BEHIND-THE-SCENES PHOTOGRAPHY GREG WILLIAMS
WHEN IT COMES time for Edgar Wright to choose the project that will become The Next Edgar Wright Film, the director is never short of options. And in 2017, after Baby Driver became his biggest hit, that was no exception. There was a Baby Driver sequel here, an adaptation of the ’70s TV show The Night Stalker there, to name but two. But something was nagging away at him. Had been nagging away at him for a while, in fact. A perception of his career to date that he wanted to address. “In an Empire [readers’ questions] interview I did [in March 2019], one of the questions was, ‘Will you ever make a movie that passes the Bechdel Test?’” he recalls. “And I said, ‘I have, twice!’ Shaun Of The Dead and Scott Pilgrim pass, but just. And only just. I wanted to make a film that would pass the Bechdel Test within the first two minutes.”
The Bechdel Test, which was conceived in the ’80s and has been increasingly used as a measure of films over the past decade or so, is a simple metric. If your movie features dialogue between at least two women and they talk about something that isn’t a man, then you pass. If they only talk about a man, then you don’t. There are, of course, countless classic movies that don’t pass Bechdel. But it’s undoubtedly important as a way of assessing the strength and depth of female representation in film, while reminding writers and directors that there’s a lot of work to be done.
By and large, Wright’s films have been adept sketches of men and masculinity — while Shaun Of The Dead and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World narrowly squeak by, the likes of Hot Fuzz, The World’s End and Baby Driver do not. There are memorable female characters in his movies — think Ramona Flowers, or Darling in Baby Driver — but for the most part his comfort zone has been stuffed with sausages. This is something that Wright was all too aware of; what’s more, he knew that others had noticed it too. One day, even before Empire reader Leah Goddard asked him about the Bechdel Test, Wright got a text from Abbi Jacobson, the star of Broad City. She’d been to a screening of Baby Driver and, the following day, enthusiastically texted a response to Wright. It read, “I really love your movies. And I have one suggestion: I’d love you to do the same thing, but with a female lead!” Wright laughs as he recalls his reply. “It’s funny you should say that,” he texted back. “I’m working on it.”
And he was. He was finally ready to pick The Next Edgar Wright Film. And he chose Last Night In Soho, a movie that would take him — and audiences — somewhere new. “You want to be able to tell stories outside your comfort area,” he adds. “In a perfect world, every project should push you in areas you’ve never tackled. You have to move into areas that are challenging, or that make you feel uncomfortable. And I thought there was a way of changing the perspective of some of the movies that I loved growing up, and finding a way to make a movie in a psychological thriller genre, where you could tell it through a female perspective.”
The result of this desire is a genre-defying, time-travelling, disturbing thriller that dispenses with the comedy of his earlier work in favour of a jolting, unsettling nightmare. There’s nary a Pegg or a punchline in sight, and not one, but two female leads. Needless to say, Bechdel is passed within the first two minutes. With flying colours.