i was sitting in los angeles and i was thinking
last night in soho is going to be my next film i i really wanted to do something completely different
and it was a real departure for me something that was a challenge in a lot of ways something that
was more serious a film that had like female leads um and i knew it was like the right thing to do
is to sort of after baby drivers that is to make an original movie like as you know rather than
go straight into a sequel or to sort of like you know go off and do a franchise
movie it's like if i have the opportunity to make an original film i have to take it
the first meeting that we had about it was with our location manager camilla stevenson because
once you've written the script the very first thing you think about is like can we pull this
off in soho because that's important i don't really want to be recreating soho
like in another area so we kind of grabbed the ball by the horns and
said we're going to make this film in central london and so
what that requires is an enormous amount of planning
the amazing cooperation of the city of westminster to let us actually shoot in areas of london that
never close even on a sunday like soho doesn't shut so you have to figure out a way to work
around soho to shoot scenes that take place in the modern day and to shoot scenes that take place in
60s london with period dressing and period cars and changing all the signs and changing all the
ground floors of everything and it was a you know a herculean endeavor and i think
it's a credit to my location team production team and production design and ads or the ad department
that we were able to sort of pull it off because there were some days i came to work and thought i
don't know whether we're going to pull this off because it's like soho is an area it cannot be
tamed and so you had to figure out a way to make the movie with real life happening all around you
the costume design was obviously a huge part of the process because it's actually
you know baked into the plot in terms of the eloise gets inspiration from the 60s and what this
the character of sandy who she's becoming obsessed by is wearing and that almost becomes the key to
kind of her creative expression in the modern day and she starts to get some success on her course
through being inspired by the girl who she sees when she goes to sleep so with all that in mind
we knew that the first dress that sandy is going to wear has to be like a knockout dress but also
something that in its way has its own personality and so it's something where i feel like sandy
and the dress become kind of intertwined um and the dress in itself kind of has sort of a quite
ethereal feeling about it you're in a dream state and she's got this kind of amazing
sort of like floating dress and almost that she seems like a sort of shimmering mirage in a way
so we talked a lot with our amazing costume designer odile dix moreau about what those
costumes would be and obviously taking a lot of inspiration from the past and looking at kind
of dresses from the time and the material and um the people wearing them and the designers so
that was i mean that's the fun part of it where you sort of get to sort of
you know kind of turn back the clock and look at all these amazing fashions from the 60s
watching you cry for me get on your knees apologize please no why don't you die for me
one of the deal dicks monroe's credits was the film an education um which i thought did the
60s brilliantly and i it's stuck in my head as a film where i felt like the period work was really
really well done and didn't feel like it fell into those cliches that you sometimes get of like
swinging london so i wanted to work with her and um you know even just my first meeting
with her it's just like an explosion of like reference that was just like
oh i was obviously the right person for the job and she was really excited by the prospect of it
and and i guess in terms of sandy's costumes there's a way of you know showing narrative
throughout the costume designs and so that was something both with costume and hair and makeup
how we can tell sandy's story and the arc of her journey through her costumes
when eloise travels to the 60s
we wanted the film to feel a little different at that point and there were a couple of things
we did to achieve that one was the just about palette control in terms of we wanted the 60s
to explode in color you know obviously like a lot of archive at the time there's lots of black and
white photography or like you know like tv at that time wasn't necessarily in color in the mid 60s
um but there were a lot of films of the period that were shot in technicolor and i always like
like watching films from the 60s that are shot in like vivid almost hallucinatory technicolor
so that was the idea is that when we go into the mig 60s we want to feel like we're going from
not a black and white film into color but more like a muted color film into a technicolor film
and so that was something that we achieved partly just through the actual
colors that we're using within the scenes within the costumes within the set design um and also
and also it was done by switching uh the film we were shooting on spherical lenses
in the modern day scenes and then switching to anamorphic lenses in the 60s
chung is from south korea it was interesting to me to bring his eye to a london movie like what
how does he see the city so in the same way that eloise is somebody who's coming from the country
to london for the first time you know i have a cinematographer from south korea who also works
in other you know he's worked in the states a lot he never shot a film in central london and so
i was always interested to see how he saw it and you know we really kind of um
gelled immediately upon meeting like he read the script i showed him the storyboards
um you know reference material and and obviously what he's achieved in his work is like just
he's an incredible cinematographer so it's very exciting to work with him and i think all of the
crew and the cast like love working with him as well because he's just one of those people who's
so creative and in ways that are always a little unexpected
you're not good for me at
all like some of my previous movies um sometimes the songs inspire the scenes or sometimes the
songs are there as a reminder to make the movie so you know i like i said i had an
idea for the story i started making a little playlist of songs that i wanted to feature
conjured up the mood of the movie for me and then sometimes if i heard that track randomly
in the you know in the time before i started writing say i heard ardene taylor's there's a
ghost in my house i'd be like ah i've got to make last night so it would be these things
almost like the kind of the songs would be like post-it note reminders you must make this film
and so those things like so songs also really drive the writing process for me because
much like in the film eloise like uses the music as a time travel machine essentially
um you know the the sound of the 60s kind of like propels her back into that decade and
i guess it was the same thing but writing it is obviously like so evocative of time
and action that you could hope for with any film
is that the audience feel like they've had an experience at the end of it and i
think in this movie you get to go on a journey with thomas and mackenzie's character eloise
and she isn't the same at the end of the film and hopefully neither are the audience and you know
it's it's interesting i take this as a compliment one of my friends saw an early cut of the movie
and he called me a couple of days later he goes i had a dream about your film
a dream about soho and neon flashing and i couldn't get it out of my head and i was like well
good i said that's the desired effect is that you know the film is about kind of these extremely
vivid like visceral visions and you know if like somebody watches the movie and then when
they close their eyes at night they start thinking about things that they've seen in the movie then
that you know what more could you ask for you know the worst crime is like the movie where you've
forgotten what even happened in the movie by the time you got to the parking lot that's not
good so if if people are sort of like thinking about the movie for a long time afterwards um
if it's haunting them then you've done your job
i have nothing against um like watching things at home during lockdown i have probably watched
upwards of 500 movies at home however i hope it's not controversial to say that
the film is best experienced first on the big screen it was designed for the big screen in
terms of like the the look and the mix and just you know in a film where you're immersing yourself
in like another world on the big screen you get to go down the rabbit hole with eloise in a way maybe
doesn't work quite as well if you're looking at it on your phone that's not again to sort of say that
like you can't do that but i would love people to have the opportunity to see it on the big screen
and so i'm very like sort of thankful that we were able to push the release so that that was possible
because the idea of it just going straight to sort of like um home release was not something i
was particularly kind of excited about because you know i make i loved going to the cinema
like i think the experience of sitting in the dark with strangers is like sometimes like more
than half the fun and you know you want to feel like you want to go on a journey with a movie
and there's no question that the big screen is more transportative segwaying from edward wright i
believe it's a really good thing to go to theaters and make sure that you see this film including
most of his movies uh they're very very immersive especially with music sound and visuals movie
theaters are great to just isolate all that sound and all that noise from the outside world for you
to even better enjoy the film and i love all his movies let me know down in the comments down below
one of your favorite films of edgar wright have you seen baby driver have you seen scott pilgrim
versus the world did you know he he did shawn of the dead that's one of my favorite films of his
which i purchased on steelbook which you could go ahead and check out on one of my videos
about our trip to fye so if you like all this type of stuff make sure you hit the
like button and subscribe really helps me out here and i'll see you here next time later