Edgar Wright: It's funny, my agent came up to us and said, "That line,...

I think it's good to have pressure on yourself. The worst crime is to get kind of really complacent.

Edgar Wright

kind pressure thinking

The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first?

Edgar Wright

cutting editing baby

In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.

Edgar Wright

genre-is trying thinking

I'm a big fan; I like all sorts of genres. I do like an occasion to just switch my brain off and enjoy some mindless carnage.

Edgar Wright

bigs fans brain

Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.

Edgar Wright

tv-shows writing thinking

I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make.

Edgar Wright

fascination horror watches

Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.

Edgar Wright

benefits done ideas

Hot Fuzz in a strange way, for me, summons up the spirit of watching R-rated films that I was too young to watch. I was 14, 13 maybe, when Robocop came out. Seeing Robocop at my brother's friend's house, and not really supposed to be watching it, because it was [rated] 18 and I was 13. That mind-blowing experience, because not only is it a great film, but it feels illicit.

Edgar Wright

mind-blowing brother house

I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films. But there's definitely beauty and art and design in games. I don't think anybody could deny that.

Edgar Wright

design art thinking

The script and the performances and the style all clicked.

Edgar Wright

scripts style performances

I came from another county. I spent 15 years in Wells, but I was treated like an outsider. It was like, "Oh, you're not local."

Edgar Wright

outsiders wells years

Near my apartment in London, a lot of the pubs kind of look identical, which is very strange.

Edgar Wright

london strange looks

I don't want to get them in trouble for crimes in the early '90s - but there was usually like one pub that was the soft touch in terms of you could get served under 18, and that pub was The Rose and Crown.

Edgar Wright

crowns want rose

I used to drink a lot of lager when I was younger, but I'm more of a wine drinker now, I guess. I feel daunted looking at full pints.

Edgar Wright

drink used wine

We like to imagine that Shaun is in George Romero's universe, that it's happening at the same time as the Pittsburgh outbreak.

Edgar Wright

outbreaks pittsburgh imagine

Now I'm back in LA, it's high time to finish a little something I've been working on.

Edgar Wright

im-back littles

Usually in TV... A TV director could be anything from a main grip to just a glorified cameraman, and sometimes a director can be the person who is hired last. It's very much a producer's medium.

Edgar Wright

sometimes

There are things that are about the entire genre, so it's weird when you look on Wikipedia and people say, "The scene where Angel grabs his fist is from Superman II," and you're thinking, "Ummm, no it's not." Or, "There's a shot from Matrix Revolutions." I'm thinking, "I've only seen Matrix Revolutions once, and will never watch it ever again."

Edgar Wright

angel people thinking

I think when I was getting into directing, or wanting to be a director, when I was a teenager, the two films that really inspired me were Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. And in the case of the former, I thought, "Wow. Why don't all comedies look like this?" And then as I started doing comedy, particularly when I started doing it on TV...

Edgar Wright

teenager two thinking

I call it Inherent Twice because I am looking forward to seeing it again.

Edgar Wright

inherent looking-forward seeing

It's funny, my agent came up to us and said, "That line, when Nicholas says, 'I'm gonna bust this thing wide open,' what film's that from?" I said, "I think it's from every film." It's just like you get into that kind of mode of generic dialogue, it's fun to do.