Scott Pilgrim Smack-Down
Edgar Wright, Michael Cera and Anna Kendrick On Bringing the Popular Graphic Novel to Life

I can’t say I was overly excited when I heard that Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead director had decided to take on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as his next project. While I could understand the filmmaker wanting to go in a bit of a different direction, adapting a series of graphic novels (written by Bryan Lee O'Malley) about a dorky guy having to defeat the object of his affection’s seven evil exes in an all-out video game-style smack-down didn’t exactly set my heart afire.

Edgar Wright (left) and Michael Cera (center) on the set of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World © Universal Pictures

Since no one should ever let preconceptions ruin a good time, I’m happy to report all me worries in regards to the feature were almost completely unfounded. All of which made it even more of a pleasure to sit down with Wright and stars Michael Cera (staring as Scott Pilgrim) and Anna Kendrick (playing his glib big sister Stacey) for a brief roundtable to discuss the picture. Like most interviews of this sort the give and take was fairly fast and furious, but there were still some fine tidbits to be had. Here are some of the highlights.

Question: Edgar, you started work on the script before the comic was done, and the movie sticks very close to those first volumes that were written when you started writing. If the comic had been done do you think it might have seemed like a more daunting task to turn it all into one movie?

Edgar Wright: Probably. I think you’re absolutely right. I think it would have been incredibly daunting with the whole series done. But because we worked with Bryan Lee O’Malley right from the start the two things started to effect [one] another. The books, in some small way, got affected by the film. We’ve kind of arrived at the same ending from different directions, and Bryan was involved the whole way. Michael Bacall [and I] wrote the script, and Bryan did the occasional polish, and there are lines in the film that are his and don’t feature in the books. It [would] be funny to me that if a fan was being particularly pedantic, saying, “that line doesn’t appear in the books!” I’d [be] thinking, well, Bryan wrote that line. The book is always going to be the canon, and that’s what [the film] is based on. I’d love it if people [who] saw the film who hadn’t read the books and said, “I want to read those books now,” and [then] they’ll have another universe to explore, you know?

Question: About the soundtrack, how did it all together?

Edgar Wright: There was definitely a snowball effect in getting [those] amazing artists [onboard]. I’ve been very lucky to be friends with [recording engineer, record producer and musician] Nigel Godrich for maybe ten years, and we always wanted to do something together and this was the first thing that came up where there was going to be a big musical element to the film.

Both of us are pretty hard on fictional bands in films, with a couple of exceptions, so we wanted [these] to seem really real, or really diverse, so it was Nigel’s idea to get different bands to play the different artists. We talked about bands that were similar to Sex Bob-omb, and even met some of them, but it actually came to, in some cases, of getting artists to kind of play a part themselves, so getting Beck to do the Sex Bob-omb songs was amazing because I think he enjoyed it because he could return to his fuzzier, kind of low-fi roots. And then, you know, because it’s set in Toronto, just having the Canadian royalty of Metric and Broken Social Scene was just amazing and then it just started to spread after that. Like the Patel Bollywood song. I was a big fan of Dan the Automator’s album Bombay the Hard Way, which is all Bollywood songs, so we got him to do that.

Michael Cera: Wow. I hadn’t heard that.

Edgar Wright: It’s great. It’s amazing. It’s just all remixes of Bollywood music. And we needed music for the Katayanagi Twins. I have to say, if it was me on my own, and Nigel Godrich’s name was not involved, it might have been a bit more difficult. But Nigel is kind of like an all-access pass to getting you any great band across the world. He [even] did the score, and even just the people playing on the score were just incredible. Members of Broken Social Scene, Supergrass, Air, Kid Koala… it was amazing.

The irony is [that] the first draft of the script had a running joke in it where you never heard the songs. Or you’d hear a little bit of an intro, and then Knives would say, “That's the most amazing song I’ve ever heard!” But then as soon as Beck and Metric got involved, and Broken Social Scene, it was like, let’s hear these songs!

Question: Michael, you tend to be best known for being a little understated in your comedy. Was it a fun challenge playing somebody so boisterous and kind of obnoxious?

Michael Cera: It was so much fun [but also] a little scary at first. When I was reading the script, I was thinking, how am I going to say some of these lines? It’s hard to imagine the tone of the film when you’re reading the script. Then when we got together and started rehearsing, Edgar showed me everything he had to show, gave us as much of a sense of the movie as [he] could before actually starting it. Then it started to become a little more clear in my mind, what it was going to feel like. Acting with the other actors was really helpful too. But it was a blast to get to do that.

Anna Kendrick and Michael Cera in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World © Universal Pictures

Question: This film is a true ensemble. The cast that you were able to assemble here is quite extraordinary. Were you surprised at all with who kept saying, "Yeah, I want to be a part of this, I want to work with you on this film?” What was it like for you two, Michael and Anna, getting to come to work every day and getting to see so many different faces?

Edgar Wright: It was amazing. I can honestly say I cast everyone I wanted to cast. I’d say 50-percent of the [actors] I was either a fan of or had seen in other things. Michael I knew from “Arrested Development.” The first time we talked, Superbad hadn’t even come out, so I cast Michael [as] Scott Pilgrim on the basis of “Arrested Development” alone, I hadn't even seen Superbad or Juno.

Anna I saw in Rocket Science. That was before [she] was cast in the film, before Up in the Air and even before the first Twilight. The casting process has been going on for three years. I’m not sure that this cast would have come together with three months’ prep. Some of these people I had in mind while I was writing it, like, I saw Rocket Science and said Anna would be the perfect Stacey Pilgrim even before I met her. Other people like Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and Jason Schwartzman definitely were in my mind as I was writing, and other people were a revelation to me. I can't claim credit for the suggestion of Kieran Culkin. That was our casting director Jen Euston, and as soon as he comes in and starts talking, I’d seen him in other films, obviously, but I just thought, oh my god, that’s perfect.

Question: But, following up on that, and I know you two have worked alongside some pretty great actors, but what was it like to work with that sort of talent?

Anna Kendrick: Well, I don’t know, but for me personally it was two things. One, I got to know the cast outside of filming. I never filmed with Chris or Jason. I knew Jason before, but I just sort of met Brandon and Chris separately, we never really filmed. But everyone was really lovely. I think I can sort of say, within a kind of young actor community, [they] are kind of royalty, really well-respected, and not just Chris Evans and Brandon Routh, but [also] Mark Webber and Alison Pill and Kieran Culkin. Maybe the rest of the world hasn’t seen Pieces of April or Igby Goes Down but the cast certainly had, and I think there was lots of mutual respect going into it.

Question: Knowing that the book is very personal to Bryan, it’s kind of pieces of his life, was there anything that you may have extracted from the book that you could tell was important to him and that you wanted to preserve in the movie?

Edgar Wright: I think [Bryan] found the whole experience very surreal. He would pretty much sit on set with a bemused smile. For example, something like Scott and Wallace’s apartment, he took a picture just walking around his neighborhood. He took a picture like of a little door that was like a storage space underneath their house. He took a picture of that, drew that as Scott and Wallace’s apartment, and then six years later, we go back to that neighborhood and he had the photo but he could not remember the address of the place. He knew vaguely where it was.

So, I think that’s the kind of thing he would find amusing about it [filming]. [We] have this photo from 2003, and we’re walking around this neighborhood trying to find that door, and it took us about three hours because they’d repainted the door. And then we recreated it.

I think you’ve got to put an audience member’s hat on. If you’re reading something what you do is you kind of read into it your personal experiences and stuff. I certainly felt like a Scott Pilgrim type when I was a teenager. All kind of romantic engagements would be dealt with in absolutes. Any new girl I met would be the most amazing girl I’d ever met. Every break-up would be the worst thing that had ever happened. It’s the end of the world! So I can totally empathize with Scott Pilgrim’s completely naive blind optimism and overreaction and exaggeration of everything.

Question: The books have a very read-at-your-own-pace feel to them. There's so many in-jokes, you can read a page and take ten minutes to do it. How did you transfer that, with all the little in-jokes? How difficult was it to find the right pace? How difficult was it to find that right feel?

Edgar Wright: It’s certainly like a balancing act. I think, certainly with comedy, I just don’t want to ever talk down to the audience. You have to pace the film as if you were a fast reader and if you don’t get everything, or you missed a joke and stuff, then it’s absolutely all yours to watch again.

Edgar Wright (left) and cast on the set of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World © Universal Pictures

I feel that way with the books. It’s like you said, you can take a day to read the book if you want to, or you can rip through [one] in half an hour and then there’s lots of extra little details to go back and pore over [later]. I thought about it like that.

I thought about that a lot with the action as well. When I used to read Marvel comics as a kid sometimes I would do exactly that. I would read the comic, read the all speech bubbles, and then when it got to a fight scene, you’ve got like a double-page spread in Spider-Man of a fight scene, I would go pow-pow-pow-pow-pow next! And then later [I] would go back and go, holy shit, Todd MacFarlane’s amazing! But the first time I would read it [the comic] I would rip through it in fifteen minutes flat. [But I] would then go back [later] and appreciate the artistry and stuff.

Question: So, I was curious, especially for you two Michael and Anna, now that the film has been getting screened and people are getting a chance to see it there has been sort of an argument that's been presented that it's a generational film. If you weren't a video game child of the 1980’s, maybe the late ‘70s, then you're not going to like the film because you're not going to relate to it.

Anna Kendrick: I think that’s silly. I think that’s just sort of silliness. When I saw this film coming together, it wasn’t completely finished, but I was already so excited to show my mom and dad. And obviously, yes, they’re biased or whatever, but, like, my dad really loved Kill Bill except for the violence.

So I don't know who wouldn’t like a really funny, fast-paced colorful movie? And yeah, there are video game references, but if you don’t get that that little ding-dong noise that happened was from Sonic the Hedgehog it doesn’t make you feel left out.

Michael Cera: Totally.

Anna Kendrick: Because the jokes don’t revolve around video games or comic books, they’re just enhanced. It’s done with a wink and a nod.

Michael Cera: That’s true. There’s nothing in the movie that’s depending on the viewer’s previous knowledge of anything. You can kind of just watch it and it’s a film that tells a story.

Edgar Wright: To be honest, there are some video game references that are in the books, like the door with the star, which is a Mario reference [but] it doesn’t have any particular resonance to me. How I interpreted it when I read the book was that she represents the unknown and this door is a leap into the unknown.

So you can read into it whatever you like, and you certainly don't have to have a Cliff's Notes on video games before. I haven’t had a console for ten years. I’m kind of like a lapsed video gamer. In a way, I think you have to make films for yourself and then hope other people discover them. I remember when me and Simon [Pegg] used to write “Spaced” we would always take our cues from “The Simpsons.” “The Simpsons” has a million esoteric references in it but it never stops the show. Things don’t stop for an allusion to The Birds; it’s just there if you want to see it.

Question: In interview with another site you said, “Scott Pilgrim is a daydreamer, and I wanted the daydream to never end.” I thought that was interesting because when I talked to you were doing Shaun of the Dead you said almost the opposite. You'd just come off “Spaced” where everything was a dream that had to end at some point and that you wanted to make a movie more set in reality.

Edgar Wright, Michael Cera and Mary Elizabeth Winstead discuss a scene on the set of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World © Universal Pictures

Edgar Wright: Yeah, that's true, and after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, as crazy as they are, they do take place in a real world where people die and they don’t come back. But when I read the Scott Pilgrim books it actually reminded me in a nice way of “Spaced” and I wanted to return to that. When you read source material which is so full of magical realism it’s just sort of a gift to make a film like this with a studio, [to have] that kind of backing to be able to pull off some of the visuals, and I like that kind of idea that your interpretation of the reality of the film is kind of up to you.

- Special thanks to Tyler Foster at DVDTalk.com for assisting with this article