Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World 10th Anniversary: The Original Empire Feature

Ten years ago, Edgar Wright unleashed his third movie upon the world: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World – a pop culture firecracker bursting with epic fights, 8-bit video game stylings, garage rock fuzz and a then-largely-unknown ensemble that spent the next decade conquering Hollywood. As it turned out, The World wasn’t quite ready for Scott Pilgrim at the time – but though it wasn’t the financial smash many hoped for, it became an instant cult classic for its quotable dialogue, wild genre mash-ups, and groundbreaking filmmaking techniques. To mark one decade of Wright’s adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beloved graphic novels, read Empire’s original Scott Pilgrim feature from 2010 – going on set in Toronto, talking to Wright, O’Malley, Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman, and producer Nira Park.

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Edgar Wright’s first Hollywood film could have been The Crazies, The Green Hornet, or, er, Failure To Launch. Instead, he chose Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, a rom-com musical with epic battles. Empire discovers why the strangest option was the best.

Take a martini glass. Pour two shots of Reposado tequila. Add a splash of Patron XO Café and a single espresso. Top with a dash of agave syrup. Shake over ice. Strain. Congratulations. You’ve just made your first Edgar Wrightini.

The cocktail was created last year by London bartender Will Foster in honour of the British director. But be careful: it’s potent stuff. Tequila aside, the Edgar Wrightini is pumped so full of caffeine, it’s a wonder it doesn’t jitter-shake its way off the bar.

“It’s well named, because I am teeny,” laughs Wright. “I haven’t actually tried one – I feel like I can’t make my own cocktail – but hopefully I’ll get one eventually. Though it sounds like it’ll give someone a heart attack!”

Perhaps, but it surely won’t be him. After all, Wright’s prodigious coffee intake is now legendary. During a particularly taxing day on the set of his new film, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, he gulped down a super-human eight double espressos (“Enough to kill an elephant”). According to Hollywood lore, a certain ‘80s comedy star used the world “popcorn” when he wanted cocaine; Wright, on the other hand, requested “heroin” (in emergencies, “double heroin”) when he got a jones for java. He became especially hooked on a local concoction of banana, maple syrup, cinnamon, and a brain-boggling quantity of concentrated joe. Survivors say drinking one is like injecting a coffee bean into your vein. The brew’s name? ‘Rocket fuel’.

Which is apt. In recent years, like some kind of bearded ballistic missile, the turbo-talented 36-year-old has shot himself high into the moviemaking firmament. His Brit-com one-two of Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz has bowled over Hollywood’s great and good. The directors this West Country pop-culture junkie idolised as a teenager – Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, Steven Spielberg – are now friends, admirers and often colleagues. Wright himself can’t quite believe it.

“I lived at Quentin’s when he was writing Inglourious Basterds,” he recalls, at Fresh (a coffee shop, naturally) on Toronto’s Spadina Avenue, midway through the Scott Pilgrim shoot. “Me and Joe [Cornish] were writing Tintin upstairs. Quentin would come up and say, ‘Do you guys wanna hear a scene?’ He’d play every part. I’ve seen him do Winston Churchill.”

Getting to witness QT’s bulldog impression is one way of knowing you’ve made it. Another is finding that everyone in Hollywood wants to work with you. Ever since the success of Shaun Of The Dead, a cascade of screenplays has come rushing at Wright. Among them, The Green Hornet, The Crazies and – bizarrely – Matthew McConaughey rom-com Failure To Launch. (“You get the script for that and you’re thinking, ‘Really? Me?’” says Wright.)

Some of the offers were almost too tempting to resist, like an invite from Raimi to direct Drag Me To Hell. “But it was so obviously a Sam Raimi film. I told him as a fan I wanted to see him do it. When I visited the set, they were doing the graveyard scene and Sam’s suit was splattered in mud. He turned to me and said, ‘Edgar, why’d you do this to me? This is all your fault!’”

Wright’s destiny lay not with a goat-demon, but down another path. His next film was to be an adaptation of an obscure graphic-novel series. There were no big stars with perfect abs attached, no roles for Simon Pegg or Nick Frost. It was the story of a bunch of twentysomething underachievers, set in Ontario. It was a risky next move. But, very possibly, the perfect one.

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Take a slacker hero. Add a snarky gay roommate, an adoring Chinese girlfriend and a pushy sister. Stir in a mysterious babe from out of town and her seven diabolical ex-lovers. Fuse to outlandish, anime-inspired visuals. Congratulations. You’ve just created the world’s coolest comic book.

“I wanted to do a story about romance and fighting,” says Bryan Lee O’Malley, the Canuck cartoonist who actually created it. “The title came first. I loved the song ‘Scott Pilgrim’ by the band Plumtree and tried to come up with a world that would suit it. Something fun and over-the-top, in this sort of muted Canadian way.”

There are six volumes. The final one, Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, comes out just weeks before the movie; the very first printed version arrives at O’Malley’s LA house via FedEx during his chat with Empire. It was the original instalment, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, which was handed to Wright by producers Jared LeBoff and Adam Siegel back in 2004. “They collared me outside a screening of Shaun Of The Dead with a copy,” the director remembers. “It was in my bag for eight weeks before I actually read it.”

When he finally flicked it open, his eyes widened. Not just because of the ingeniously silly story, in which a guy has to confront his girlfriend’s past, literally, in the shape of a League of Evil Exes. But because, with its whirligig pace, loving pop-culture references and frequent shifts into fantasy, it reminded Wright of his own work, the groundbreaking sitcom Spaced.

“The mix of naturalism and magic realism was what really appealed to me,” Wright says. “It starts in a very real place, with characters who are young and directionless. And then it balloons into insane fight scenes. It’s comedy on a big, overblown, manga scale.”

Two men from different continents, one deliriously geeky worldview. O’Malley is obsessed with neon-blue Nintendo sprite Mega Man; Wright has whiled away entire transatlantic flights playing Tetris. Either can talk you through the intricacies of Japanimation series Cowboy Bebop. Both adore UK indie band The Bluetones. The questions wasn’t whether Wright was the right person to bring Scott Pilgrim to the big screen. It was how soon he could start. Even before Hot Fuzz began production, Wright and Michael Bacall (a writer who’s also Inglourious Basterd Pfc. Michael Zimmerman) were working on the movie adaptation, which would bear the title of the second book.

“We had this event in LA recently,” says O’Malley, “where J.J. Abrams interviewed Edgar about his whole career. And watching all the clips being played, it really made it seem like this was his destiny. Everything he’s done points towards this crazy film.”

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Take a wimpy comedian. Break a skateboard over his head. Give him a flaming sword. Now unleash the world’s most formidable stunt team, whipping up Hong Kong-style carnage. Congratulations. You’ve just turned Michael Cera into an action god.

“Wirework, hand-to-hand, backflips… You have to get over the jitters of it at first. Then it’s easy,” shrugs Cera on set. Like most thing the Superbad star says in interviews, it’s hard to know whether to take this claim seriously. The scene Empire is watching him do today, at any rate, looks downright hardcore. Taking place midway through the film, it’s Scott’s tangle with Evil Ex #4, a lesbian named Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman) who once locked lips with his girlfriend, Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). It’s fair to say that Scott is having his behind handed to him: as he’s walloped around a glitzy bar, at one point he’s socked so hard that he flies straight up and nearly hits the mirror ball on the ceiling. The effect is achieved by violently yanking cables attached to Cera, while blasting an industrial air cannon at his face. As the 22-year-old is lowered back onto the ground for the fourth time, his director looks on in delight: “Michael’s a human piñata in this film!”

With a Hollywood budget at his disposal for the first time, Wright’s aim wasn’t just to pay tribute to his favourite martial-arts flicks – he wanted to outdo them. So he made a few key hires. First he called up Brad Allan, the wushu expert who’s overseen stunts on countless Jackie Chan films (and personally attacked Chan in several of them), summoning him and his crew of warriors to Toronto. Next onboard was Bill Pope, the genius cinematographer behind the wire-fu mêlées and sprawling cyber-vistas of the Matrix trilogy. Then Wright put his young cast, who he wanted to perform many of their own stunts, through combat boot camp: push-ups, bamboo-sword jousts, giant-hammer fights, the usual.

“The action is huge!” beams Jason Schwartzman, who plays the final Evil Ex, record producer Gideon Graves. “I never imagined I’d get to have a massive sword fight scene in a summer movie, sword-fighting Michael Cera. We spent a whole month shooting this one scene and it’s absolutely nuts. Edgar said to me, ‘I want to do wide shots where we can see it’s really you guys. I want you to be so good you can take Michael on with one hand behind your back.’”

“Every fight scene has a different tone and edge to it,” says Cera. “They were all equally challenging and complex to put together. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll be able to apply any of the skills I’ve learned to real life.”

Beside girls, Pilgrim cares about two things: video-games and music. Both have huge bearing on the action. “In Spaced, what you see on screen is a reflection of the media the characters consume,” explains Wright. “Here that idea’s been pushed even further. The whole movie could be taken as Scott’s daydreaming: he has a mundane life, but this is how he’d like to be represented.”

Brace yourself, then, for battles that adhere to the loopy logic and raging speed of a console brawler. When Scott defeats enemies, they transform into showers of gold coins, like denizens of Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. There are extra lives, brutal finishing moves, the odd pixellated weapon. Sound-effects are sampled from retro 8-bit titled like Sonic and The Legend Of Zelda. Even the aspect ratio frequently shifts (from 1.85 to 2.40), to ape the look of in-game cut-scenes. This is Wright’s hyper-kinetic paean to the Nintendo, Sega and ZX Spectrum games he and O’Malley grew up hooked on. And while Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World isn’t based on a video-game, it may prove to be Generation Xbox’s defining work.

Then there’s the tuneage. Scott is bassist for a ramshackle band called Sex Bob-Omb (another Mario reference), also comprised of friends Stephen Stills (Mark Webber) and Kim Pine (Alison Pill). Throughout the movie they face off against rival outfits The Clash At Demonhead, Crash And The Boys, and the Katayanagi twins, often resulting in a literal battle of the bands.

“Music is a weapon,” marvels Brandon Routh, who plays Todd Ingram, member of The Clash At Demonhead and Evil Ex #3. “Todd and Scott have a bass-off, where we use our guitars to blast each other around the room and through walls! Actually, I’m doing most of the blasting since my musical skills are superior.” Ken and Kyle Katayanagi (Shota and Keita Saito), meanwhile, are Evil Exes #5 and #6, electroheads who lock amps with Sex Bob-Omb in a duel that involves a sonic yeti.

All this has given Wright a perfect excuse to create 2010’s most cutting-edge soundtrack. Alt-rock legend Beck wrote Sex Bob-Omb’s songs (“My brief was, ‘It should be difficult to tell whether they are awful or awesome,’” laughs Wright); Canadian bands Metric and Broken Social Scene provided tracks for Clash and Crash. Moreover, super-producer Nigel Godrich (who’s collaborated with Beck and Radiohead) contributes his first proper film score, while two members of Supergrass recorded a cover of a lullaby from Zelda. The result is cut an embarrassment of riches that it’s being released on two CDs.

“The one thing we can do that you can’t with a comic is hear the music,” says Wright. “In the original draft of the script, it was a running joke that we never hear any of it – we always cut around what the bands sound like. But then we got all these amazing people to do the songs and it wasn’t even a question anymore.”

The film itself is strutted like a classic musical, with ruckuses subbing for production numbers. “It’s a hybrid of Jackie Chan and Bob Fosse,” the director muses. “A mano-a-mano fight is like a duet. Scott taking on Gideon’s henchmen is like a big dance number. And onlookers react in the same way. In Grease, nobody at the end of ‘Summer Nights’ goes, ‘Wow, why did everybody in the cafeteria just start singing? What was that about?’ Here an enormous battle breaks out in a party, and then people carry on talking. People have exploded into coins, but there’s no criminal investigation or repercussions for Scott Pilgrim.”

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Take a lengthy prep period, including visual-effects tests and multiple script drafts. Add a six-month shoot. Tack on a year of intensive post-production, complete with 20-hour days, seven-day weeks, and countless red-eyes across the Atlantic. Commiserations. You still haven’t broken Edgar Wright.

“I can’t tell you the number of people working on this film who have hit the wall in the past four weeks,” says Nira Park, Wright’s long-time producer, speaking in early July. “The hardest things has been keeping people sane. But Edgar works harder than anyone. Wherever he is in the world, when I email him he responds straight away. I’m working with two other directors at the moment, Joe Cornish (on Attack The Block) and Greg Mottola (on Paul, with Wright’s old muckers Pegg and Frost), and they are so envious of his stamina. Although he did say to me today, ‘I need to take a few days off before the press tour or I may die.’”

Empire meets with Wright a total of five times throughout the making of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. On two of those occasions he’s operating on a mere four hours’ sleep; when we arrange a meet in yet another mochaplex to talk through the freshly released first trailer, he’s had just two and is clearly fatigued, his usually energetic patter punctuated with… long… pauses. The gigantic editing job – rendering endless effects shots, stitching together his trademark high-energy mix of snap zooms, whip pans and Dutch tilts – is taking its toll.

Given a chance to prove himself on a big budget, he’s pushed himself harder than ever. Will the results be worth it? Empire gets its first real clue at the end of May, when Wright cues up 40 minutes of footage in a West End screening room. Even though the scenes we see are out of context and unfinished, it’s dizzying stuff, the stylised set-pieces as caffeinated as the director himself, frames packed with fine-spun detail. The jokes are sharp and multi-layered: Lucas Lee, the link-heading action star/Evil Ex #2, has a team of burly stunt doubles whose grunts are voiced by Chris Evans himself, while the Japanese numbers on the Katayangis’ amp go all the way up to 11. Most importantly, the characters are instantly loveable, from Cera and Winstead’s lead couple on down – Ellen Wong and Kieran Culkin are particular standouts as Scott’s lovelorn ex Knives Chau and ice-cool roomie Wallace Wells.

Our final meeting with the director takes place over lunch at London’s members-only The Groucho Club. Elsewhere in the restaurant, UFO enthusiast and failed agony uncle Danny Dyer is loudly holding court. Wright himself, knocking back an espresso and picking at gnocchi and rocket, is running on fumes but cheerful, having completed his sound mix in the ungodly hours of that morning. There is now just 11th-hour effects-tweaking and colour-grading to do. “I’m looking foward to a lie-in,” he concedes.

There have been test screenings. Some have involved his celebrity friends: Peter Jackson, Jason Reitman and Kevin Smith all came out raving (Smith promising that, “Nobody is going to understand what the fuck just hit them”), while Tarantino delivered pages of notes, including the suggestion that Wright add an opening credits sequence. Not only was the idea adopted (“It gives a sense of occasion,” says Wright), but the movie nods back at Kill Bill with its very own ‘death list’. Though this one is laminated, thwarting Scott’s attempts to cross off names.

The public screenings were also overwhelmingly successful, despite the bone-rattling volume of some of the fights making it hard to monitor laughs. It all proved too much, however, for a few. “We’ve had ones where the audiences were whooping, screaming and clapping all the way through, but they haven’t all gone like that,” says Park. “A while back, in Las Vegas, when the crowd knew absolutely nothing about the film, a whole row got up and left during the first fight. It was that moment where (Evil Ex #1) Matthew Patel (Staya Bhabha) breaks into song. Apparently that happened again recently in Arizona. But you’re going to get that. I love that about the film, that it’s one thing and then another and then another. You just hope that because it’s so original and unlike anything else, people will fall in love with it. But you just don’t know.”

All concerned must be feeling at least a few jitters, given the disappointing box office of Kick-Ass, Universal’s other comic-book adaptation that dared to be different. With its vast array of characters, largely unknown cast and busy plot, this is not the easiest of sells. So can Scott Pilgrim take on the world… and win?

“I’m really pleased with the reaction so far; hopefully it represented something different and fresh for people,” says Wright, putting down his fork and preparing to zip to another meeting. “Shaun and Hot Fuzz were like valentines to their respective genres, but this is a different beast. Essentially, it’s a romantic comedy with a big and crazy twist. All the fantasy and action, it’s serving one central idea: how hard would you fight for someone?”

An old-fashioned love story, then, with bonus sonic Yeti? We’ll raise an Edgar Wrightini to that.

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Lucas Films

Lucas Lee (Chris Evans) is Evil Ex #2. He’s also a Hollywood action star with the ropiest résumé this side of Steven Seagal. Before the shoot, Wright and Evans got together to shoot some fake movie posters. Here, the actor talks us through them…

Scott Pilgrim is out now on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download.