<aside> 📎 意外看了Empire UK Magazine十月刊，被这篇文章首图的视觉效果惊到了，剧照正好从中间被分成两面，两女主呈镜像式对映，这相视是眼神是何等迷离复杂。
此文系为Empire记者Chris Hewitt于2019年7月参观片场并访谈众人后所作，主要谈及本片的创作来源，谈及Edgar Wright突破定型印象和创作瓶颈的尝试，诸如以女性视角为主、怀念旧Soho却也批判旧Soho、跳出他所擅长的喜剧cult、侧重心理惊悚和人物塑造等。另外涉及了一点片场描述和拍摄杂谈，至于剧透似乎不如预告片多，可以放心食用。
Empire.UK.2021.10-EdgarWright.pdf
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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 away 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.
Like Baby Driver, which took years to get to the starting grid, Last Night In Soho was an idea that had been noodling around in that non-stop noggin of his for quite some time. In 2007, he first started putting together a playlist of songs for something he initially called 'The Soho Project' (and, later, borrowing from that playlist, 'The Night Has A Thousand Eyes', before settling on the title of a Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich song). It was a deeply personal idea derived from his own experiences living and working in Soho, that insalubrious slab of real estate that runs roughly through London's West End. Forget New York — London is the city that never sleeps. And Wright felt that there was a story to be mined from that moment when the workaday hustle and bustle recedes and the darker, seamier, seedier side emerges.
"I moved to London in 1994," he says. "But it's only in the last four years that I've actually lived in central London. It's a very strange place. The heart of show business and the media district is hand in hand with a much darker world in plain sight. I'm always struck by the fact that, as fun as that area is, after midnight, things start to change. You feel the energy change immediately."
So, like an inverse Hot Fuzz, which saw a big-city cop head to the countryside, Last Night In Soho follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a young fashion student with stars in her eyes and dreams in her head, who swaps life M a sleepy Cornish town for the bright lights of London. There, while struggling to fit in at fashion school, she finds that her unique gift — she has a sixth sense, and can see spirits — somehow forms a bridge to the Swinging Sixties, and an unshakeable bond with Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young girl who arrives in the city with similar dreams of stardom (albeit as a singer).
In a way, it's an echo of the journey Wright himself undertook when he left the tiny city of Wells in Somerset and headed for The Big Smoke. What happens next to Eloise, though, is very different from Wright's experiences, and is a dark, dangerous and — this being an Edgar Wright film — deeply stylish descent into madness, as the '60s and the modern day begin to overlap with terrifying consequences. "If I have some recurring fantasy, it's always about time travel," says Wright. "It's a bit of a cautionary tale of nostalgia. It's about the dangers of romanticising the past. Last Night In Soho is really about that idea of, 'Be careful what you wish for.'"
That's a theme that runs all the way through the movie. The night that Wright was introduced to co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, following a recommendation from her 1917 writing partner Sam Mendes, seems significant in that regard. It was 24 June 2016, and there's a reason they can pinpoint this with such accuracy — the historic vote that had taken place the day before. "It was the night of Brexit," remembers Wilson-Cairns. "And we were lamenting the fact that Brexit had happened." That turned into the two embarking on a whirlwind tour of Soho, during which he told her the story that had been forming in his head, and then, just a few weeks later, an offer to write the screenplay together.
And even though that story was something Wright had been chipping away at for a while, and certainly before Brexit, the shifting of the political landscape over the last few years also seem to very much chime with the themes that drive Last Night In Soho. This is a movie that charts what happens when rose-tinted yearning for a bygone era of sunlit uplands crashes into the harsh reality of what that period was actually like.
And so Eloise — who is infatuated with the '60s — begins to see that there's a darker, grimier, and maybe even murderous heart just beneath the flawless skin, as she watches, seemingly helpless, as Sandy gets involved with Jack (Matt Smith), a roguish but charming promoter who may or may not have an unscrupulous side. It's here where it becomes clear that Wright also wants to explore some tough themes.
It's a movie — at least partially — about toxic masculinity, trauma, abuse, grief, and the manipulation of women. Wright points out that he was working on the movie before the rise of Me Too and Times Up, but there's an undeniable and powerful current running through the movie. "It's about the exploitation of women," agrees Wilson-Cairns. And the exploitation of any marginalised group, really. I don't think people talk about it enough. I don't think we see it on screen enough and I don't think we understand the full implications of it enough. And I think we need to talk about it in fiction, bemuse that's how people begin to grapple with stuff that's not directly connected to them. So it couldn't not be a theme, because we're talking about the '60s, and it was rife."
By way of explanation, Wright proffers an anecdote about the time Dame Diana Rigg, one of the '60s icons he cast in the movie, along with Terence Stamp and Rita Tushingham, asked to take a tour of the Café De Paris set that had been meticulously recreated on a soundstage at Leavesden Studios. (The film was Rigg's last; it begins with a title card dedicated to her.) "Diana said, 'Oh, I went to the Cafe De Paris on my 18th birthday to see Shirley Bassey,'" Wright recalls. "So it's a Saturday and it's an empty soundstage and I'm walking Dame Diana Rigg on my arm to the Cafe De Paris. She looks around and goes, 'It's very good.' And then there's a pause and she says, 'I remember walking down the stairs, and I remember lots of rheumy-eyed men looking me up and down, and feeling like apiece of meat.' In that recollection of everything that was great about the '60s, very quickly the darker side of it bubbled to the surface. And I was thinking, Well, that's the whole movie.'"
When Empire visited the set of Last Night In Soho, there was little evidence of that darkness. It was a slightly muggy evening in July 2019 and we had come to the Empire (cinema, that is) in Haymarket to watch Wright and co at work. If anyone on the production had been trying to keep the 1960s cat in the bag, it was clearly too late now. Because on that night, 2019 London had given way to a big old blast from the past, in the form of a huge marquee for Thunderball, resplendent above a recreation of the entrance to the Café De Paris.
It's here where Empire watched McKenzie's Eloise take her first steps into the '60s, emerging from a nearby alley into the dazzling, disorientating lights of another era. Time, and timing, was everything. The production had got the all-clear from Westminster Council to shut down all three lanes of traffic, but could only shut down the third lane for two minutes at a time, and no more than four times per hour. So when Wright called, "Action!", everything had to be executed to the nth degree as McKenzie — listening to Cilla Black's 'You're My World' on a hidden earpiece — walked into the traffic (the cars stopped miraculously for heft this is both a dream and a movie, after all) and gazed in awe at the world she'd somehow gatecrashed. "That was overwhelming," she says now. "I remember having to get the timing so I didn't get run down by a car!"