Video:Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall Interviews - Scott Pilgrim

Transcript:Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall Interviews - Scott Pilgrim

Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the World Premiere of Universal Pictures' Scott Pilgrim vs the World.

Edgar Wright - Scott Pilgrim vs the World Co-Writer, Producer and Director

I've seen the movie. I don't know how to tell people about this movie because it's just so bizarre and out there. How do you tell people about it?

Edgar Wright: "I guess it's a reasonably simple love story about boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy has to fight seven evil exes of that girl, and then you have to go to the theater to find out what happens."

You take the story places most movies don't dare go. How difficult was that to sell that idea to a studio?

Edgar Wright: "Well ironically the studio brought it to me. They had bought the book and they had brought me the book. That's the irony of it is kind of like...the film is pretty crazy, but it is essentially like my first studio film."

How close in tone is it to the graphic novel?

Edgar Wright: "It's pretty close, but it diverges at kind of the midway point. The key was to kind of keep it all organic. Everything is very much in the spirit of the [book]. We worked very closely with the author and so he was very much involved in the adaptation and would kind of okay our drafts and stuff. You know, we knew early on where it was going to be something where structurally kind of... Just waving at Michael Cera. Sorry. And it had to diverge from the books, but everything is very much in the same tone and so I hope that the books will drive people to the film and vice versa."

Well it's going to drive me to the books because I saw the film.

Edgar Wright: "The books are fantastic. If people enjoy the film, they're going to love the books."

How difficult was it to get Michael Cera to be an action star?

Edgar Wright: "8 weeks of training, of boot camp. That's exactly what he did. We had like an action boot camp and it was great."

Why should people see Scott Pilgrim instead of every other movie out there this summer?

Edgar Wright: "Because no other movie this summer features people exploding into coins."

Michael Bacall - Scott Pilgrim vs the World Co-Writer

So what's it like working together with Edgar?

Michael Bacall: "Amazing. It keeps you on your toes in the best way. I always like to work with people who are smarter than me, which isn't too hard. But he's a genius and a very hard worker, and we both have kind of nutso work ethics so we put in long hours and had a lot of fun kind of coming up with it - reading comics and playing video games and calling it work."

Who has veto power?

Michael Bacall: "I believe that a director should always be the one who's guiding the process. A guy like Edgar in particular who is such an auteur and such a genius, and such an amazing writer in his own right, so of course everything gets run through him, and he makes the final call on everything which is as it should be. It's kind of a relief to know that ahead of time so that you can just kind of go have fun with it."

You guys worked closely with Bryan Lee O'Malley when you were adapting it, didn't you?

Michael Bacall: "Oh yeah."

So what did he say to you had to absolutely be in the film that you guys couldn't mess up?

Michael Bacall: "He never really said that anything had to be in the film. He was, I think, hopeful that we'd have an emotional story and that the women would be a part of it and be strong in the way that they are. And that's all stuff that we were dying to do. It all worked out. Bryan was an amazing resource for us, beyond just providing the comic books. He was a great sounding board, a good collaborator."

It's really close in tone, right?

Michael Bacall: "Yeah, I think so. I think we captured the tone of the books. We compressed the timeline, but we really tried to keep the tone and spirit of the books."

When you guys were writing it did you have Michael Cera in mind as the lead? Was any of that done when you and Edgar were working on it?

Michael Bacall: "Edgar had Michael in mind fairly early on, when Arrested Development was still on the air. And we were very frustrated because he was just too young at the time. But as these things go, Edgar went off and shot and promoted another film and by the time we came back around to writing the second or third draft of the script, Michael had kind of aged into the role. And it just became a perfect situation. It was really great."

It did take you guys a long time to do this.

Michael Bacall: "Yeah."

Is that normal for everything you're working on?

Michael Bacall: "I think so. I mean in Hollywood terms this is probably lightning fast. Half a decade, yeah, that's fast-tracked."

You're also going to be writing the Les Grossman movie, right?

Michael Bacall: "Yeah."

And?

Michael Bacall: "It's a blast. Tom Cruise is an amazing guy. He's really smart and really energetic, and really excited. We already realized speaking to him and working with him, he's worked with the best filmmakers in the world and has really absorbed that over the decades in the industry. And it's kind of a treat to work with someone with that breadth of experience."

Is he up for anything that you throw at him?

Michael Bacall: "It's a fun working environment. There's a lot of laughing and just throwing stuff back and forth. He's a great guy to be working with and Ben [Stiller] is a great guy to be working with. It's a crazy situation. I even pinch myself sometimes. It's a blast. They're really funny guys."

I fell in love with that character but I just can't see a full film... That's going to be so cool.

Michael Bacall: "Oh yeah. We've got a really fun idea. It's Tom's idea on how to structure it. I'm pretty excited about it because I think, of course, people might be concerned that, 'Oh, it's just the same gag over and over.' It absolutely is not. We've got a really fun way to structure this to make it its own movie. Yeah, you're going to love Les Grossman. He's a guy that you love to hate to love."

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