Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Edgar Wright - Page 2

We were shooting 'Hot Fuzz' in my hometown of Wells, Somerset, and I remember looking at the dailies and going, 'Wait, there's a Starbucks in the shot. I don't remember that being there!' We had to digitally remove it; the same thing happened with a McDonald's in another scene. I had this sensation of, 'What's going on here? Where am I?'

Some actors don't even read the stage directions at all.

The worst thing you can do after a test screening is slash it for the lowest common denominator.

It's interesting that some people reading the comics see Scott Pilgrim as a blank slate in that they like to imagine themselves as Scott Pilgrim, so it's interesting that there are two kind of schools of thought about the character. One is, like, Scott Pilgrim is awesome. The second is Scott Pilgrim believes himself to be awesome.

When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'

Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.

I remember when we did 'Shaun of the Dead,' and when we were trying to get it off the ground in 2001 before we actually made it, a lot of people just didn't want to know.

If you have ever driven around London and seen the amount of one way systems... they basically rubbed out all car chase crime. In fact, if you get bank robberies in the U.K., they're using scooters.

I'm very happy with the response for everything I've done, but, you know, sometimes you get things like, 'Oh, 'Spaced' Series One wasn't as good as 'Spaced' Series Two.' Or 'Shaun of the Dead' is not as good as 'Spaced,' or, 'Hot Fuzz' is not as good as 'Shaun.' Or, now, 'The World's End' is not 'Shaun of the Dead.'

When I did 'Hot Fuzz,' I tried to get Barbara Steele in the movie, but I was told she had retired.

Some people are brilliant on the first take, some people are brilliant on the fourth take, and when you are doing a group scene, you kind of have to figure that out.

I love the Zucker brothers' films - 'Airplane!,' 'Top Secret' and 'Police Squad!' - are my formative experiences.

I'm very happy with my life and career, but I do find myself having serious attacks of nostalgia, and I don't quite know why. Even though I've got to travel the world and do amazing things, I still want to go back to my teenage years and change little aspects of it. It's strange, but it does continue to bug me.

It's a very rare and fortunate position to be able to make movies with two of your best friends who happen to be really amazing actors and writers.

I remember seeing 'Gremlins' and having my mind blown and seeing 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' at 13, and it was this hugely aspirational experience.

I had a chance to do 'Ant-Man' in 2011.

Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.

I'd rather try and cram in another two gags than leave a pause to say, 'Hey, wasn't that bit funny?'

'The Driver' wasn't commercially successful at the time, but when I was a teenager, I had no knowledge of that.

I have this theory about science fiction movies in that, when the space race sort of died, a lot of people sort of lost hope.

I'm a big fan of films that I grew up on and would watch obsessively, over and over again. If I didn't feel like I got everything on the first watch good, I want to see it again immediately.

I grew up on Marvel and, like, '2000 AD.'

I grew up on 'Battle of the Planets.'

When you're struggling to get a feature film off the ground, there's no big overarching tenure plan or anything like that.

I find just in terms of free time I'm always envious of people I know who... listen to music, watch films, play games, read books. I have to pick. And I find frequently that if I've got Sophie's Choice, I'll try to keep up with music and keep up with films. So my book reading and comic reading and game playing is terrible and infrequent.

I always liked movies like 'American Graffiti' and 'Gregory's Girl.' 'Gregory's Girl' is particularly perfect because it really captures that summer holiday bubble of teenage utopia. Even though it's got a happy ending, there's a feeling that these characters may never see each other again.

'Scott Pilgrim' is something that was a little bit more difficult to put in one box. But, to me, that's not necessarily a bad thing about the movie.

Critics should think about how the opening weekend audience might want to discover some surprises for themselves.

When I was a kid, I just figured we'd be living on the moon by the year 2000.

I first saw Walter Hill's second film, 'The Driver,' as a teenager, late at night on the BBC, quite possibly sitting too close to the telly. Given that this 1978 slice of neo-noir takes place almost entirely in the dark streets of a deserted downtown L.A., it's really a perfect midnight movie.

You cannot put 50 years of the Marvel universe into a movie. It's impossible.

One of the reasons for me that there's no 'Spaced 3' is that I don't think you can pretend to be 26 for ever.

I'm a big believer in keeping the stage directions really tight.

Every time I watch a Clint Eastwood film, I'm in touch with my feminine side, I've developed a searing man-crush on Clint Eastwood.

We got offers to make sequels to both 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' and they never really interested us because we like having these endings where it seems very final but could hint at some kind of future adventure that you'll never see.

I was never a DC kid - I went through a phase from, like, 11 to 17 where I would try to buy as many Marvel titles as possible. And '2000 AD' was kind of the sort of sci-fi/punk of British comics.

When we made 'Shaun of the Dead,' it was our first feature, and we were just lucky to make a film, full stop.

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.

'RoboCop,' when that came out, was like the best comic book movie ever, and it's not based on a comic book.

There are lots of films I wish stopped at installment number one. I like 'Back to the Future Part II' and 'Part III' enough, but I still like the ending of the first one better.

Mel Brooks is an interesting one because he started out making films about stuff that he was totally affectionate about, like musicals, westerns, horror films, Hitchcock films. And then, as they get further on, and you get to 'Spaceballs,' then it's just kind of contrived.

I was at art school that had quite a celebrated film course as well. I tried for that film course when I was 18, but they said I was too young. I tried this audio and visual design course instead. Two years later, I reapplied for that higher course, but they said I was still too young and to try in five years.

Occasionally, you'll get a 'District 9,' a film that is politically charged, but there is nothing going on beneath the surface with a lot of horror films. They are not about anything.

It's funny, my agent came up to us and said, "That line, when Nicholas says, 'I'm gonna bust this thing wide open,' what film's that from?" I said, "I think it's from every film." It's just like you get into that kind of mode of generic dialogue, it's fun to do.

Now I'm back in LA, it's high time to finish a little something I've been working on.

I came from another county. I spent 15 years in Wells, but I was treated like an outsider. It was like, "Oh, you're not local."

I think where the criticism of videogames come from is where videogames are just Xeroxes of films, and when you get a film adaptation of that game, you've just Xeroxed something twice. I think that's where a lot of the criticism comes from - there are ultra-violent games that are already based on a million films. But there's definitely beauty and art and design in games. I don't think anybody could deny that.

The script and the performances and the style all clicked.

Hot Fuzz in a strange way, for me, summons up the spirit of watching R-rated films that I was too young to watch. I was 14, 13 maybe, when Robocop came out. Seeing Robocop at my brother's friend's house, and not really supposed to be watching it, because it was [rated] 18 and I was 13. That mind-blowing experience, because not only is it a great film, but it feels illicit.

I'm a big fan; I like all sorts of genres. I do like an occasion to just switch my brain off and enjoy some mindless carnage.

I don't want to get them in trouble for crimes in the early '90s - but there was usually like one pub that was the soft touch in terms of you could get served under 18, and that pub was The Rose and Crown.

In a weird way, riffing on genres is kind of a reaction to formula. When you watch so much of the programmers and the films that you just think you've seen before, it's kind of going back to the well in terms of trying to conjure up the spirit of what made you excited about films in the first place.

Everything that I've done so far has had a bigger budget than the last, but I've never ever felt the benefit of the bigger budget because the ideas always exceed the budget.

We like to imagine that Shaun is in George Romero's universe, that it's happening at the same time as the Pittsburgh outbreak.

I think when I was getting into directing, or wanting to be a director, when I was a teenager, the two films that really inspired me were Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. And in the case of the former, I thought, "Wow. Why don't all comedies look like this?" And then as I started doing comedy, particularly when I started doing it on TV...

The editing process, to use a slightly grim analogy, is like the slow suffocation of lots of babies. It's like, which finger do you want to cut off first?

Near my apartment in London, a lot of the pubs kind of look identical, which is very strange.

I used to drink a lot of lager when I was younger, but I'm more of a wine drinker now, I guess. I feel daunted looking at full pints.

There are things that are about the entire genre, so it's weird when you look on Wikipedia and people say, "The scene where Angel grabs his fist is from Superman II," and you're thinking, "Ummm, no it's not." Or, "There's a shot from Matrix Revolutions." I'm thinking, "I've only seen Matrix Revolutions once, and will never watch it ever again."

Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together.