Edgar Wright on Exploring the Dark Side of the 60s in Last Night in Soho

Edgar Wright’s new film Last Night in Soho is a dark psychological thriller with time-bending supernatural elements—the latest redefinition of expectations for what an Edgar Wright film is. Wright first broke through as the director of the UK comedy Spaced—which followed the misadventures of a pair of Gen X Londoners as the 20th century gave way to the 21st—working closely with series co-writers and co-stars Jessica Hynes and Simon Pegg. Stylish and packed with pop culture references—both stylistic and verbal—Spaced set the tone for the three films now known as the Cornetto Trilogy thanks to a running gag featuring the popular ice cream treat: the zombie movie parody Shaun of the Dead (2004), the action movie riff Hot Fuzz (2007), and the science fiction comedy The World’s End (2013).

Those films tend to be what moviegoers first think of when discussing the subject of an Edgar Wright film. But Wright has been breaking away from that mold for over a decade. Between Coronetto entries he made the inventive and form-pushing 2010 comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. He followed The World’s End with Baby Driver, a music-drenched 2017 crime film that kept Wright’s light touch but incorporated an unnerving sense of real danger and menace. This year has seen the premieres of both Wright’s first documentary—The Sparks Brothers, a love letter to long-lived cult band—and now Last Night in Soho, a dark psychological thriller with time-bending supernatural elements. (By happenstance, Wright signed off on the final cuts of each film on the same day shortly before Christmas last year. “At the end of that day,” he says, “I just kind of sat back and I was like, ‘That's a lot of movie.’”)

In Soho, Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Old) stars as Eloise, a Cornish teenager whose obsession with the culture and style of ’60s Britain leads her to pursue a degree in fashion at a London design school. Once there, she finds the city of dreams isn’t quite what she hoped. Her classmates are backbiting snobs who mock her retro notions and the streets are filled with men whose leering and innuendo always seems on the verge of tipping over into outright aggression. After taking a room at boarding house run by a longtime London resident (Diana Rigg), Eloise becomes overtaken by fantasies of walking the streets of ’60s London and seeing it through the eyes of her room’s former resident Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a confident, stylish, aspiring singer whose life seems to take a turn for the better when she hooks up, romantically and professionally, with Jack (Matt Smith), a manager who promises her a bright future. But for both Sandie and Eloise, life soon takes a disturbing turn.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917), the film draws on everything from classic Italian giallos to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion for inspiration. It also casts several towering stars of 1960s British cinema, including Terence Stamp, Rita Tushingham, and Rigg, who died before the film’s release. (It’s now dedicated to her.) Though flecked with humor, it’s Wright’s darkest film.Wright spoke to GQ about why this film is a personal effort, the underside of nostalgia, the secret to soundtracking a 60s films without using overplayed songs, and the awkward joys of the theatrical experience.

Which came first, the idea to do a psychological thriller or the idea to do a film about the '60s?

That's a difficult question to answer. I feel like the idea has been swirling around in my head so much that I can’t remember which came first. The psychological thriller aspect… I miss certain movies in terms of just the feeling of them. There are a lot of psychological thrillers and horrors from the '60s and early '70s that I think about a lot. They give me a certain kind of feeling, or they feel dark and transgressive and illicit in a way that sometimes more modern horror films don't.

The ’60s element is something that had been an obsession from a very young age. Not dissimilar to Thomasin in the movie, I’d inherited my parents' record collection at a very young age. Or rather, put it this way: they had one record box of ’60s albums which seemed to stop when my brother was born, and they had no ’70s albums. I don’t ever remember them listening to music when I was growing up. I certainly don't remember them listening to their records.

So I would listen to the records for them from about the age of six, figure out how to use the record player and just kind of obsess over these ’60s albums and then start to sort of formulate… I was born in 1974, so the ’60s is the decade before me. A lot of people say you have nostalgia for the decade that you just missed and I used to form a perception of the decade from reading about it in music books, music magazines, art, fashion, film, TV. You start to build up this idea of this amazing decade that you missed. (And my parents’ recollections of the '60s were quite vague and of no help.) Then that, in a way, just continued, especially after moving to London, especially being in Soho a lot and spending the majority of my time there when I’m in London. I’d start to have these time-travel fantasies about going back to the ’60s. Wouldn’t it be great to see that show or go to that club?

But then the more that I started to think about that, the more that I started to wonder why I was so obsessed about going back, and whether nostalgia itself was a retreat from modern life, and was it in fact a problem? So I guess all of those things started to sort of come together in this idea of this kind of cautionary tale of time travel. If you could go back, would it be like a dream come true, or would it actually be something much darker and more complicated than that?

Was exploring the dangerous pull of nostalgia part of your personal connection to the story?

Especially in politics, people use the phrase “the good old days” all the time. It obviously happens a lot in American politics, and it’s happened a lot in the UK. I just thought it was kind of strange. In the UK, when people would talk about the good old days, what decade are you referring to, where everything was great and nothing was bad? It’s not like the evidence of the darkness of [the 60s] wasn’t out there in the literature and the dramas, and even just the news. But it's weird: as you get further away from the decade, some people choose to forget, and it gets reduced down to a more romanticized view. What if you went back but you just can't have the good without the bad?

To have it through the eyes of a female protagonist obviously makes it doubly so. The ‘60s are known as being the most progressive decade, but that wasn't necessarily the case for everybody, and I think a lot of people actually took advantage of that. The first thing I did when I pitched the idea was to hire this incredible researcher Lucy Pardee to really dig deep and get some real testimonials and stuff, which I started doing as long as 10 years ago. So by the time I came to writing, I had this massive tome of research that was deeply disturbing, and all of your worst fears confirmed. That made a harrowing read, to read about all of the crime and tragedies of the time. I don't know if you've ever had that, where when you read about murders and tragedies and careers cut short, from decades ago, this terrible grief and sense of loss about people that you’ve never met.

You co-wrote Last Night in Soho with Krysty Wilson-Cairns. It’s also your first film with a female protagonist after making a string of films with male protagonists. What were the challenges of stretching out like that?

Well, I guess the thing is that I just wanted to do it right. All of my producers are female, like Nira Park and Rachael Prior. So even before Krysty came on board, it was made in collaboration with them. When I first met Krysty it was actually a chance encounter, in a sense, because I knew I wanted to write it. And I guess there was part of me that hadn't... Maybe it was in the back of my head, but it hadn't occurred to me what was stopping me from starting to write the screenplay. And I think, in a weird way, meeting Krysty was the final piece of the puzzle.

It was Sam Mendes that introduced us. And not in terms of a working thing, he just said, “Oh, have you ever met Krysty Wilson-Cairns? You guys would get on like a house on fire.” The first time that we met in Soho, we were sitting in a restaurant, and she pointed across the street to one of the two surviving strip clubs in Soho. In the '60s, I think there were maybe fifty or more. Now there’s, like, two left. She pointed to one of the few that still remains, Sunset Strip on Dean Street, and she said, “I used to live above Sunset Strip for five years when I was working around the corner as a barmaid in The Toucan," the pub we feature in the film.

As soon as she said that, I said, "I have this story I want to tell you about." And then I said, "Will you come out with me one night, and we'll just go around Soho bars? I want to tell you this story." So I think initially, but maybe just subconsciously in the back of my mind, I knew where it was going. I just wanted to use her as a sounding board to see what she thought about the story. We were in a basement bar in this place called Trisha's and I told her the whole story and she really loved it.

It was maybe a year later when I decided that I wanted to do this next. I felt like it was a challenge. There's lots of things in this movie that I haven't done before. And that is important to me, to try and sort of stretch myself and challenge myself. I called her and said, “Do you remember the Soho film I was telling you about?” and she goes “Yeah, of course. I haven't stopped thinking about it." And I said, “Well, do you want to write the screenplay with me?” And then I came back to London to write it with her.

And that was great. Because I’d held onto the story for such a long time and there were so many weird things in it that were personal to me.There is a lot of [autobiographical] stuff in it. Just coming to London. My mum studied dressmaking at art college. My sister-in-law came from Cornwall to London and studied fashion at college. My mum, I would say, is quite supernaturally switched-on, not dissimilar to Eloise in the film. I grew up in a house where my mum, very matter-of-factly, would talk about seeing ghosts at work, or in our family home, and I would not be skeptical. If anything, I was envious of the fact that she’d seen a ghost and I hadn't.

And then bringing Krysty on board: the great thing of working with somebody, is there's shared experiences that we both have. Her mother and grandmother also both made clothes and were seamstresses. But also there's the experiences that I haven't had. As a woman working and living in Soho for five years, she had seen everything. So it was a great collaboration in that respect, because we could just bring everything that we had from our lives into the story.

It's really good at capturing the microaggressions of just being a woman in the city.

I'd say, sadly, most of those lines spoken by men have been said to Krysty.

You cast some towering '60s movie icons in this movie. I don't know if you had those particular actors in mind, but did you always want to fill those with iconic figures?

In some cases. I remember writing with Krysty and saying, “You know who'd be great playing this part? Terence Stamp.” And then in some cases it's just you thinking about who would be best for the part. I mean, I can't think of anybody better than Diana Rigg to play the part that she does. And when she wanted to do it—just amazing. Because I just think this is... Now that she's no longer with us, all I can do is just cherish the memory of working with her and getting to know her. Our friendship continued long after the shoot, into lockdown, where I'd speak to Diana on the phone as often as my own mother, talking to her, gossiping away about old movies that had been on cable.

I think some of those things come up organically. Having Rita Tushingham as the grandmother was really special to me, because she was eighteen when she made A Taste Of Honey with Tony Richardson. Thomasin McKenzie was eighteen in this movie. Just looking at her thinking, “I'd buy her as your grandmother,” and also just that connection between the actress that Thomasin is and Rita being a kitchen sink cinema hero.

I'm interested in how Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy worked together. You’ve said that Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is an influence and, as with that film, you have these two characters whose identities are blurring. How did they accomplish that?

The interesting thing is that though they're in a lot of scenes together—all of Anya's scenes, Thomasin is there—they don't talk to each other that much at all. The first thing that they had to do in the movie is this mirror choreography, and that just made them immediately become kind of sisters. They're so intimate with each other because they literally have to copy each other. It almost becomes a bit like trust exercises. That was some of the first stuff they ever shot, and it was obviously really intense getting all of that, doing that choreography and mimicking each other. I think it was a really great experience for them, because it was an interesting thing to see two actresses become metaphorically joined at the hip, and be in the scenes and be so aware of the other one, without actually having dialogue together.

The film has a lot of great period music, but they’re not the cliched ‘60s songs. What's the secret to doing that?

I tried to zone in on a particular period, the mid '60s, especially in the heyday of the female singers of that time. I honed in on songs tonally that felt right. Most of the songs that are in there, they're sort of stained with tears. Even the ones that are upbeat, they're kind of melancholic. They’re really emotional songs, but there's this bittersweet element to it. But I was also trying to find ones that [weren’t from] the Swinging Sixties psychedelic period. It's earlier than that, just those amazingly emotional ballads. I mean, it's funny when I actually looked at them, I realized how many of them are written by Bacharach and David. I think they have like five credits on the soundtrack.

You’ve made a point of expressing that you’d like viewers to see this on the big screen. Are you optimistic about the future of moviegoing?

I am. I don't think it's going to go away. I think the toughest thing at the moment is that independent films are suffering, but I really hope that will come back. I feel bad sometimes when there are movies that have done festivals that then either go straight to streaming and they don't find that audience in the same way, or they don't have an audience response. I felt that a lot about films in the awards season last year. The critics and voters had seen them but the public hadn't embraced them.

Listen, obviously the streamers sometimes finance films that wouldn't get made elsewhere. But when you go to the cinema and if you're watching something that's a little more challenging or something that maybe doesn't quite reveal itself until the end, you don't usually walk out of a movie. Usually, if you've paid your ticket, you will watch the whole thing. The problem is, I think, with some streamers, if it's something where you haven't actively bought a ticket or even rented a specific film and it's just something that's on, people's attention spans are really bad. It makes me worry about some of the more challenging films that go straight to streamers. You start to wonder how many people watch the whole thing.

I know it gets into sort of thorny territory when directors say, "You have to see my movie on the big screen or not at all." I don't believe that. Soho coming out in cinemas, it means a lot to me, because I want people to have the opportunity to see it on the big screen. It's not like I can't enjoy a movie at home, but you want people to have the opportunity to see it on the big screen. I just hope that the independent films don't sort of get lost in the wash. I do think cinema will survive, but I hope it's not just the big ticket items and it's the other films as well.

I have an ongoing conversation about this with a friend who makes the point that while you obviously want to see something like Dune on the big screen you also want to see something like The Card Counter in theaters, a movie where you really need to focus your concentration. You can do it at home, but it takes more effort.

Basically, when you go to see a film at the cinema, the film is in control. It's like you're getting on a train, and the train is leaving, with or without you. So you have to show up when the train is leaving the platform. That's when the movie starts. At home, when you're in control, all of the temptations of being able to stop it, or even the convenience of being able to rewind something because you missed a bit or you didn't get it… In a strange way, all those things add up to the cinema experience as well. One of the great joys is when a movie is having such an amazing response that the dialogue is drowned out by the audience. That's not a bad thing. "Oh, wow. People were laughing so much you couldn't hear the lines in the next scene.” These are champagne problems to have. I think my general rule of thumb—and again, I'm not being snobby about watching films on iPads or phones, or even on planes—is the actor's head has to be bigger than your own.