As part of our Empire 30 celebrations, we asked Empire readers to vote for their favourite Edgar Wright shots – and then got the filmmaker to talk us through them. Originally published in the March 2019 issue of Empire.
10. Band rehearsal (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, 0:02:54)
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World opens with an optical illusion, as Wright’s camera pulls back from Sex Bob-omb as they launch into a number, and then pulls back some more, stretching a small living room into something that looks like Wembley Stadium. “We did it for real. We had a massive carpet that went all the way back, and pulled out the wall, so the camera can track back. And the sofa was on coasters, and as the camera goes past, you push the sofa back into the shot.” Don’t try it at DFS.
9. Grabbing some pints (The World’s End, 0:00:30)
The opening shot of The World’s End is, according to Wright, “Gary King’s perfect world”, in which he and his friends, pictured in silhouette, run into a pub and find five perfectly poured golden pints waiting for them. “I’m really proud of that shot,” says Wright, who added it into the film fairly late in the day, and also had to convince Simon Pegg of its merits. “But then he watched it back and went, ‘This is the opening, clever clogs.’”
8. Double Dalton (Hot Fuzz, 1:10:37)
“I think there’s a somewhat similar gag in Airplane!” says Wright of the shot in which Timothy Dalton’s nefarious supermarket manager, Simon Skinner, poses by a picture of himself with the exact same expression. But its origin lies with the manager of a Wells shop where Wright used to work as a shelf stacker. “He had a photo of himself as a manager in his office. And if you look closely, the Simon Skinner photo says ‘Employee Of The Month’. So he’s given himself that title.”
7. Cuppa Tea (Shaun Of The Dead, 0:37:23)
Part of a much bigger sequence in which Shaun imagines a series of scenarios whereby he saves all his loved ones, this push-in on Pegg, as he drinks a cuppa and beams at the camera, is particularly glorious. Wright recalls that the whip pan onto the cup at the end took ages for David Dunlap, the DP, to get right; at one point he snapped at Wright after the director laughed at one take. “But that was the particular shot. He thought we were laughing at him, but we were just marvelling at him.”
6. The Window Jump (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, 0:53:40)
An almost blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag in which Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim, desperate not to talk to Knives Chau, leaps out of an actual window instead, while his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin) covers for him. “That’s a Texas switch,” says Wright. “It’s all in one shot. There’s no digital trickery. You see Michael Cera, then he runs around the corner and hides, and stuntman Chris Mark is the one who jumps through the window.”
5. Harlem Shuffle (Baby Driver, 0:06:25)
Baby Driver begins with Baby (Ansel Elgort) going to get some coffees, post-heist. Except Wright saw it as a chance to further showcase his intent for the movie, with Baby’s every movement coordinated to Bob & Earl’s ‘Harlem Shuffle’. A sequence so complex that it needed a full day of rehearsal, the take used was take 21. “I’m in the finished shot as well. I’m in a reflection — rather than paint me out, I was holding a monitor and they made that into a smartphone. That’s my Hitchcock cameo,” says Wright.
4. The Reverse 180 (Baby Driver, 0:04:09)
“This was not in the script,” admits Wright of Baby Driver’s greatest bit of auto-erotica, in which Baby avoids an oncoming truck by slamming his red Subaru into a 180-degree slide, then out again. Wright calls it the ‘180-in-180-out’. “Tom Rothman said, to his credit, ‘I need six trailer shots.’” So Wright and Darrin Prescott racked their brains, eventually coming up with this. “And it’s in every single trailer of the movie.” This shot was captured by a drone, perfectly framing the intricacies of Jeremy Fry’s stunt driving.
3. Shaun Goes To The Shops (Shaun Of The Dead, 0:25:45)
Shaun Of The Dead’s most complex shot, which tracks Shaun as he walks to the corner shop, oblivious to the zombie apocalypse happening around him, had its origins in a similar trip Wright took following a Resident Evil 3 marathon. Mirroring a shot earlier in the film while adding the undead, it’s layered with bits of business, such as Shaun slipping on a pool of blood without realising. “We plotted all these little gags so you could watch it more than once and notice all these background details.”
2. The Fence Jump (Hot Fuzz, 0:28:46)
When Shaun jumps over a fence, badly, in Shaun Of The Dead, Wright and Pegg never intended for it to become the beginning of a running (and jumping) gag that features in all three Cornetto movies. “But we liked the idea of these little running gags,” explains Wright. “And, because Nicholas Angel is a supercop, wouldn’t it be funny if he excelled at doing what Shaun did badly?” Cue this gag where Angel, in pursuit of a suspect, somersaults and flips his way across a series of back garden fences.
1. The Andys Exit (Hot Fuzz, 0:52:10)
Far and away the winner of our poll, the greatest shot in Edgar Wright’s movies was a complete accident. It was a simple set-up, requiring Rafe Spall and Paddy Considine as the two Andys to goad Nicholas Angel, and then exit the frame. “Except Paddy was just fucking around, basically,” laughs Wright. Which explains why Considine suddenly lurches back into the frame for one last pop, and then leaves again. It was the only take they had of Considine doing that, yet Wright knew it was the one. “We really had to work closely in the edit to keep it in the movie. If you watch closely, Rafe Spall is already cracking up in the background. But as somebody who plans their movies to within an inch of their life, it’s nice to have these little magical moments like that.”
