Oh, I burned this great idea for this movie on this music video.”

Brian Reitzell

You gave it away.

Edgar Wright

I gave it away and what a waste. What a waste of the idea, but then weirdly, over the years, and I’ve got to thank Noah Fielding and the success of The Mighty Boosh for this. This video just kept sort of echoing around. Like this video was shot in 2002 and released in 2003. Literally, it was released a couple of months before I started shooting Shaun of the Dead and basically, even like 10 years later, people would still like be posting it on the Internet like it was a new video and I think even it crops up in one of The Mighty Boosh DVDs.

It actually ended up being a help because then by the time I was thinking about actually doing the movie, when I started talking about it more seriously like 10 years ago, especially in like 2010 after Scott Pilgrim came out, this video was still sort of in the ether and there was even a funny thing, like I remember the LA Film Festival in 2010, I did this like talk of clips from my movies and J.J. Abrams was moderating and he said, “Hey, can we share that getaway driver music video that you did,” and I said, “Yeah.”

Then once the clip was playing, J.J. leaned over to me and said, “I think this would make a great movie,” and I leaned back and said, “I am way ahead of you.” It still took seven years, but this is, if you haven’t seen it before, the dry run for Baby Driver. This is Mint Royale and “Blue Song.”

(video: Mint Royale – “Blue Song” / applause)

No car chase at the end of that though. That had to come later. Didn’t have the funds to do a car chase back in 2002.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah, that’s such a clip, but you know the Fat Boy Slim and that whole time, 2001, 2002, 2003. I’m telling you, sitting right there with the bass pumping kind of helps not date the music.

Edgar Wright

Well, it’s sorts of funny. I guess around that time actually that a lot of those artists, it did actually like inspire a lot of great music videos because most of those people are not in the videos, so if you actually think about it, Chemical Brothers, Fat Boy Slim.

Brian Reitzell

That was the time.

Edgar Wright

They have lots of great videos by Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, etc. partly because the artists are not featuring. There’s no vocalist to lip sync it, so it actually gave... With music videos, it gave people like an open brief. With something like that, the band are in there briefly like they walk pass the car, but like, sort of, they’re not even singing. It’s a Captain Beefheart sample, so it actually, sort of let you kind of come up with wilder ideas, that whole sort of spate of like superstar DJ, like, sort of tracks.

Brian Reitzell

Do you still have a portable Discman?

Edgar Wright

I don’t think I ever had a portable Discman.

Brian Reitzell

Does anybody? Because I have one and it’s broken and just the other day I went to Best Buy because I heard they sell them there, like Insignia sells them, for like 17.99. I didn’t buy one. OK, so we’re going to move now into one of the greatest sci-fi movies, probably the greatest sci-fi movie of all time, 2001: A Space Odyssey. [applause]

Edgar Wright

This is maybe not the most obvious clip of this, so if you’re predicting what clip it is, it’s not going to be like sort of the most two famous clips. It’s leading into one of the most famous sequences, but this is something that like... Another movie that my parents introduced me to and I think when I first watched it on TV, I was already into Star Wars by that point and then obviously this film is a lot more adult and a lot more enigmatic, but even as a kid, I’m not really understanding it. It’s still sort of wields a power over me and I wasn’t grown up, like my parents didn’t take me and my brothers to church at all, so I have no religious upbringing, so in a weird way sort of like 2001 is about as close at it comes to like sort of a religious experience for me and particularly this.

There’s a shot in this bit, you’ll see it, where the kind of, the planets and the monolith come into alignment that I just think, “Uh.” It’s just to me that’s just sort of like there’s some kind of proof of some higher power. It’s just the idea of symmetry in space. This is a movie that, and it’s one of those movies, I’m sure other people in the audience feel the same way, is that when it’s on at the cinema, I go and see it because I just have to see it on the big screen and it almost feels like going to, like seeing something in a gallery for two and a half hours

The other thing that’s interesting about this is there’s films which... This is a sort of key film in terms of the film’s soundtrack, in terms of actually using existing source. Like using songs that already exist or pieces of music that already exist because the story with 2001 is interesting. Stanley Kubrick commissioned a composer called Alex North to do the score and he did the score, but by the time Alex North had done the score, Stanley Kubrick had got so used to the guide tracks, the temp tracks, which were these songs that were in the film because him and his editors had bought a bunch of classical albums trying to find the right thing, Strauss and Ligeti.

Brian Reitzell

Ligeti.

Brian Reitzell

Ligeti on this clip.

Brian Reitzell

Who was alive at the time too.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

And wasn’t all that well-known.

Edgar Wright

I read something that was interesting is that Ligeti liked the film and liked the use of his music in the film, but was annoyed that Richard Strauss and Johan Strauss were in the same movie, [laughs] but here’s an interesting thing. This is like one of the first examples of, which happens a lot later, exactly the same thing happened with The Exorcist score, which is why “Tubular Bells” is on that movie is that Lalo Schifrin had done a score, but William Friedkin had got used to the temp music and chucked the score out.

Basically, Alex North’s score went unused because Stanley Kubrick and his editors thought it was just more, like, impactful with the temp music they’d used.

Brian Reitzell

And Alex North was a very, kind of great conventional composer. He did like North by Northwest and all these wonderful movies. You can get his score and I think this sequence, he’s released it. It’s called like “Metamorphosis” or something. Or no, I’m jumping ahead. You can get it.

Edgar Wright

I mean, this is an incredible... I mean, the whole movie is incredible to me and I think also because at the time that sort of like cutting edge technology in terms of using miniatures and opticals and trying to show sort of like deep space in a way that it had never been seen on screen.

Brian Reitzell

And it’s only like a 10, $12 million movie. Was not an expensive movie to make.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. The thing is that... This film is 49 years old? Yeah. It’ll be 50 years old next year. Even though, obviously, special effects have come a long way since, it’s still very powerful. This is one of... A sequence that... When I see this in cinema, this sequence has me cowering in my seat just with the sheer power of the sound.

(video: 2001: A Space Odyssey – Star Gate Sequence / applause)

Brian Reitzell

I’m really curious to know if Kubrick showed the temp music to Alex North. Like, “Dude, this is what I like. Check this out.” That’s just... Ligeti experimented with all these ways of making tone clusters and that’s with soprano, with voices and stuff. It just sounds like the future, still.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. I don’t know whether he...

Brian Reitzell

Showed it to him?

Edgar Wright

Yeah. I don’t know whether...

Brian Reitzell

There you go.

Edgar Wright

Whether he did show it to him.

Brian Reitzell

I doubt it. I doubt it. He was such a big composer, he’d be like, “I don’t want to see it.”

Edgar Wright

Yeah, and sometimes people don’t want to... A lot of composers don’t want to hear any temp music, especially sometimes even if you’re trying to be nice and temp it with their own music, they’re like, “Oh, no. Turn this off. I don’t want to hear it with my own music either.” I have no idea whether he actually heard the temp but...

Brian Reitzell

I bet he did.

Edgar Wright

It’s difficult to top that. Also, it’s clear the editors edited it to the Ligeti. It’s still astonishing, that sequence. I just... It’s amazing to think that’s 49 years old because it still looks incredible.

Brian Reitzell

I know. There’s no Straus or Wagner in The Shining. OK. Now, let’s move on to 2004, Shaun of the Dead.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. There’s no real link between 2001 and Shaun of the Dead.

Brian Reitzell

That’s why I jumped right into it.

Edgar Wright

This is... I’m not even going to tell you which scene it is because you can guess. This was absolutely written into the script and this song was written into the script. I’ll tell you afterwards what the B choice was, but this was something as well... Again, in anticipation... Like I said, I’ve been thinking about Baby Driver for all this time but this is the first time I’d done a sequence where we had a piece of music playing and we had it playing in on the set so that the actors could hear it as they were performing the sequence. It was the first time I had ever used ear wigs, which is basically where... It’s a little transistor so...

Brian Reitzell

Radio.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, so the actor can hear the music but we can still record dialogue. They can hear it but the microphones can’t pick it up. Basically, we had ear wigs for the actors and I think the camera operator as well. It was also the first time I had really done a sequence where I had actually had a music choreographer... In fact, the same choreographer who did “Blue Song,” a woman called Litza Bixler, who’s amazing. Had her and a stunt coordinator at the same time. I think, unlike some of the later ones, like Scott Pilgrim and Baby Driver, in this one, it wasn’t the perfect blend yet in terms... I felt, on the day, that when we were doing this sequence, the stunt coordinators stood back and said, “Oh, no. This is your bit,” and stood in the corner with his arms folded.

I think, then, on later movies, especially working with Brad Allen on Scott Pilgrim and working with Ryan Heffington and Darien Prescott on Baby Driver... That was a thing where it became a proper team effort. This was getting there... I’m very happy with the sequence but it wasn’t something where it was moving in this direction of two very disparate departments, like dance and stunts, working together. We can talk a bit more about it afterwards but this is a clip from Shaun of the Dead.

(video: Shaun of the Dead – “Don’t Stop Me Now” / applause)

That movie was not an expensive movie and so we’d written Queen into the script but I don’t think it was until we were in, maybe even when we started shooting, that we knew we’d got it cleared. That was quite nerve racking because we were really banking on that song.

Brian Reitzell

Did you have to show it to them?

Edgar Wright

No. I don’t think so. In fact, the reason that “You’re My Best Friend” by Queen is on the end credits is because we went... When we were writing the script, I had Queen’s Greatest Hits on CD and I would play, and we would play this song because we were going to use this song, then, “You’re My Best Friend” was the next song up on the album. Everything that would come on, I eventually said to Simon, “This would be good for the end credits,” because the first lyrics is, “Oooh, you’re making me live.” You’ve just seen Ed as a zombie, spoiler alert [laughter].

I remember that we didn’t know for sure whether we had it when we started and our B choice for this sequence was “Rasputin” by Boney M. That’s exactly why we didn’t use it. It’s because that song means something in Europe and Australia but nothing in the states but I’m telling you, go home and YouTube “Rasputin” by Boney M, your new favorite song.

Brian Reitzell

It’s a party.

Edgar Wright

It’s an amazing song but it would’ve had tumbleweeds at the Vista in Los Angeles. The other thing that’s interesting about that was... The other reason I used that song is I was a big Queen fan growing up. Used to love this song, but at the time before the movie, this wasn’t one of Queen’s most famous songs.

Brian Reitzell

No, not at all.

Edgar Wright

At the time. The crazy thing, there’s this Queen musical, We Will Rock You. I went to see it a couple of years before I did this and “Don’t Stop Me Now” is not really in the musical. I was like, “How could you miss that?” It’s the most obvious musical number. They even make a silly joke where somebody starts singing “Don’t Stop Me Now” and somebody else goes, “Stop,” and they never sing the song, which to me was really dumb. I didn’t really like the musical and that was one of the reasons.

I later found out, way later, that Brian May doesn’t really like the song. It’s a Freddy Mercury composition.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah, it’s Freddy.

Edgar Wright

Freddy wrote it and I think, at the time, it was for when Freddy has his own PR guy. I found an interview later that Brian May said, “I never liked “Don’t Stop Me Now” because I can’t think of the song without thinking of Freddy’s PR guy going, “That’s the single, guys. “Don’t Stop Me Now.”” He basically got annoyed that this song was getting pushed. It’s funny.

I didn’t really get any response from Queen about the movie particularly. Weirdly enough, Brian May did respond to the use of “Brighton Rock” in Baby Driver because he wrote that one.

Brian Reitzell

Of course.

Edgar Wright

He tweeted about it the other day to say how much he liked the film and liked the use of “Brighton Rock.” I was very happy to use this song. I’m not claiming credit for it becoming more famous. I guess I am claiming credit, but it did actually started appearing in adverts afterwards.

Brian Reitzell

I don’t think it was a hit here in this country. Maybe a minor hit because you had “Fat Bottom Girls” and “Bicycle”...

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

Which were...

Edgar Wright

From the same era.

Brian Reitzell

Powerhouses.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

From Jazz, the same record.

Edgar Wright

Oh, yeah. It’s a great song.

That was the first time really that I had done something where, not just playing the music on set. There’d been other things, like obviously music videos or things in space, where we played the music. We were really timing it out and everybody can hear the different parts. It’s very strange to be out doing a night shoot in the middle of south London with a bunch of zombies, also blasting “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

It was exactly as I hoped that the sequence would turn out and I was happy when that became one of the most standout sequences in the film.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah. Then you knew that you could do more things like that.

Edgar Wright

Yes. That’s definitely another trial run. There is a link into the next one, though, I think.

Brian Reitzell

Yes.

Edgar Wright

If I’m right in thinking…

Brian Reitzell

Oh, yeah.

Edgar Wright

The next clip is one of the movies... I think, of all of the horror comedies that had some influence on Shaun of the Dead, this one probably has the most influence on it. Not a zombie film although it does feature zombies. John Landis’s An American Werewolf In London I think is one of my top three desert island movies of all time. I saw it when I was... I was too young to see it at the cinema but I remember, when it came out in 1981, so I must’ve been six or seven.

There was this magazine. It was our version of Fangoria. There was a magazine called Star Burst and they had this especially gory cover of David Norton surrounded by all the zombies from the cinema. It was incredibly bloody. My parents used to buy me and my brother this sci-fi magazine, Star Burst. Used to get more and more gory and have complaints about it.

I just could not believe this photo of this movie and then reading the coverage of it. This is three years before I saw The Thing. It’s that weird thing when, back in the days, pre-Internet and stuff, when you’re relying on books and magazines. You would get obsessed by movies you hadn’t seen. You’d look at the stills, you’d know everything about it. I remember the first time it was on network TV, 1984, maybe three years after it came out.

I was only 10 by then and my parents knew how obsessed me and my brother were with the movie, so they let us stay up to watch it. However, if you’ve seen the movie, there’s a particularly gory flashback with nazi demons. At a point where somebody’s throat gets slit very gorily, my mum was like, “OK. That’s enough. Bed.” Which is also a bad policy because then I had terrible nightmares because I didn’t see the monster vanquished at the end. There’s no resolution of the film for me, so it actually gave me worse nightmares than if I’d watched the whole thing.

Brian Reitzell

Which is why you’re sitting here.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, although if I had stayed watching about another 10 minutes I would have had to watch the Jenny Agutter nude shower scene with my mum and dad, which would have been equally embarrassing, but I obviously finally saw the movie and it quickly became, and still is, I think this is one of those movies that’s just like… And I think when you cross genres together, if you do films that are two genres in one, like a comedy horror, something like that, no two movies are the same. You know, things just have their completely unique tone, and this is one of those movies that not only does it have a unique tone in itself, but also within John Landis’ filmography. He never really did a film that exactly like it.

The other reason, of course, that this is extraordinary to me is that I think, and this is one of the things that kind of went on to influence me in a big way, is when I think of films which have like a jukebox soundtrack, using source music, not music composed for the film. Using pop songs. And obviously 2001 in a weird way is something that, they’re using classical hits. The other big ones like growing up… Like growing up that would have a big influence on me would be American Graffiti, George Lucas’ movie which is kinda wall to wall rock & roll hits all playing on radios and stuff. American Werewolf in London, like hugely influential because it’s all of a theme, all of the songs in the movie have “moon” in the title. So you open with… There’s like three covers of “Blue Moon,” including one in this clip. There’s like “Moon Dance” by Van Morrison, “Bad Moon Rising.” Curiously not “Werewolf in London” by Warren Zevon, not in the movie strangely. There was some ones I think he wanted to use but couldn’t use like, like he couldn’t use “Moon Shadow” by Cat Stevens, he couldn’t use Elvis’ version of “Blue Moon” and then along with some other ones, one of which we’ll see later, like, just the use of pop music, but I think when I saw this when I was 10 I’d never seen a movie like it and it has some score as well but the actual choice to kind of stick to a theme of particular songs and nearly always be counter scoring, especially in this scene as the beautiful “Blue Moon” cover is going against the action.

Brian Reitzell

This is the version sang by Sam Cook.

Edgar Wright

Yes.

Brian Reitzell

And this is the scene where I had said it was scored, and it was called, released later as “Metamorphosis,” this was scored by Elmer Burnstein, the great Elmer Burnstein. So he scored the sequence but then they decided to use the Sam Cook version and the movie opens with “Blue Moon” and it also closes with “Blue Moon.”

Edgar Wright

An amazing cover of “Blue Moon.” Yeah its incredible, I think that...

Brian Reitzell

They didn’t have iTunes back then so they could only think of like five moon songs.

Edgar Wright

I think they wanted to use Elvis’ one and they also wanted to use Bob Dylan but they couldn’t but this sequence is just incredible. I mean the other thing about this sequence I’m sure many of you have seen this Oscar winning sequence, this movie got the first ever, they created the Academy Award for special effects and make up for this movie.

Brian Reitzell

This is 1981.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, 1981. So they created a category for the movie cause it’s such extraordinary work and also this transformation sequence is kind of like, at the time, and still now, you know it got John Landis the job directing Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” but its also notable of the fact that all previous werewolf transformations, or transformations in film are always done in the dark, in the shadows because its easier to hide in the shadows and hide some of the effects and this one is in, like, in a very harsh sort of light.

(video: An American Werewolf in London – Complete Transformation / applause)

That movie is just incredible to me, I never... Also the best cut away to Mickey Mouse ever.

Brian Reitzell

Is that an homage, do you think?

Edgar Wright

I’m not sure, I also just think it’s kind of like, it’s just a funny thing to cut to. I’m actually surprised they gave them the clearance to use it in an x-rated movie.

Brian Reitzell

Oh come on it’s incredible. It took them six days to do that sequence.

Edgar Wright

Rick Baker, yeah amazing make-up artist, LA native [applause]. Yeah and won the first Oscar for that and you know, and like I said that’s… Like Michael Jackson saw that movie and called him up to do “Thriller.” That movie is such a simple idea and it’s such a clever idea to sort of use the different moon themed songs and sometimes it’s working perfectly with the movie, like Van Morrison which is a romantic song is soundtracking the sex scene but having that beautiful sound cover against all of that screaming and bone breaking it’s amazing.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah I quite like the sound design there, it’s not too big, it’s perfect. OK, moving along to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Edgar Wright

Yes, I think we’ve got two clips of this. So this movie, this movie was a real gift in terms of like, it’s based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s amazing graphic novel series and you know one of the interesting things, me and an LA writer called Michael Bacall we wrote the adaptation together. One of the things that was great about doing the movie is that at the very start, Bryan Lee O’Malley, the writer of the comic books, he had made these playlists to go with the books for himself.

Brian Reitzell

Were they any good?

Edgar Wright

Yeah and in fact some of the songs are in the movie and then on the flip side I made playlists based on what I felt when I read the different books. So we sort of started the process of the adaptation by exchanging songs and quite a lot of the songs on both our lists ended up in the movie. The cool thing with this one was that also in the books and in the film there are fictional bands and, you know, sometimes fictional bands in films can be like, bad. There are some great examples of great fictional bands, Spinal Tap being the obvious one. I love a movie called Phantom of the Paradise by Brian De Palma which has several fictional bands in it, all written by Paul Williams who actually makes the cameo in Baby Driver.

So with this we had an idea that because there are several fictional bands in it that we would get different people to play the different bands. So Nigel Godrich, who is in Radiohead and Beck and you know, a producer, this is the only film he ever scored so far. But he also kind of brought the different bands together and I think this clip doesn’t have a band bit but the second clips has some more band stuff but this clip is like the bass-off sequence and what’s funny about this bass-off is we recorded it live to guitar players that you probably know, Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Jason Falkner, who both play with Beck and they basically performed the bass-off live, I think on the Blu-Ray there’s a video of it.

So then Michael Cera and Brandon Ralph basically had to kind of learn to do these very intricate, like, bass solos and actually Michael Cera is a really good guitarist so you know, Brandon had to really bone up to get there but it was an amazing sort of experience doing this movie because there was so much music in it, and we had Nigel around sometimes. Nigel came to record some of the songs with the cast or we like, we had the amazing thing of like, Metric did a song and then Brie Larson re-recorded the vocal or like Beck did a whole bunch of songs and then the actors re-recorded the vocal. It was amazing because then it was really like, I think in the whole movie it feels like you get a sense of the music business by having different artists do different bits. So it was an incredible experience to have all these sort of artists that I love doing bits and bobs on the film and even on the score, Nigel had members of Air like Nicolas Godin, who you know and...

Brian Reitzell

I was in Air.

Edgar wright

Yeah and members of Broken Social Scene and members of Supergrass and Kid Koala, there’s all sorts of people playing on the score itself. So it was an amazing experience and then also it’s something, and this is very much in the books, but it’s something that I really wanted to do and if anything Scott Pilgrim was my sort of way of doing something a bit like Spaced on the big screen. So taking that sort of like pop, arty, sort of highly stylized sort of comedy and doing it with sort of an action music film. So this is one of the clips from Scott Pilgrim.

Brian Reitzell

The idea using a bass duel...

Edgar Wright

That’s kind of like James Bond stuff, doesn’t that literally happen at the start of Live and Let Die? It is it’s like in the United Nations they start killing people with sound. That’s happening for real.

Brian Reitzell

Let’s change the subject, let’s go back to the lovely world of... I love that there’s, whose idea was it to have a Rickenbacker and a Fender Mustang bass?

Edgar Wright

I think they’re both in the comic, I think they’re both drawn like that, we were pretty specific to what he’d drawn.

Brian Reitzell

Because they’re different but they’re two of the coolest basses.

Edgar Wright

Yeah no, Bryan Lee O’Malley knows his stuff, I’m almost certain we took it straight from the comic. But I remember we recorded that bass-off at Capital Records, so it’s not far away and Justin and Jason did it live, so it’s kind of like a...

Brian Reitzell

So they did it while to the picture after you did it, or you...

Edgar Wright

No they did it before, they did it before and Michael Cera and Brandon Ralph like basically played along with it, but what’s funny is that the take is a take it’s not like us doing one bit then doing the other.

Brian Reitzell

They’re good.

Edgar Wright

They’re amazing, you know and they’re both sort of two of the best session guitarists out there, and producers now, Justin produces now.

Brian Reitzell

Justin produces. Well Justin is a kind of bass player’s bass player, and Jason Faulkner plays everything.

Edgar Wright

That was... With the other funny thing about that, is anybody from Toronto. Toronto rather? Because that place is a famous venue called Lee’s Palace, but we actually…

Brian Reitzell

I played there, sure.

Edgar Wright

That’s a set we recreated.

Brian Reitzell

It looks a lot nicer than Lee’s Palace actually.

Edgar Wright

It’s like a little bit bigger so the Canadian bands that came to visit like Metric and Broken Social Scene were absolutely dumbfounded that we basically made a set of Lee’s Palace.

Brian Reitzell

Why would you do that?

Edgar Wright

Because you couldn’t known down the walls on the other one. It was like, I think the entire place would have come down if we’ve done that. It’s not necessarily a structurally sound place. In fact, actually whilst just after we shot the one exterior of Lee’s Palace for real it started falling apart, that building. I wouldn’t have shot that sequence, that real location. But I have fond memories of doing that bit, and it’s just little images that you... Just the idea of Brandon Routh pushing all of the empty glasses around the floor with his telekinesis is always really... I love a lot of the details in that.

Brian Reitzell

Did you live in Toronto?

Edgar Wright

Only when I was doing the film. I was there for nearly a year making the movie and had a fantastic time. I mean that place is great and it was at the time when there was this sort of fertile… You know, Broken Social Scene and all the various factions that came out of that so, I got to know all of those bands and it was…

Brian Reitzell

You got to also work with Chris from Sloan, right?

Edgar Wright

Yes!

Brian Reitzell

Another friend of mine.

Edgar WRight

Yeah!

Brian Reitzell

Great band.

Edgar Wright

He was... What’s his name? Chris, um?

Brian Reitzell

Murphy.

Edgar Wright

Chris Murphy, oh yeah.

Brian REitzell

Sloan, they’re rock stars in Canada.

Edgar Wright

They’re huge in Canada.

Brian Reitzell

Huge.

Edgar Wright

He was basically the kind of music teacher on the movie. So he basically, the cast had varying abilities in musicianship. Michael was really good. Brie Larson was really good. Other people had to learn their instruments like Alison Pill had to play the drums, Mark Webber had to learn play the guitar, and Chris was there. What’s funny for the Canadian members of the cast like Michael Cera and Alison Pill…

Brian Reitzell

“Oh my God!”

Edgar Wright

Yeah they couldn’t believe that Chris Murphy was there, basically being teacher. And in a lot of the shots, especially when Mark Webber is performing on guitar, Chris Murphy is standing to the side of the camera going “D, A,” like acting out so Mark Webber could follow what Chris Murphy was doing. Chris Murphy was wearing the same costume as Mark Webber so it was a very surreal thing to witness [laughter]. He would’ve been right there in the next sequence we’re gonna show. This is actually a scene later on in the movie, which is probably one of the wildest music sequences. Oh no we’re gonna show a different one!

Brian Reitzell

Yeah we’re gonna ping-pong, we’re gonna play something and then we’re gonna come back to Scott Pilgrim. We’ll talk more, more about that.

(video: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Boss Battle #3 / applause)

Edgar Wright

I was saying it before about highly influential movies, I mean soundtrack-wise. American Graffiti, American Werewolf in London, Reservoir Dogs is obviously another obvious one. But then, I think the other movie, I think I saw this when I was like 15? Maybe when it came out? 16? 16. It was Goodfellas and the use of... [reads notes] Oh no no is it a different one first?

Brian Reitzell

Sorry these notes were for me to read.

Edgar Wright

Oh you’re right! You’re right. It’s a different one first. We’ll come back to Goodfellas.

Brian Reitzell

We’re being chronological, we’ll get to Goodfellas in a minute.

Edgar Wright

You’re absolutely right, this is a different one. OK. This is from a film called Mauvais Sang from 1985. This is a director called Leos Carax. I don’t know if anybody, some of you might know this film. Leo Carax is a French director who’s only really done a handful of films. A film called Boy Meets Girl. Another one called Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, called Lovers on the Bridge in the states. French title’s better.

More recently, you might’ve seen this film Holy Motors, which is a fantastic movie. Nearly all of them star Denis Lavant and nearly all of them have some amazing sequence featuring a pop song. This is from his 1985 film featuring a young Denis Lavant and I think as a big David Bowie fan I think this is the best use of David Bowie in a film ever.

This isn’t the most high-quality clip but I really wanted to show this one because it’s the sort of clip that I obsess about and I just think, especially because it’s not a big budget movie, this is a French movie. It’s sort of like an AIDS metaphor about a disease that’s killing people who have sex without emotion. Mauvais Sang means “Bad Blood.” This is a short sequence using David Bowie, and I just think it’s incredible, so let’s watch that and we’ll talk about Goodfellas and Scott Pilgrim later.

(video: Mauvais Sang – “Modern Love” / applause)

I just think that’s an astounding shot and most of his movies feature some incredible musical set piece. What’s also I love in that is the fact that they’ve painted or pasted the walls for several blocks…

Brian Reitzell

Yeah, yeah…

Edgar Wright

Pasted like gray, and red and all the colors so it’s starting strobing behind him and obviously there’s no trickery in that. It’s all in camera. You can even see the cameraman struggling to keep up with him at some points. And I’m sure that’s... They probably just shot that out of a car window. I’m not sure if there is any dolly that can go that fast at that time before the days of cable-cam and all that kind of stuff so I just... I mean his movies are well worth seeing. There’s not that many of them. I think there’s six total and I highly recommend Holy Motors, his last film, which stars an older Denis Lavant but I just wanted to show that clip because it’s one of my favorite bits of music in film.

Brian Reitzell

And it’s always good to hear David Bowie.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. Now we’re gonna see another clip from Scott Pilgrim. This I remember there was a point when I was making this sequence where I really felt like I’ve bitten off more than I could chew. I remember at one point just... There’s lots of things in this movie where there’s lights going off within the movie, We still had this idea that every time there’s a connection or a hit, there should be a light going off. So in a lot of the fight scenes, this is in one of the fight scenes specifically, we would have these light bulbs placed around the shop, and got to go off in an order and I would set them off by hand. Sometimes the choreographer would do it but most of the time I would do it.

So I’d have this button and I’d stand by the monitor and I would be going... They were real light bulbs, I think we used 4,000 light bulbs during the making of the movie and we’d be going like [imitates pressing button, blowing light bulb]. And I’d have this button and it just said Edgar, they gave it to me at the end, I’d have this button and it was just my light bulb button.

And I remember at a point during this sequence I remember me and the AD and the Director of Photography. It was... Usually there is always a sequence where three-quarters of the way through the shoot where everybody’s exhausted and it was before the final rally where everybody’s tired and I remember this is exactly where the scene landed. I’m very happy with the finished thing, and I remember point-and-shooting it standing by the monitors with a wind machine going and pressing all these light bulb buttons and thinking, “What the fuck am I doing?” [laughter]

Brian Reitzell

I think that everyday.

Edgar Wright

It’s funny Michael Cera said that for a long time after the film, he had this sound of light bulbs haunt his dreams. Obviously later on… The main thing is digitally taken out, the actual light bulbs were all gone, but if you actually watch closely, especially with the final sequence with the sword fight and stuff, every time that they connect a light goes off. You can’t really do that stuff digitally because it throws the light in a certain direction so there’s shitloads of lighting cues in this sequence. The other thing to say about this one, which is interesting, is this is a battle between two bands. The Japanese band is played by Cornelius, if you don’t know that artist who is one of my favorite artists, incredible guy, I just saw him live this summer…

Brian Reitzell

Incredible live show too.

Edgar Wright

What’s funny... Cornelius is being promoted over here by Matador, the easy thing they used to say is, “Oh Cornelius is like the Japanese Beck”. So playing the part of Sexb Bomb in this sequence is Beck. So my thought with this sequence was like, Beck vs. Japanese Beck [laughter]. Which is the joke probably for an audience of one, me [laughter].

Brian Reitzell

No I get it, I, I totally get it.

Edgar wright

But what’s funny too is that Beck and Cornelius are friends and in fact Cornelius has done some remixes of Beck’s songs. What’s interesting is that both of them did these songs completely separately, and they’re both obviously done before the movie. In fact, Cornelius, and Beck, they both recorded their songs, we have no footage, I just gave them storyboards. In Cornelius’ case, I cut together the storyboards and he did a sort of approximation. Beck on the other hand, in Echo Park in his garage... Garage. That’s how we say it in the UK.

Brian Reitzell

It’s called a recording studio.

Edgar Wright

One weekend, he wanted to do the songs and Nigel worked with him, but he wanted to work off... I think he was working off an eight-track or something? He just had at home. He said, “Give me the scenes, give me lots of artwork, give me some rough guidelines of what the song needs to be and let me have a go.” So basically, we printed out large pieces of artwork from the books. We gave him all the storyboards for the sequences on boards. I gave him a list of how many songs I needed, and over a weekend… At the end of the weekend, Nigel called me and said, “Oh, Beck’s got something for us,” and it was like a CD-R with like 22 songs on it. And basically, the songs were done in a rough form, maybe it’s on a four-track actually, done in a rough form. He gave us versions without the vocals because the actors ended up replacing his vocals. On the album you can get the Beck versions too. But we never got to re-record anything, because they sounded so raw and garage-y that it just seemed right. And even the music in the opening credits was very difficult for the actors to mime along with, because there are lots of fluffs on it. They were just sort of jamming and improvising. But it sounded so real, it just sounded like we should use that, and not go to do any overdubs. And so what he did on his four-track that weekend is what’s in the movie, including this song.

Brian Reitzell

Did you send him any Oskar Fischinger?

Edgar Wright

Any what, sorry?

Brian Reitzell

Oskar Fischinger.

Edgar Wright

No, what’s that?

Brian Reitzell

I’m thinking of the opening of the movie that feels visually... Oskar Fischinger is one of my heroes.

Edgar Wright

Oh, like the scratch kind of art?

Brian Reitzell

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, you know what? That sequence, actually it’s funny, that wasn’t the original intention, the opening credits of the movie. Originally we had them playing that song, and then it said the title and then it went into the movie and they finished the song. But then it was actually, weirdly enough, it was a suggestion by, name drop alert, Quentin Tarantino. He said…

Brian Reitzell

Who?

Edgar Wright

He watched the movie and he said, “You should have a title sequence at the start of this movie,” he goes, “just to let everybody settle and see the names of the people that are going to be in the movie, and just let everybody get their heads around it for like two minutes.”

And I thought, “That’s an interesting idea.” So we didn’t have anything, but we did have this Beck demo. The thing that the Sexba Bomb are playing in the opening credits, there was like three minutes of it. And it was fun, and so the only thing that we added with Nigel is that we got the actors to come in and yell on top of the demo, like they’re jamming and trying to shout at each other whilst they were playing. But basically that demo is the opening titles of the movie, so that... There’s another artist... Norman something, what’s the other guy that does the scratch art, anybody?

What, Norman McLaren? That’s the guy. So the reference was Norman McLaren. Yeah, so Beck didn’t see any of that until it was finished. So that idea for that sequence didn’t exist until very late in the day, and then these amazing music video guys, who have done incredible videos, I asked them to do the opening credits, and so we had that demo. But this is one of the latest sequences, which features…

Brian Reitzell

Cornelius versus Beck.

Edgar wright

Beck versus Japanese Beck.

(video: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World – Boss Battle #5 and #6 / applause)

Brian Reitzell

Whoa, it seems like there’s a lot of Easter eggs in that movie.

Edgar wright

Yeah, there’s a Queen track in that scene, can anybody name it? “Flash Gordon.” The sound of the ring is from “Flash Gordon,” and we had to actually clear…

Brian Reitzell

You licensed that, you cleared that? I could make that on my phone right now.

Edgar Wright

We licensed it. The song is called... I know, I think we sort of just did it and then it was just funny to me that in the end credits it says, Queen “The Hypnotic Seduction of Dale,” is the name of the track. The other thing that’s in there is when the Japanese turn their dials up, it’s the Japanese symbol for 11.

The other thing I remember about that, is when we shot the whole scene, when we shot all the stuff with the actors and the Sato twins, who played the Katayanagi twins, then we had to do a day of shooting plates for all the effects stuff. So we had to go back and shoot the crowds, and one of my vivid memories of the movie, specially when you stand from it removed, is watching the second AD explain the movie to the extras on what was happening in the scene. And he was going, “So then you look up, and there’s two dragons, and then over here is this electric yeti, and then they’re fighting, so you’re like, “Whoa,” and then they’ve killed the dragons, and you cheer, and then the yeti disappears and you cheer again.” I imagine the looks on the extras’ faces, trying to process all of that...

Brian Reitzell

Just nod.

Edgar Wright

Yep.

Brian Reitzell

I love that punk rock blows away EDM in that scene, too.

Edgar Wright

Well, see, that was Beck’s demo. So that was the demo he did in like…

Brian Reitzell

Which is what punk rock is, you don’t make demos for punk rock.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, on a four-track, no overdubs, yeah. It was amazing. So the next one we were already started on... Goodfellas.

Brian Reitzell

Goodfellas. 1990.

Edgar Wright

And this is a sequence. This isn’t the whole of the sequence, but this is... Martin Scorsese is one of those directors who can use music brilliantly, and he had already been doing it in his career with Mean Streets, and The Color of Money...

Brian Reitzell

The Last Waltz.

Edgar Wright

What, sorry?

Brian Reitzell

The Last Waltz. I mean, he lived with Robbie Robertson.

Edgar Wright

And I think this is the movie where they sort of... It’s such an expansive soundtrack, because the movie moves from ’50s, to ’60s, to ’70s, and covers hits from all of their sequences. But this is one of those things ... We should just play it, I won’t say which one it is, because you’ll know which one it is. But it’s just one of those things where it’s so thrillingly edited and put together. And this isn’t the whole sequence, but some of it. And also, just genius use of music. And a lot of cases of him using music that either haven’t been used in films before, or making it the defining use of that song. There are some kind of songs that Scorsese just claimed as his own and nobody else can use them.

Brian Reitzell

“Give Me Shelter.”

Edgar Wright

“Give Me Shelter,” “Leila”...

Speaker 3:

He also would play music on set. He would play music on set.

Edgar Wright

Right.

Brian Reitzell

And I know that in this movie, which does take place over quite a few years, different decades, that he wanted to be sure that whatever he played could’ve existed in that time. So he was... This piece of music was from 1971, ’72, the great Harry Nilsson doing “Jump Into the Fire.”

Edgar Wright

It’s amazing.

(video: Goodfellas – “Jump To The Fire” / applause)

Brian Reitzell

That was enough music budget for the first three movies I did right there. So that was Harry Nilsson, and then we go into [inaudible] Turner?

Edgar Wright

Yeah, Mick Jagger from Performance.

Brian Reitzell

With Ry Cooder on guitar...

Edgar Wright

And later on in the sequence, I think it has six songs in total in that sequence. “Monkey Man” by the Stones, “Magic Bus” by The Who, “Mannish Boy” by Muddy Waters, and there’s another one as well that I’ve forgotten.

Brian Reitzell

Probably another Rolling Stones song.

Edgar Wright

What’s the other one... Oh! It’s a George Harrison, “What Is Life?” And then they play Harry Nilsson again at the end. I remember watching that film, it was like the first film that I watched… I saw it when I was 16, I think it was an 18 in the UK, so I’d sneak in and I went back to see it the next night because I was just bowled over by the technique. I think his use of music, and the editing... What’s great in that sequence obviously he’s coked out and it’s all paranoid, but it was still taking place in the course of a day so it makes a sort of choice that you don’t really… I think it was the first time I had ever really seen that in a movie, the idea of this takes place in the course of the day, there’s six songs to show you the passing of time. To show the montage rather than have one thing that carries all the way through.

There is a funny link with Shaun of the Dead. Goodfellas and Shaun of the Dead have the same camera operator. No, sorry, the camera operator on Goodfellas was the DP and main camera operator on Shaun of the Dead. This guy’s name is David Dunlap, and one of the funny things is that he was the operator on Goodfellas, so he’d shot all of that sequence you just saw, he’s not a steady camera operator, though. So all the way through the shoot, people would say, “Oh my God, you shot Goodfellas! Tell us about doing the shot in the kitchen, when they get through the kitchen.” David would say, “Uh, I didn’t do that with them, that was Larry Edwins. I did everything else.” And they’d go, “Oh. But that kitchen shot, man.” [laughter]

Then, just to haunt David Dunlap again, with Shaun of the Dead, people would say, “Oh, you did Shaun of the Dead! What about that steady-cam shot when he goes to the store and back?” And he goes, “I didn’t shoot that one. That was Chris Edwards, but I did everything else.” I feel like David Dunlap is constantly haunted by these amazing... I mean, still incredible to have done the rest of Goodfellas, obviously. But he did both movies. Something like that, so both directors whose choice in music I love, like Scorsese, Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Walter Hill as well, like that definitely plays into Baby Driver, which is like the kind of culmination of loving movies like Goodfellas. And also the use of music in them, as well.

Something like Goodfellas has so much music in it, where it’s usually playing a score, sometimes is happening within the scene, or you get the sense that it’s playing in a club, or a wedding, or in a bar. I think the idea I had with Baby Driver is that to sort of do a soundtrack like that, but to have it entirely diegetic, and also to have the main character playing the music. So most of the music in the film, the lead character has actually chosen it. And a lot of times in the movie, you’re listening to what he’s listening to so you’re seeing the movie through his eyes and hearing the movie through his ears.

Brian Reitzell

And he has pretty good taste.

Edgar Wright

Yes. I mean, a lot of these are obviously things that I like. I mean, if you’re going to make a movie and you’re going to listen to these songs hundreds of times, you’ve got to love the song you know, so…

Brian Reitzell

A good song is always a good song I think.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. In the movie there are no songs that I tire of because I love all the songs and you know…

Brian Reitzell

And I think there’s about 44, there’s a lot of songs.

Edgar Wright

I think it’s maybe like 35 like commercial tracks, which is a lot, and you know, and we had to also kind of clear them before we started shooting. It’s like doing the Queen scene 35 times over. Every scene, in the scene, which is the opening of the movie, which we are about to watch part of, you know, it’s, in a scene like this, it is exactly like that where sometimes Ansel’s listening to it in his ears. A lot of times in this sequence, because there’s no dialogue, it was one of the few sequences where we could just play it out loud. In a lot of these scenes in the street, we’re just playing this song you know, full volume because the other actors are also doing stuff in time to the music.

But this is the thing, like literally this song, that opens this movie by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is the song that I heard when I was 21 and was… The start of the germ of the idea for the movie was because when I listened to this song I’m imaging this car chase. You know, I was 21 years old so it wasn’t like I necessarily liked it or was thinking, “This would be a great scene in something.” I started to think that but it was more the way when I listened to the song I couldn’t think of anything else. I would always start visualizing this car chase. It was like having, like action movie synesthesia, because I had this vision of this thing and you know, like the Mint Royal video that we saw earlier was sort of this start of a dry run for it but this kind of has what happens next.

It was like a real thrill to have, and in the time, I think after Shaun of the Dead I met Jon Spencer from the Blues Explosion and we became friends and I sort of told him, I didn’t want to jinx it for myself in terms of, but I said, “Oh, I’ve got this idea for a movie and I really want to use “Bellbottoms,”” and I’m sure Jon thought, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” but then you know, cut to like this summer. Jon Spencer is actually in the movie as well. He’s in the final scene of the movie and sort of has one of the final lines of the movie. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not going to spoil the end scene. The idea I thought was it’d be funny if Jon Spencer was the first and last voice you hear in Baby Driver. Well, let’s watch the scene.

Brian Reitzell

“Bellbottoms,” Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 1994.

(video: Baby Driver – Opening Scence / “Bellbottoms” / applause)

Oh boy. I love car chases.

Edgar Wright

They’re as exhausting to make as they are exciting to watch.

Brian Reitzell

I remember seeing, and this really affected me as a kid, I saw Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, in the drive-in as a kid in the back of my parents car. Never been the same.

Edgar Wright

Incredible movie. Also a British director doing an American car chase movie.

Brian Reitzell

Really?

Edgar Wright

Yeah. John Hough.

Brian Reitzell

And James Garner did a bunch of the stunts. OK. Music in film. Did you add some, I don’t remember the strings being in that track?

Edgar Wright

There are strings in “Bellbottoms”…

Brian Reitzell

There is.

Edgar Wright

But we do actually like add to the start of it. That’s one of the things that was really… There are strings in that song and one of the things that was great, Steve Price, who is the composer on this film, he is somebody that when I first started thinking about the script, like 10 years ago, he was a music editor, and I met him and I said, “Oh is there a good music editor?” I asked our music supervisor and he said, “Oh there’s this guy called Steve Price, you should meet him.” I got him to break down the tracks for me and I had 10 of the tracks worked out like “Bellbottoms,” “Hocus Pocus,” “Tequila,” the Damned, “Brighton Rock,” a lot of the big set pieces in the movie and he did these sort of basically like charts, much more detailed versions of like intro, verse one, verse two, middle eight, just a lot more detail and it was really helpful and incorporated a lot into the script.

Another thing with Steve is that then the next time I met with him… He was like the music editor and arranger on Scott Pilgrim. The next thing he did is he was one of the composers on a film I produced called Attack the Block. The next thing he did is he composed Gravity and won the Oscar, only with his second score, which is astonishing. I did The World’s End with him but when it came to this, there’s only like half an hour of score in Baby Driver but I called Steve, even though he’s a big time Oscar winner now and said, “You have first refusal because you were there right at the start,” and he goes, “Of course I want to do it.”

The great thing about Steve, and this isn’t the case with like, probably in direct contrast to say, Alex North, you know, being bumped off, his scoring bumped off by all the temp music, the great thing about Steve is that he knows what the movie is, he knows about the songs, and a lot of his score in the movie is in like leading into the same key of the song…

Brian Reitzell

Connective tissue, yeah.

Edgar Wright

Yes.

Brian Reitzell

I noticed there’s a lot of handoffs between, yeah.

Edgar Wright

And that’s great. Not all composers would do that because some of them have too much ego to kind of like really think about, well, the other stuff is, the great thing about Steve is that there are several bits in Baby Driver where the score starts to come in during a song, or in the middle of a song. At the opening of Baby Driver itself, is it sort of starts with like the sort of tinnitus, starts on the Sony “bing” at the start and then builds and builds and builds and turns into strings and then “Bellbottoms” starts and his strings keep going until the strings in “Bellbottoms” starts. That’s like a great example of like the song and the score and the sound designer all going together.

There’s like places in the movie where like a song that you know already suddenly sort of has like this kind of, in “Hocus Pocus,” we do it as well, where there’s this part in the middle of the song where sort of an orchestra is playing at the same time, in the same key, sort of bolstering parts of the song.

Brian Reitzell

Also, this film in general is incredibly rhythmic. There’s so many sequences that are glued to the music. You clearly were doing your homework before and afterwards, very rhythmic.

Edgar Wright

Yeah. All of the songs were written into the script. Pretty much every day on the set was like shooting the Queen scene in Shaun of the Dead. We always had every possible way of doing playback so in some cases only Ansel can hear it and maybe the camera operator and me. In some cases everybody can hear it.

You know, obviously at the start of that sequence, when Jon Hamm and Jon Bernthal and Eiza Gonzales are getting out of the car, they can all hear the track. On top of the track as well, the choreographer is counting on top. That little shot at the end is much more deceptive, is much more complicated than it might seem when they get out. Ansel pulls up, they get out of one car, they all open their doors at the same time, they all close their doors at the same time, they all switch places, Eiza switches costumes, they all get into final car, close the doors on time, drive off, and she drives off, all in one shot.

If you watch the scene again, it’s pretty much, it’s almost like a 360 and the crew are all hiding behind pillars and other cars because there’s nowhere to hide because we basically, the camera operator pans around and me and the choreographer, the choreographer Ryan, would be running around the camera and because the car’s noisy and stuff, that’s a case where he’s going, “Five, six, seven, eight,” you know, like shouting out on top. That’s a case of like they’re doing it to the music but I think after a couple of rehearsals they then just do it to the counts because with the car stuff, especially on the freeway, forget trying to listen to Jon Spencer.

Some of those times you have to kind of like do it with counts or create those moments later but everything up until that, you know, the music is playing at like full blast and you know, it was one of those things where I think probably in total it must be something like 10 days-shoot over a long period of time. We’d keep coming back to it and poor Jon Bernthal, he’s only in the first kind of couple scenes in the movie, was like the one actor who kept having to come back to Atlanta to come back and do a day of frowning in a car and then go back to Ohio. He was totally fine with it though.

I remember he said a funny thing to me that really stuck with me. All of the other actors were there for the whole time, but Jon Bernthal was the one actor I felt like I needed to apologize to him because I think he was supposed to come back and forth but then we needed to do extra stuff on the scene and so he came back an extra like three times. In total on the movie, he flew to Atlanta maybe eight or nine times or something and I said to him, on the last day I said, “Hey Jon, I just want to say thanks for your patience. You know these scenes are really sort of like meticulous and difficult to do,” and Jon Bernthal said, he goes, “Listen man, if this shit was easy, every asshole would do it.” [laughter] I thought those are words to live by. By the great philosopher Jon Bernthal. I mean, he’s not wrong. It really stuck with me. He just said it and it really stuck with me. “If this shit was easy, every asshole would do it.” Speaking of which

Brian Reitzell

Speaking of, yeah.

Edgar Wright

Speaking of meticulous and tricky.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah, we’ve got two more clips here and then we can get some questions if we move fast enough.

Edgar Wright

And this is the last…

Brian Reitzell

... The music video. Michele Gondry’s Chemical Brothers video for the song “Star Guitar,” which is a fantastic... This came out in 2002, and was mostly all shot on a TGV train. I’ve taken those trains. Michel’s from France, so he’s taken them more than me, but I’ve taken those trains many, many times listening to music. It’s one of the best music videos you’ll ever see. It’s just your own, just sitting on the train. Everything... Because they go over 200 miles an hour. You’re just sitting there. It’s like [makes noise]. Everything becomes locked to the rhythm here, and it had a big effect on me as a musician, just those rides. But Michel nailed it with this video. It’s really kind of an incredible work.

Edgar Wright

I think it’s just such a deceptively simple video. I remember the first time I saw it I was like sitting... I think it was a production company that I was working with for music videos, and I was watching it through the TV, I was watching on it a TV through a piece of glass, so I was like watching it through a window without the sound. I was looking at this video thinking, “What the fuck is that?”Because it was just like, like a train shot, and then obviously you hear it and say, “Oh this is genius.” I mean there’s elements of that, that even factored into the clip we just saw. Because like...

Brian Reitzell

It’s all very rhythmic.

Edgar Wright

Yeah and there are a couple of places where you know almost everything is in camera, and then there are some clever cheats right at the end of “Bellbottoms” when they pull in to that car park, on those little bass riffs you see these concrete pillars go through shot. Two of them are real and two of them are not real. It’s sort of like you’ve got one that lands on the music and then we say, “This one’s on the music, put one in there, and put one in there.” It’s literally like you’re putting on the beat. If you see... If you got the Michel Gondry, they did this amazing, I think it was Palm Pictures that did those, Best of Michel Gondry music videos. They have the making of, one of the things he did is he took the track and basically like notated where the beats were, and then worked it out initially with like oranges and dominoes, like putting them on the ground.

Brian Reitzell

Michel plays drums.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

He is a drummer, so he’s got that.

Edgar Wright

So this is made up of video through a train when we’re in France. But it’s obviously then like of computer generated loops. But it’s still just incredible. And it’s one of those things where you know... A lot of his videos I love, another one that does a similar thing that I really love is his Daft Punk video for “Around the World.”

Brian Reitzell

Right.

Edgar Wright

Which also does a similar thing.

Brian Reitzell

Which is a similar thing.

Edgar Wright

Oh it’s amazing, anyway this is a hypnotic and incredible video.

Brian Reitzell

And this also features a sample by David Bowie, “Star Man.”

(video: The Chemical Brothers – “Star Guitar” / applause)

Edgar Wright

A truly hypnotic video. Have we just got one last clip I think?

Brian Reitzell

Yeah but we’re behind, so it’s...

Edgar Wright

OK. So this is actually the sequence that immediately follows the last thing we saw in Baby Driver. This is the opening credit sequence. And a couple of interesting things about this, if you haven’t seen it before or if you’ve seen it for the second time, most of you probably know this but keep a close eye in what’s written all over the walls and all over the place during the opening sequence. The other thing that’s interesting about this, it’s all in one shot. As a steady cam shot... So it’s all in one shot, and we did it on the first day of the shoot.

It’s like a two minute 45 second shot, and in the course of a day I think we sort of did two sort of half day rehearsals on set. We rehearsed a lot with Ansel and then with the kind of like the extras and everything, and other people. We sort of did two sort of half day rehearsals. On the Blu-ray actually there’s a great, funny, like dress rehearsal on video, which is worth watching. On the day, like a ten-hour shooting day, we shot 28 takes of this. And this is take 21. Shot on 35 mil. Like our poor, amazing operator, a guy called Roberto Dangelis... De Angelis rather, it was his first day on the shoot. And so during the course of this day, I think we worked out that he walked like 50 city blocks by the end of the day. So poor Roberto got a real workout.

But you know, and the other thing that’s crazy about this is that I had got the song, and this is like years before... There was a British DJ... There is a British DJ, his name is Martin Nicholson, Ozzy Misu and he’s like one of the those guys that came around in sort of like 2000. One of those like mash up guys. And he’s really talented and he’s great at like combining sort of different samples into his music. So way back when I first started writing this, I made this mix of Baby... of “Harlem Shuffle” where I gave him notes and we basically put in sound effects all the way through the song, including like Baby talking to a barista. What’s funny is that we basically used that as the guideline for the choreography all the way through, even to the point where at one point there’s this sound of somebody using an ATM, and we had it on the track in a certain place, and I just got used to it.

You know like how... Or another big one, he bumps into somebody and they say “hey!” You know, “Lookout.” But it’s funny with the ATM, it’s like we had this sound there so when we were working out the song I could sort of you know we were timing it out and following Ansel and by the track I could say to the product designer, “That’s where the ATM goes.” That’s where the sound is, that’s where that goes. So you could sort of work out where things were. One of the other crazy things about working out this sequence is that we had to find a location where we could get to a coffee shop for the chorus.

Brian Reitzell

Right

Edgar Wright

You know, so literally...

Brian Reitzell

You can do that in Silver Lake.

Edgar Wright

Yeah.

Brian Reitzell

Really Easily.

Edgar Wright

But the weird thing you’d have to do is that we started by like finding like, “What door do we like? Oh this is a cool door, let’s use this door.” OK, let’s play the song, and let’s see where we can get to by the time that chorus comes in. So it’s kind of a crazy thing to witness, is like on my iPhone playing “Harlem Shuffle” and seeing how far I could get.

Brian Reitzell

Walking in beat.

Edgar Wright

Yeah!

Brian Reitzell

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

And then they’re also… On top of that then Bill Pope, my cinematographer, would say, “Remember Ansel has longer legs.” So it’s a sort of weird thing is that the door that opens this shot, the building that opens this shot, every possible direction away from that and around the corner, we looked at everything to see where we get to at this point, and then whether he could get back in time for the end of the track. Because it isn’t one of those tracks where you can really extend it, so it’s like one of those things where you’re completely like a slave to the song at some point. This is where it starts, he needs to get to here, and then when he goes back he needs to go back quicker, because you’ve got less song on the tail end.

Brian Reitzell

So you didn’t edit the song at all?

Edgar Wright

No. The song is the song. You know it’s one of those songs where you can do an edit with a dance track or something, but you can’t really do an edit with this without people noticing, so the song is the song and that’s it. But the other thing that was in it as well is that… With the ear wigs and you’ll hear like, there’s several people in the shot who were talking, and those people could hear the track as well. So there’s sort of like speaking in time with the track, and so as well as we had the sound mixed, not only did we have sound of the street and all these wilds tracks, but we had all these people talking throughout this entire thing.

So you can sort of hear especially here when you hear it in the best kind of stereo. You can hear these bits of conversations coming in and out, but those people were like speaking for the entire track. And then they would sort of be speaking on beats so they’re sort of getting little... If you’ve ever done that thing where, you know, you make music out of people’s words, you know some of these guys do that amazingly like Kid Koala and Ozzy Misu sort of can take people’s talking and make music out of it. So we’re sort of doing that the other way around. So these are all things that came into the creation of the shot.

Brian Reitzell

Do you know what the tempo is of the “Harlem Shuffle”?

Edgar Wright

That is a very good question.

Brian Reitzell

I’m gonna check during the...

Edgar Wright

OK, well lets watch it, and then we’ll come back to it.

(video: Baby Driver – Coffee run scene / applause)

Brian Reitzell

Yeah it about 120 beats per minute. Which I think most people tend to talk at that cadence. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with my score and my work with that, and 120 we all kind of talk like that.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, well it’s a good thing to get them that sort of, those people, the key sort of people who sort of come into the ear shot you know you just got them to kind of like doing it, and then you know… So some of them were like, sort of, that guy who goes, “be on time.” He’s just kind of like talking and improvising but just kind of like hitting the beats.

Brian Reitzell

Yeah, it’s again... It’s a very rhythmic movie. Very rhythmic movie and I can very much appreciate that.

Edgar Wright

Thank you. OK.

Brian Reitzell

We’ve got a little time left, if anyone wants to come up an ask a question. There are microphones on either side of the stage. Because you know, you and I could go off forever. OK, welcome.

Audience Member

Cool, awesome. Hi Edgar, big fan. Question. I was listening to you on a podcast actually a couple days ago where you were talking about that as you were writing the movie your then girlfriend... You wrote it in spurts and you gave it to her to kind of feedback, you know, “How does that sound?” And I was wondering because I do it to with my partner sometimes where it’s like, “Oh what does that sound like…” and I write to music all the time too. Have you ever gotten that response of, “Oh this scene is good! I don’t know about the song though.” Is there any difference between that response that you get from someone that you have an emotional connection with, that relationship, versus if you give it to Ryan Johnson or Tarantino or someone in there. Oh, “What about this song?”?

Edgar Wright

You know in that particular case I’m not sure that necessarily when they read scenes that the song... I’m not sure if I gave over the song as well. I think once I was done with the script... When we gave it to the actors we gave them this special iPad. We made this kind of app where the song was baked into the script. You could push a button and the song would start. It was a really good thing to get this cast onboard, because people could sort of hear the film and understand it. Maybe some things changed in a couple of places, but not too much actually.

Audience Member

OK, cool. Awesome.

Brian Reitzell

Switching sides.

Audience Member

Hi so it’s always hard to get license for music. Is there anything that you’ve tried really hard to get license for music and they just rejected you? And then what scene would it have been for?

Edgar Wright

Well usually there’s things where there’s, the only things that have really dropped out of this and this has also been the case with some previous movies, hip-hop or dance tracks that haven’t cleared any of their samples. You might be able to buy them commercially but when it comes to being in a movie, the label gets all kind of jittery and stuff. There’s one Atlanta hip-hop track that I wanted to use in Baby Driver by CyHi the Prynce and it sampled like the Atlanta Braves. It was like the perfect track for this bit. But it was on a mixtape so they had never released it commercially and therefore, they had never cleared any of it and they weren’t about to start. Even though we even offered to sort of try and clear it for them, they were like, “This is more trouble than it’s worth.” So, sometimes there are obviously bands that are like prohibitively expensive, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac especially very expensive. But, sometimes it’s just like songs are just unclearable.

There was another song in Baby Driver I wanted to use by The Herbaliser which was using this kind of like dialogue from an old film. The song also featured sound bits from Star Wars and stuff. It was just like a complete no, no. I got in touch with The Herbaliser and said, “Well, where is this dialogue from?” It was from some old radio bloopers. We tried to track that down. But, sometimes those things, like sort of people do like mash up stuff or like even hip-hop from the late ’80s, early ’90s, those things are not really licensed properly and unusable.

Brian Reitzell

And sometimes there’s a publishing dispute between the different writers as to who has what percent. Hip-hop is notorious for that, it’s crazy.

Edgar Wright

There was one thing on Baby Driver, it cleared very late, but there was a song by The Detroit, not The Detroit Covers, The Detroit Emeralds, where all of the writers were dead and it was tricky getting in touch with their estates and we finally got it cleared just before we started shooting. You get into problems like that. It’s usually the tracks that you don’t think would be a problem become problems. You are smart enough to not write, if you are making your first movie, don’t write the Beatles and Led Zeppelin into your script, cause that’s not going to happen.

Audience Member

Hi, I’m Taryn. What is the best advice you have for young aspiring filmmakers?

Edgar Wright

I think you just got to sort of basically got to cling onto, just go with your gut and you gotta cling onto what you really want to do, especially at that stage. If you’ve sort of lost kind of sight of your style or your intent, that’s like, it’s not good and it never feels good. So, I think especially if you’re doing something for nothing and you’re making your first movie and you can make your first movie with nothing and my movie costs absolutely zero, it’s probably one of the last times you are gonna be your own boss. So you should make sure that it is at least a fraction of what you actually want to do. You don’t want to make the first thing that you make something that’s like not yours at all and you are unable to discern it. I think sticking to your guns and going with your gut is really important and never forgetting that.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Audience Member

Baby Driver is not the first movie that you’ve used The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion for. I was wondering at what point did he come on for his track in Hot Fuzz?

Edgar Wright

Yes, he does although weirdly enough, he is not credited at the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in Hot Fuzz. I think he was like Jon Spencer on his own. It was called something like Jon Spencer and the Elegant Two. So it was, Jon Spencer by that point, he does the end credits for Hot Fuzz and also in all of the mug shot sequences you hear Jon Spencer. He composed a special song for the film called “Straight Out of Sanford,” which made me laugh. What’s funny on the TV version, all of those bits with the mug shots that are all cut out of the movie, and when I saw a terrible TV version, I said, “I wonder why they cut all those bits out?” Then I realized it was cause Jon Spencer is going, “Here come the motherf*ing fuzz.”

So those bits are missing from the network versions. It was because I had become friendly with him at that point, and I thought… I was a big Jon Spencer fan, I thought it would be really funny to get him to do a song for the movie. I remember getting the song back. The movie came out in February and I think we got the movie at Christmas. My brother is also a big fan. So I remember that Christmas before it came out, we were listening to that song and laughing and laughing, just couldn’t believe that we had this Jon Spencer track for Hot Fuzz, talking about the movie as well, which is equally funny.

Audience Member

Hi. I heard a story for Baby Driver. You interviewed an actual car thief or drag racer who was actually arrested in it. Did you visit him in prison or was that a true story?

Edgar Wright

No, it’s true. He was out. I interviewed a number of ex-bank robbers and ex-getaway drivers, all of whom had done their time. I mean, some of these people you can find through rehabilitation programs and some people have written books. There was a particularly great guy called Joe Loya, he is in the movie as a security guard. In the ’80s and ’90s, he had committed 30 bank robberies. People say, “How do you meet somebody like that?” I say, “Well, he is actually represented by CA for his writing.” But, he was amazing and he introduced me to some other people. There are a lot of things in the movie that I had asked him about. I had already got the story of the movie.

He’d also written this guy, Joe Laurie, had written this great article called, “Soundtracking a Bank Robbery.” He didn’t do the same thing as Baby, but he used to have a thing of playing like a victory song once he knew he’d got away. In fact, something that Jamie Foxx says in the movie is exactly what Joe Laurie said, I asked him I said, “Would you ever play music on the way to a job?” And he said, “Oh not on the way to a job because I’ve got enough demons up here making music.” I was like, “Oh boy.” [laughter] Write that one down, I’ll have that. But his thing, this is true, one of his songs that he would play when he was getting away from a bank robbery would be “Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson.

Brian Reitzell

“Not We are the Champions”?

Edgar Wright

No.

Brian Reitzell

That’s what I would play.

Audience Member

Hi, long term fan, I used to read your MySpace blog [laughter / applause]. How do you come to collaborate with Run the Jewels for Baby Driver?

Edgar Wright

How did I meet Run The Jewels? I think that was probably through Danger Mouse, Brian Burton who saw the movie early and wanted to release the album on his label, Thirtieth Century Records, which is part of Columbia. Then, we used a Run the Jewels track in the movie. I was a big fan of them and we used a Run the Jewels track and then Brian had the idea of doing, it’s not a song that’s in the movie, but it was one that’s on the album that samples “Bellbottoms.” That was totally Brian Burton’s idea, Danger Mouse. He actually presented me with it. He goes, “I’ve got this idea, I’m just gonna play it to you.” So, he had one, like a remix of “Bellbottoms” and he said, “I think I could get like Run the Jewels and Big Boi to rap over this.” I’m like, “Great.”

So the movie was already done by this point so there was nowhere really for it to go in the movie but we put it on the album because it’s sampling “Bellbottoms.” But, that was great, so I got to spend a day in Atlanta with Killer Mike and the real El-P and they are so funny and amazing and Big Boi as well. It was incredible. Big Boi and Killer Mike are also in the movie. I think though, when we came to do the song for the movie, Killer Mike had forgotten that he was in the movie. Then he put two and two together way late. He goes, “Ahh, yeah, I’m in this movie,” with Big Boi at the bar with Killer Mike. It took him a second, I think he actually sort of like, he didn’t put two and two together until we were actually sort of looking at clips from the film, then he remembered. He goes, “Oh, yeah.” He had completely forgotten the one night that he came down to the set. Him and Big Boi and Killer Mike are standing with Kevin Spacey at the bar in the restaurant. Those are the two guys that are chatting to him at the bar, Atlanta royalty.

Audience Member

So if Baby Driver is kind of as close to a musical as you’ve gotten but would you be interested in doing an actual musical film and if so, like what kind, like jukebox, original something?

Edgar Wright

Yeah I would, I mean if it was the right thing. I think it’s about finding the right thing and something that hasn’t been done before or like you know, it you’re going to redo something, then there’d better be a good reason to redo it or a good take. As evidenced by some of the clips, I love that stuff. To me, the idea of doing… I don’t know how you would do a modern Busby Berkeley but if there’s a way of doing something like that, I’d love to do something like that. It’d be great.

Audience Member

Hi Edgar. Big fan. Watching the Cornetto trilogy back to back in theaters was the single greatest drunken experience ever. From an aspiring filmmaker, you’re truly an inspiration and if I could steer the topic to something just as important as music, to what makes a film the story, and you’re such a good storyteller, maybe Ant-Man would have been a great film. I just wanted to ask, in that preliminary stages of brainstorming, for when you’re coming up with your stories, do you still follow that method that you and Simon were showing in that one video? Where you’re…

Edgar Wright

Oh yeah. I think you’re talking about when we do the flip chart stuff right? I think when we did Shaun of the Dead, we would do this thing, where we would basically just have a flip chart, and we would write a scene on a page, and sort of... I still do a similar thing. With Baby Driver, I sort of used that thing where... The 40 index cards thing. Which I think is the old David Lynch thing he used to say, “40 postcards is a movie.” It’s like 10... Not that David Lynch necessarily thinks too much in the three-act structure. 10 cards for act one, 20 cards for act two, 10 cards for act three. And the thing with Baby Driver, is I really thought about it in terms of one song per scene. Now, obviously there are some scenes in Baby Driver that don’t have music deliberately, but pretty much there’s 35 songs in that movie. It’s pretty much a song per card and what’s happening in the scene. It is sort of like, how I wrote the film, is that I wouldn’t write a scene unless I had the right song. Before I started, I had 10 of them figured out. Then, when I came to a scene where I didn’t know what the song was yet, I would find the song before I continued writing. By the end of the first draft, I had this playlist and it was 90% of what’s in the movie.

Audience Member

Right.

Edgar Wright

That was a way I did it, but it was sort of like using that kind of index cards thing, and the three-act structure, but linking them to songs. Sort of like... And that’s pretty much... Weirdly enough, I still have the postcards on my wall, sort of from the writing. Even in my room of my house that I write in, there’s still Post-it notes of the two or three scenes that I cut out at the bottom of the board. It’s funny, I just left the Post-it notes up there. That’s pretty much how I did it. It’s similar to the flip chart thing. I think the thing with the flip chart, is it’s a good thing to do with a co-writer. Because, you’re sort of just brainstorming on every page, or about the characters, and it is a good kind of Bible.

It means when you are writing together... You know, when we write together, you might do a thing where it’s like, “I’ll do this scene, you do that scene,” and then you rewrite each other’s scenes. You always got this thing on the wall that is the map. When you are writing on your own, you can be a bit more focused. When I was writing on my own, and I had these cards up on the wall, that was my road map.

Audience Member

You and Simon were just all of the place with that. Thank you, I look forward to all your future projects.

Edgar Wright

Thank you. Hi.

Audience Member

Are we on? OK there it goes. Your films are so incredibly detail oriented. That last clip was a perfect example with the lyrics being matched, and all of the graffiti, and everything. My question is, how do you come up with ideas for things that obviously have to be planned out beforehand? And, how long does it take to really flesh out those details from a practical standpoint? Because, all of the signs have to be made, and all of the art department has to do all that stuff.

Edgar Wright

That scene is a good example, because some of that work was done in 2008, and some of it was done this year. How I started with that sequence, is that I had the song, and then I worked out what I wanted to happen in the song and where, which is pretty much what you do with a music video. This is basically the map, like literally that Michel Gondry thing, he literally made... He laid it on the floor what it was going to be.

Brian Reitzell

He scored it.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, he scored it. This is a similar thing. I listen to the track, and I write down, “This is happening here, then he crosses the road, then he goes into the coffee shop, then he comes back, oh there’s a police car.” I kind of work those things out. Then I got this DJ to do a sound effects mix for me. That was the thing then... I could play it to people and they could hear it, and sort of say, “Oh I understand.” Then, you’re finding that location, like I said.

Then, you’re working out the bits with the other actors, even getting to know the people who are like... There are dancers, and then there are extras that cost less, dancers cost a bit more, and then there are people that talk. Anybody that talks in the thing, you audition them, you get them to do it in time with the music. Even finding little things. You notice in the thing, there’s a trumpet player who at the start of the track, when you see him the first time, he’s walking along with his trumpet in his box, and at the end of the song, he’s playing.

Some of these things are building up in this rehearsal period, go through with the choreographer, with the ADs. Then, actually, the graffiti is the thing that comes in last. Because I wanted to do more graffiti, but most of the buildings wouldn’t let us spray on them. The building on the other side of the street that he goes past, is one of the court houses in Atlanta. They were like... They were pissed off about us filming outside, but absolutely we could not do any graffiti. I’d seen this VFX reel. I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie called Our Most Violent Year with Oscar Isaac, which takes place in the ’80s. There’s a scene in that where they’re on the subway, there’s a big long subway chase, and the subway car is covered with graffiti. Then they showed on the Internet the before and after, all of that graffiti was digital. I was like... I had seen the movie, I was like, “No fucking way. That’s amazing.” All of the graffiti in that shot is digital.

Because, some of the bits are real, a couple of the bits are real. As you notice, we had to put graffiti on buildings that wouldn’t let us put graffiti on. So if they’re watching in that back courthouse, “Ha ha! We got you.” The other thing is, if you watch it, the graffiti changes when he goes back. There’s fresh graffiti on top of the other bits. When he walks the first time, is the lyrics for the first part of the song. When he walks back, there’s extra lyrics on top of those lyrics. As if, whilst he was in the coffee shop, that graffiti artist came along and just did it again. Right at the end of the shot, the last lyric in the song is, “one more time.” And, that is on the glass door, but that is not on the glass door at the start of the shot.

It’s basically the whole shot is all real. It’s all real choreography, all the extras are real, the car is real, etc. etc. Then there is just those... Even the building at the start is five floors, but we digitally made it look like it went into infinity. That first shot where you’re looking up is that you can’t see the top of the building. It’s like taking real photography and... Similar to the “Star Guitar,” Michel Gondry thing, augmenting it. That’s how it’s done. That’s a process of thinking, of ideas, literally 10 years ago, and then adding to that idea, this year whilst we’re editing it. So yes, it’s very detailed.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

I didn’t know that about Our Most Violent year, that’s crazy.

Edgar Wright

You can find the before and after thing on the Internet. It’s astonishing.

Audience Member

For the “Don’t Stop Me Now” sequence, you said that the stunt coordinator kind of just stepped back and let you do your thing. For something like Baby Driver, where it’s like that, but on a much larger scale, nearly every scene…

Edgar Wright

Oh yeah.

Audience Member

How do you divvy up the responsibility between you, the stunt coordinator, and the choreographer?

Edgar Wright

Well that was the great thing, I’d say starting with Scott Pilgrim, Brad Allan, who’s amazing, who did Scott Pilgrim, and worked with Jackie Chan, and more recently did like Kingsman, and stuff, he’s amazing. He really believed in that himself. He was all in with the dance element to it. I mean, some of the things in Scott Pilgrim are sort of dance stuff. The whole thing with Mae Whitman and the razor blade is basically like rhythmic gymnastics. She’s doing exactly that routine but with this like sharp weapon. On Baby Driver, Darrin Prescott was the main stunt coordinator and second unit director.

It’s one of my favorite things about doing the movies is that you bring these disparate departments together. Ryan Heffington, whose studio the Sweat Shop is just down the street on Sunset, he’s the guy that did the chandelier video for Sia. He was the choreographer on this. Those guys got on like a house on fire, those are the great experiences in a movie like Scott Pilgrim, or this, is that when those two departments learn something from each other. Stunts turn into choreography and choreography turns into stunts. That’s where you get something interesting. In a lot of other movies, like sort of the departments are all working in isolation, and not communicating, and you don’t necessarily get cohesive results. But, in this case, it was a great partnership.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

First, I wanted to thank you for signing my iPod at Amoeba the other day. When you have that one song...

Edgar Wright

It’s gone up or down in value? [laughter]

Audience Member

Yeah. Thank you though. When you have that one song that you want to use, or that one shot, like the opening scene of Baby Driver, how do you bring yourself to practicing that on a smaller scale like you did on the music video? Or, just bringing that out into the world? Because, that’s an idea you want, obviously. How do you bring yourself to release that, not necessarily in the form you want in the first place? If that makes sense.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, I mean, it’s a similar thing. There’s a good thing... I wish I had the clip now, but on the Blu-Ray there’s a dress rehearsal for that shot, the “Harlem Shuffle” shot, and it’s really funny to watch because it’s basically exactly the same shot, same camera operator, but with everybody not wearing their costumes and just see people working it out, and you can see the mechanics of it, basically. That’s not dissimilar to like, doing a short film or doing a low-budget dry run for something. If you want to do something in your first film that’s quite ambitious, you probably should try it out in a different form first. When I was doing music videos, I’d always be engineering the music video itself to be an experiment for something else.

Brian Reitzell

Your test kitchen.

Edgar Wright

Yeah, totally. Back then it was something you could do. Especially when you had these artists who don’t want to be in the videos. They don’t want to be on camera. You’ve got a perfect chance to do a short. Music video is a good testing ground for just technique. If you’ve never used a piece of equipment before, try it out on something. You don’t want to be doing something ambitious... You don’t want to be doing it on your first film for the first time ever and then something goes wrong and you could’ve anticipated the mistakes if you’d done a trial run. That’s a lot of the things on Baby Driver, I’ve been working up to doing them for a long time.

I’ve done bits of car stuff in Hot Fuzz and Shaun and The World’s End, nothing to the extent of Baby Driver, but at least I knew what it was basically going to be like and how hard it was going to be. I think if Baby Driver had been my first car chase stuff, and that was the first time I realized how hard car chases are, I probably would have gotten very quickly dissuaded. I knew what was going to go into it and I knew it was going to be worth it.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

I have a pretty specific question because I actually just finished shooting my first feature at the beginning of this year.

Edgar Wright

Congratulations.

Audience Member

As of right now, Google is our legal department. You kind of touched on this with that opening sequence of Baby Driver where you took an existing track and you guys added to it. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where the original track doesn’t really fit the film, but you decide to create an homage to it, and walking that line between when it becomes a new, original track again.

Edgar Wright

I think in score that happens quite a lot where you’re doing a sort of homage... In Shaun of the Dead the score is very much like a homage to John Carpenter. It’s not exactly the same notes, but it’s definitely in his style, and it’s clearly like a pastiche. I think that’s always a good way to go, especially if you don’t have the money. One thing I always say is that if you’re doing your first film or even doing a short, don’t temp with something you couldn’t afford. You see when you’re at an art college people do shorts and they slap John Williams on it and it’s like, “You’re going to be disappointed.” You’d never be able to afford John Williams, and even if somebody composes the music for it, it’s not going to sound like John Williams. My thought with Shaun of the Dead was, we temped the movie with music we thought we could afford, so it was like John Carpenter and Goblin, and that stuff that I thought we could do something like that because that’s exactly how those guys did it. I think that’s the thing, pastiche is fine if you get into something where you’re in... Copyright breaches ...

Audience Member

We got really lucky. Our producer matched with a composer on Tinder, and so she’s been working with us for free. Actually the person...

Edgar Wright

I don’t know if I want to hear the rest of this story. You should be on the stage.

Audience Member

The person we’re paying homage to is actually one of the first clips you showed. It’s Ennio Morricone.

Edgar Wright

Your producer matched with Ennio Marricone on Tinder?

Audience Member

Yes, he did. He matched with the legend, yes.

Edgar Wright

He’s like, 88. I think doing pastiche is fine. Plenty of scores do that. John Carpenter, doing the Halloween score, was trying to rip off the score to Suspiria. It doesn’t really sound anything like it, but that was his attempt. He thought, “Oh, I could do something like that”, and for cheap and do it on my synth and then he creates another iconic soundtrack.

Brian Reitzell

Google’s legal department should be able to figure that out for you.

Audience Member

We’ve already credited them. Thank you.

Audience Member

Hi. I’m scared that’s going to fall out... Like a lot of people in this room I have a pretty keen interest in music supervision, and I’m drawn to that career because I feel like it is a very fast vehicle to enabling artists to have a life doing what they love. I’d like to think that if I were to get a broad, city-level budget that I would continue to use artists that are lesser known. I don’t know. I’m not accusing you of doing this at all, but I think often times music supervisors that have big budgets and directors who have big budgets for music end up choosing pieces that are... Sometimes it feels lazy to me. I’m just wondering what you do with that dilemma of... I want to use lesser known artists in this particular piece, but sometimes Queen is the only match for that moment. How do you deal with that dilemma? Or, is it a dilemma for you?

Edgar Wright

Not really, I think it depends on the thing. I mean, in terms of the Queen scene in Shaun of the Dead, that has to be a moment of a song which pretty much everybody knows. If you picked an indie song, which nobody knows, and the scene fails... There’s lots of other music in Shaun of the Dead that’s much lesser known and Queen is easily the biggest artist, but on the same soundtrack is Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster or Lemon Jelly or bands that would be happy and excited to be on a soundtrack. At that kind of level, that’s the kind of thing that you do is that... You will get artists who will be so happy to be in a movie, and pretty much most of my movies have that where there’s some big songs and then lots of other artists. Even on Baby Driver. There’s lots of songs that are much, much lesser known.

Even Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is not Queen, it’s much more niche and cult. I try and keep that balance. In fact, when I was doing that TV show Spaced, that was very much what we were going for, looking for artists who hadn’t had any exposure on anything else. To be honest, I’m always happy when there’s a song that you’ve got in a movie that nobody has ever used in a movie before. Nobody has ever used “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion in a movie, nobody has ever used the Damned song that’s in Baby Driver.

Brian Reitzell

I tried.

Edgar Wright

“Neat, Neat, Neat.” That’s never been in a movie before. That, to me, is what works good. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. Especially on a low-budget movie, no producer is going to tell you to go for something bigger because most of the time you just can’t afford it. If you find young artists who are willing, it’s like a bonus for them and I would say most producers would be on side with that.

Brian Reitzell

It’s certainly not lazy.

Audience Member

Again, I was not accusing you of this at all, but I do think that it is something that does happen in the music...

Edgar Wright

There’s certainly lazy music choices in a lot of movies.

Brian Reitzell

Certainly big Hollywood movies, there’s a lot of laziness in a lot of those movies for sure.

Audience Member

Thank you so much.

Edgar Wright

Thank you.

Audience Member

First of all, thanks for the talk so far, it was awesome. You said you came up with the basic idea for Baby Driver 10 years ago?

Edgar Wright

Longer than that, 21 years ago.

Brian Reitzell

In the womb, I think he started it.

Edgar Wright

I started writing it 10 years ago, but the first time I heard that song by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is when that album came out.

Audience Member

OK, because I was thinking in that time period Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive came out and also the reverse chase scene in Kingsman. I was wondering how you deal with seeing parts of your ideas on other people’s screens?

Edgar Wright

I did worry about that... Usually I’d worry about that before I saw the movies and then when I saw them... It’s other things like The Transporter and things like that. They’re very different movies but, any time you hear about a movie that’s got a car chase or something you’re kind of worried about it. The funny thing is that Drive and my movie are both influenced by Walter Hill’s The Driver, a 1978 film. When I saw that movie, I actually wasn’t worried anymore because it was actually not the movie that I was trying to make.

Audience Member

Yeah.

Edgar Wright

Not in terms of the level of action, or even the type of music. Sometimes, in some ways, it ends up teeing something up for you. I remember when me and Simon were writing Shaun of the Dead we started writing that in 2001, and at that time on the horizon there were no zombie movies. At all. There hadn’t been one in 15 years. It’s one of the reasons we started writing the film. We wanted to see another zombie film. I remember first one was Resident Evil there was the movie, and then I remember when we were writing Shaun of the Dead, Simon called me one day and said, “Did you hear that Danny Boyle is making a London zombie movie?” I was like, “What the fuck?” I was so mad about that movie up until when I saw it. When I saw it I was thinking, “Oh, it’s different.” This is deadly serious, they run. In a way, 28 Days Later teed up Shaun of the Dead. We ended up out-grossing in the UK, but I think we wouldn’t have done as well if 28 Days Later hadn’t come out because for a lot of people that was their first zombie movie of that ilk. It became a benefit. In a way I think as long as you... For things like Driver or Kingsman, I wasn’t… Kingsman has my stunt coordinator from Scott Pilgrim working on it, I wasn’t dissuaded because I think the thing is... To go back to sticking with your gut is, if the gem of the idea is still valid, and the idea of the full-on jukebox car musical with lots of car tricks as well. The same second unit director/stunt coordinator on my movie, but Driver only has one proper small chase in the middle. When I saw the movie, I was thinking, “This is a different thing. This is more a mood piece and a neo-noir,” and mine is a different tone. I was worried, until I saw it, and then I walked out of the multiplex having seen it going, “it’s going to be okay.”

Audience Member

Perfect. OK, thanks.

Brian Reitzell

There’s no Jon Spencer. You’re cool.

OK, our last question.

Audience Member

This is not a very fun last question, but I’m a big fan of clever transitions in edits. Michel Gondry’s box set is filled with awesome, incredible, mind blowing transitions and edits. Same thing with the first clip you showed. Filled with really, really remarkable transitions. You seem to be a fan of clever transitions and edits and use them really wisely. Both whether it’s clever editing, the effects, what have you. Just curious to hear your thoughts on how much time and thought and energy you put into transitions which is a challenging thing to do, I would assume, when creating big movies. Also, when incorporating music so strategically like you do. How much those clever transitions and edits save you in some cases, and also painfully hurt you in some cases.

Edgar Wright

Well, usually a lot of them are written into the script. The ones that aren’t written into the script I’d usually do in the boards. Sometimes there’ll be something that comes up on the day where you’ll have a great idea where there’s one match in the movie where it goes from overhead on a coffee cup to a button in the elevator. That was something where I was in the scene and I said, “Oh, maybe we should shoot this baby from over the top,” and then you think, “We’re in the elevator, what else is round in here? The button.” You literally do a match cut. That was something that wasn’t in any of the story boards but we shot both things and then it just looks perfect. It comes at every stage, really.

The good thing of doing transitions for me, and I learned this doing TV... Why I don’t really do any improv in my movies. Even in the comedies like Shaun and Hot Fuzz and The World’s End is because the scenes all have starts and ends and a lot of times the last line leads into the next scene. A lot of the modern vogue for improving, usually the bits that people improv around is the ends of the scenes. A lot of the Judd and Seth Rogen school is they get into a riff and have a situation, sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm where they riff on it. Having done TV I’ve figured out if you have a very hard transition at the end of the scene it is a way to control the running time of the show. When you’re doing a TV show like Spaced, it’s 22 minutes here or Spaced it was 24 and a half. You can’t just go on and on, so having a thing where the camera whips off or someone walks in front of the camera, or in Scott Pilgrim sometimes the lights switch off.

In Scott Pilgrim, we would have things like a stage blackout at the end of the scene. We would just turn the lights off in the studio. It’s funny ‘cause when the actors know it’s coming, it helps them punch through the last line. It’s like, last line, darkness. It’s always a funny thing to do on set. It’s some kind of thing of maintaining control. With these sequences, you know what the song is doing so at the end of “Bellbottoms” is when they’re driving off. “Bellbottoms” echoes and echoes and echoes. Hang wide on the parking lot because the song would be echoing around the concrete and you know what the end is. Part of it is control, but a lot of it is pre-planned. It’s either in script, it’s in the story boards, or very, very occasionally something comes up on the day where you think, “This would be cool. We can mesh these things together.” I like to do it as a way of keeping the momentum of the film going, and going back to rhythm again. Exactly, it’s musical.

You can also add little things later. There’s one bit in Baby Driver where Spacey is pressing the elevator buttons, but because we knew what the outgoing song was, we get him to press it in time with the music. Now you’ve got a little flourish at the end that goes in time with the song when it’s ending. They’re all pre-planned. You’re right, it’s like that Busby Burkeley one. Think about it, it’s 1934. That shot where there’s that mirror and then it turns into an optical and then she comes in, picks up the mirror and flips it around. That would have had to gone off to the lab, and come back and then line it up. That probably took a week just to do that transition. They’re astonishing. They used to do all that stuff in camera. They didn’t have CG, they didn’t even have video assist or anything like that to see whether it worked. They’d just be doing a guesstimate. Those are incredible.

Audience Member

Cool. Thanks.

Brian Reitzell

Right on. Well, thank...

Edgar Wright

Now we’re gonna show another 14 clips, guys.

Brian Reitzell

Thank you all for coming tonight, and thanks to Edgar Wright. [applause]