Edgar Wright Quotations

I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.

I think it's good to have pressure on yourself. The worst crime is to get kind of really complacent.

I definitely went through a period when I was a teenager when every girl was 'The One' and every break-up was the 'Worst Thing That Had Ever Happened.

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

I've always been fascinated by horror films and genre films. And horror films harbored a fascination for me and always have been something I've wanted to watch and wanted to make.

I call it Inherent Twice because I am looking forward to seeing it again.

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

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 script and the performances and the style all clicked.

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

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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?