Last Night Moves
INDISPENSABLE HOME ENTERTAINMENT
In an exclusive oral history, EDGAR WRIGHT and key cast and crew break down Last Night In Soho’s already-iconic Café de Paris sequence
[ EDITED BY CHRIS HEWITT]
EDGAR WRIGHT’S LAST Night In Soho, as you might expect, doesn’t skimp on the sumptuous visuals and earworming songs. But the two come together most thrillingly in what has already become the film’s signature sequence, in the Café de Paris. It’s here where, bookended by two Cilla Black tunes, heroine Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) travels back in time to 1965 and finds herself in the famous nightclub, beguiled by a young wannabe starlet named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). It contains meticulous design, innovative camerawork, invisible effects, and a rousing dance number between McKenzie, Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith as Eloise begins to break the boundaries of reality. Here, Wright, Smith, McKenzie and a host of key crewmembers tell us how they did it.
Edgar Wright, director/co-writer: This was probably one of the first visuals I had in my head before I’d written a word of the screenplay. One of the first ideas was to have this idea of living vicariously through somebody else’s life in dreams. And the way to show that ‘I’m me, but I look like somebody else’, is with a mirror.
Mirrors play a huge part in Last Night In Soho. In this sequence, Eloise flits between
being part of the world to becoming a reflection of Sandie, looking on as she dazzles the room.
Wright: There are two things with the mirror effects. I’m not just trying to show off and come up with these amazing, magic-trick effects. It was a practical decision. The more we could do the mirror stuff for real, the better it was going to be for the actresses involved. We did every single mirror trick in the book.