Like a lot of filmmakers, Edgar Wright has a habit of assembling playlists for the movie’s he’s sitting down to write. He’s just a little more precise about it than most: Baby Driver had a soundtrack before it had a single line of dialogue. Wright started out by picking the songs that would drive a given scene.
His new movie Last Night In Soho – which tells the story of contemporary fashion student Eloise, who finds herself slipping back and forth between the present day and the mid-60s – has similarly musical origins. But this one’s been gestating for a very long time. He’s been longing to visit the era since childhood.
“My obsession with the 60s started with my parents’ record collection,” Wright says. “They had one record box, and the albums started in 1964, and they stopped when my older brother was born. They also never seemed to listen to the albums, either. So much like Eloise at the start of the movie, I sort of inherited this box – and in a pre-internet, pre-having-a-TV-in-my-room age, I would just listen to these albums over and over and over and form a perception of the decade based solely on that. That turned into reading about music and film and TV and art and fashion, and then going to London itself.”
But as Wright got older – he’s spent 27 years in London, and “more time in Soho than in any other neighbourhood” – he started to wonder what his attraction actually meant.
“Like, why am I so obsessed with a decade that I didn’t live in? And why do I have recurring time-travel fantasies about going back to this time? And whilst obviously there are several good reasons – wouldn’t it be amazing to go to this gig or go to this club or see this show or see this film in the 60s? – then you start to wonder whether nostalgia itself is a failure to deal with modern life. So I started to question myself as to why I was constantly thinking about going back.”
I should point out that Last Night In Soho isn’t quite a time-travel movie: Thomasin McKenzie’s Eloise is just riding along with Anya Taylor-Joy’s Sandie as she experiences the highs and lows of Swinging London – a voyeuristic perspective perfected by Italian directors in pictures like Blood And Black Lace and The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, which became known as giallo cinema for their lavish colours and spectacular violence.
“It’s not just the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento, but the films that they were inspired by,” Wright says. “Obviously they’re taking cues from, like, Michael Powell and Hitchcock… films of the late 50s and 60s shot in London in blazing Eastmancolor or Technicolor like [Powell’s] Peeping Tom or Basil Dearden’s Sapphire or William Wyler’s The Collector. Just so beguiling, because they’re showing you something that’s bigger than life. And in a sense, when [Eloise] first goes back to the 60s it’s like the 60s are more glamorous than modern London. But even then, the bright colors start to be used against her. That was sort of the idea.”
Listen to the entire conversation on the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or playable directly below:
NOW What is NOW’s weekly news and culture podcast. New episodes are released every Friday.
