ILLUSTRATION MUTANT 101

Directors Edgar Wright and George Miller talk shop via the wonders of Zoom.

Trigger-happy in Hot Fuzz;

Mad Max: Fury Road — Top Gear, eat your heart out!

FUN FACT: WHEN Edgar Wright wants to test out a new home cinema set-up, he uses George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road to put it through its paces. “Even during a busy AV technician’s working day, he can’t not watch a whole 20-minute set-piece,” says Wright.

“I can think of no higher compliment.” Fury Road was instrumental in forging Wright and Miller’s friendship, the former hosting a Q&A with the latter, even giving him a lift in his Prius. “That was the first time I was in an electric car,” recalls Miller. It’s hard to imagine the man behind Mad Max’s V8 Interceptor and The War Rig in an eco-friendly Toyota.

Wright had discovered Miller’s work through Mad Max on VHS (“It’s amazing how films became legendary, just through their poster or the cover art on the box,” says Wright) before watching Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and The Witches Of Eastwick on a big screen. For his part, Miller first sampled the Wright stuff watching Hot Fuzz. “I remember the opening montage, the quick cutting,” says Miller. “And feeling there was a unique tone. Edgar quickly became one of those filmmakers for me —

I would go simply because it was Edgar Wright making the movie, no matter what it was.”

But the pair are more than just filmmaking friends. When Wright was finishing up his 1960s-set psychological chiller Last Night In Soho, he invited Miller in to see early cuts, the Australian filmmaker watching various iterations and giving advice (“Minimal,” he says modestly).

It’s no surprise, then, that when Empire invited Wright to pick a pal for an informal conversation, he turned to Miller. “I just wanted to thank George on record for being the person I could call on any hour of the day to watch five minutes and tell me if it works,” he says. “I trust him implicitly as the best objective eye I could ever ask for to watch something.” Our chat started with talk of their unique collaboration on Soho, which began at an unprecedented time.

Edgar Wright: Even though you weren’t involved in the production of Last Night In Soho, I started thinking of you as my talisman because there’s a weird thing that happened, which is I showed you the unfinished version of the movie on the last night before London lockdown. We watched it at [production company] Working Title and then we went to Fischer’s, a restaurant on Marylebone High Street. I remember our conversation was a) about the film and b) about the fact that the world was about to shut down.