Auteur theory - Edgar Wright

As part of the research and planning for our coursework, we had to find out about a famous film auteur. Here is our presentation about our chosen director Edgar Wright. This presentation was made by me, Luke, Dan and Charlie.

Rough script:
Edgar Wright was born on April 18th 1979 in Dorset. He is a director and writer know for Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and The Worlds End. His interesting style of fast editing, whip pans and crash zooms have made him a well respected director. He also mainly work with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, as well as using deadpan humour in fast-paced moments. I’m going to look at his different films and show the effects and styles of Wright that I might want to use in my music video or short film.

The first film we will look at is the first is Shaun Of The Dead, which was released in 2004. A parody of zombie horror films, it put the normal Simon Pegg in an extra-ordinary scenario. The film was mainly influenced by George A. Romero, who is a director of lots of zombie films like Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead, which this film’s name comes from. Wright also references Romero’s films a lot. Shaun Of The Dead uses a lot of whip pans and crash zooms to move from one shot to the next, and also display time moving on quickly. With the whip pans in Shaun Of The Dead, the director of photography was David M. Dunlap, who worked on Goodfellas, was able to do the whip pans on set instead of speeding them up in the editing. This made these kind of shots more realistic and less digital. He also likes having the same shot but the time of day moving on very fast, to keep the fast pace of the film going. In Shaun of the Dead, there are lots of fast action style editing for the simple things like Shaun getting dressed. I like this type of edit and want to use it for our short film or music video, as it can move small things like this on really quickly. Edgar Wright said that the trick with Shaun Of The Dead was to pull it off that “it’s a zombie film which isn't really about the zombies. That you could go through the script and replace all the zombie elements with any other obstacle, be it traffic jam, power cut of thunder storm."

The next film we will look at is Hot Fuzz, which was released in 2007. Like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz was another parody but this time a parody of police action films. Wright is a huge fan of action films, so this film is packed with all the same effects and shots he used in Shaun. He very much liked quick crash zooms to show a set up, like when Pegg was loading up with weapons. All these shots are very short and snappy, and move the story on. A very clever thing that Wright does in Hot Fuzz is his ability to story tell in a minimal amount of time. Normally if a director is moving from one scene to another he will have a shot of buildings and cars with music in the background, but Wright does things differently, as shown by this scene [show scene of Pegg moving from police station to the small town]. Wright does something completely different to the norm, turning the normal music you would hear completely down and the sound effects up, which adds to the comical aspect of the film as well. It’s all very inventive and different. Lots of times in Hot Fuzz (and Shaun Of The Dead, but mainly Hot Fuzz), Wright will take the simplest of scenes and find new ways of doing them, as well as things popping up or leaving the frame in funny ways. Martin Scorsese always said that “Cinema is a matter of what is in the frame and what is out of the frame”, and Wright uses this quote in lots of his films. Hot Fuzz also takes the most boring bits of police work and montages it in a funny, exciting, Michael Bay style. Wright also likes close ups in his films, taking influences from Scorsese who he has quoted as being the “king of the close ups”

The last one of Edgar Wright’s films we will look at is Scott Pilgrim vs The World, which is a very different style to Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead. In this film, Wright has taken loads of references from the comic itself, as well as many other video games and comics like Mario. He  also uses many of his previous styles like smash cuts, whip pans etc, but as well as this uses a lot of comic book style special effects like POW’s on the screen when someone has been hit, or lives in the corner of the screen, since this film is based off a series of comic books. This makes the film unique and appealing to all sorts of different types of fans. One cool transition effect that Wright does in this film is have the lights completely turned off to pitch black, to then come back on to reveal a different setting. He did this by turning off the actual lights on set, to make it more authentic. This also keeps the pace of the film up and engages the audience. His use of same scene transitions of time, as well as fast paced shots in simple scenes like conversations or getting changed, adds to the excitement of the film. The editing of Scott Pilgrim especially shifts reality, and moves the element of time really quickly. This way Wright is able to have better content in the film, as well as some comical content too.

So that's almost everything we like about the Edgar Wright style, most of which we hope to incorporate into our music video or short film.