Chatting To Edgar Wright About The End Of The Cornetto Trilogy

As a teenager in 2004, discovering Shaun Of The Dead was something of a revelation. The team of director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost delivered a story that was both a wonderful example of a zombie film and a loving satire of the genre’s sillier tropes. It was also hilarious.

Shaun Of The Dead was followed up by Hot Fuzz in 2007, which did to the ‘buddy cop’ genre what Shaun had done to the zombie flick. This year, Wright, Pegg and Frost concluded the series with their sci-fi comedy, The World’s End.

The Cornetto Trilogy, as it has come to be known, is a tribute to growing up and embracing (or fleeing) adulthood. But more than that, Wright says, the films pay tribute to the power of the individual. “They’re all about an individual versus a collective,” he says. Shaun Of The Dead followed Shaun’s battle to avoid becoming a complacent (and actual) zombie; Hot Fuzz featured Nicholas Angel as the only voice for good in the entire country; and The World’s End sees Gary King fighting against the intangible threat of the unrelenting march of time and the entirely tangible threat of the unrelenting march of The Blanks, an alien army trying to get a foothold on Earth.

More than simply distinctly British, the Cornetto Trilogy is also distinctly suburban — it’s keenly aware of how the suburbs have changed while we weren’t looking. A prime example in The World’s End is the character-free pub franchises that have robbed the authentic small-town heart that Gary is desperately trying to reclaim. This seems to be one of the keys to the films’ worldwide success, and Wright drew on that heavily for the final instalment. “So many people across the planet have hometowns that they’ve left, that they return to later, and they have that strange, bittersweet feeling of finding that it’s changed without [them]. A lot of people watched [The World’s End] and could see themselves in it.”

An important element of this resonance is the secret horror of suburbia: an encroaching creepiness that can be recognised by anyone with an active imagination who’s ever been stuck in a small town. Perhaps counterintuitively, the fantastic elements of Wright’s work are essential to its relatability, which he attributes to “having a healthy imagination about your upbringing.” Growing up, Wright gravitated to stories where “a small town could be sinister, and dark secrets are lurking behind every door,” with influences such as John Wyndham (author of Day Of The Triffids), Village Of The Damned and Doctor Who.

Despite being conceived in 2007, The World’s End took a while to come to fruition. Wright found the formulation of the story difficult, as the original script was reliant on a time-travel element that seemed altogether too similar to Back To The Future Part II. ”We were always thinking about this time-travel idea, and it just became a bump, where we couldn’t quite figure out how they would do that and not lose the internal logic of the piece,” he says. As soon as the time-travel element was ditched, the script began to write itself. “The answer was already there,” Wright explains. “We ended up with exactly the same beats, but by a different method.”

Beats is the correct term, too. The films of the Cornetto Trilogy have a clear and pronounced rhythm to them, to the point that a choreographer was hired to work on the latest film. The film’s antagonists, The Blanks, at times move together like an army. “Unlike zombies, which are more random and all doing their own thing, The Blanks have a hive mind, and they all do the same thing at the same time. Also, it’s a thing I always wanted to do that’s a bit more ambitious, those shots where maybe there are like 80-100 extras, all walking in time, making it look quite sinister.”

This speaks to an important element of Edgar Wright’s work: the camera framing and editing choices are often the source of jokes. Most fans would consider this an essential, if often unacknowledged, facet of the Cornetto Trilogy, which Wright worked hard to include in The World’s End. “I like when the jokes are not just dialogue-based; it’s in the way that you tell the story, the way you present it.”

Take the beer pours, for instance. “I wanted the shots of beer being poured to get more and more melodramatic as the film went along, so at the point when you reach pub number six and you’re already thick into the invasion, just showing the pouring of Foster’s can look incredibly sinister.”

The Cornetto Trilogy distinguished itself from most parody films through its loving treatment of the genres it was playing with. While the reference-based comedy is less pronounced in The World’s End, the film still exhibits the meticulous detail and comedic density that has become the trademark of Wright’s work. Wright enjoys watching loose, improvised films, but it’s just not how he works.

“From the writing to the execution to the choreography, we like to be very precise,” he says. “We like to write a screenplay, rehearse it, and then stick to that screenplay.”

Having now ventured into the post-apocalyptic genre, Wright seems anything but short of ideas of what to tackle next. He is currently working on a heist film and another sci-fi piece, and is developing ideas for a serious horror film and a minimalistic, stylised crime film. But if you’re waiting for Shaun Of The Dead 2: Back At The Winchester, it’d be best not to hold your breath. Part of what keeps Wright interested in his work is the ability to explore new territory, and he’s not ready to look back just yet.

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The World’s End is now out on Blu-ray and DVD.

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James Colley is a writer/comedian from Western Sydney. He blogs at fineanimalgorilla.com and tweets at @JamColley.