DEAN COSTELLOE
CENTRE NUMBER: 14715
CANDIDATE NUMBER: 9058
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS - DIRECTOR STYLE
EDGAR WRIGHT
Edgar Wright has produced many popular films in his time as a director, and these range from Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007) to name the most well known. In these films, he uses a range of close up montages in these movies, in which he decided to take many mundane everyday actions, to put them into a montage in order to build up towards an action-packed tool-up montage towards the end. This is shown in Shaun of the Dead (2004), when he uses many whip pan techniques in order to emphasise these mundane actions, but also so that in the final montage scene, he uses a gun tooling up montage in order to create the action-packed climax towards the end of the film. Many of the close ups and shots can be found in the scene below from Shaun of the Dead (2004):
Similarly, in Hot Fuzz (2007), the idea was to subvert this and to take the most boring parts of police work, such as the paperwork, and then to massively stylise it in order to fetishise it and make it seem a lot less boring. Also, transitioning quickly between lots of shots allows each scene to literally have a beginning and an end, but it does not drag the scene out to be too long and also gets the point across very effectively. The Hot Fuzz (2007) scene with lots of whip pans and transitions can be found below:
Some of Edgar Wright's scenes are very cleverly made as he keeps the pace of his films at a quick pace, as he admitted in his first movie A Fistful of Fingers (1995) that he did not have a lot of shots to cut to in close up montage scenes, so the close ups themselves are good ways to keep the pace of the scene moving quickly. On top of this, he also feels as if close ups are good ways to set the scene, for example, in Shaun of the Dead (2004), there is a scene where we see the main protagonist, Shaun (played by Simon Pegg) getting off of a bus with some flowers and walking down the street. Instead of showing the bus pulling up and then Shaun getting off of it and then walking down the road in a longer sequence, he instead shows a close up shot of Shaun's feet on the bus as the doors open, and this again keeps the pace of the scene and allows us to have the beginning of the scene set for us without all the other unneccessary shots. He confirms this by saying that if you were to see a shot of somebody in a car pulling up outside somebody else's house, they might stereotypically show the car driving the whole way down the road and then stopping outside the person's house, however, Edgar Wright feels as if 90% of that shot will be cut out anyway, so it is unneeded to show the whole shot, as his close ups set the scene in the same way.
Again, in Hot Fuzz (2007), there is a scene at the end of the film where Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg), where he is tooling-up lots of guns and weaponry from the evidence locker and this is again shown by a close up montage of many different shots. He used Simon Pegg for this scene and not a double as he believed that not only would Simon Pegg feel a lot better after seeing the shot knowing that it was him, but also it takes a lot of the comedic and action-packed elements away from it, so he felt like using Simon Pegg to do this scene is essential.
A scene similar to this is found in his other movie Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010), when he is seen putting on armbands and a jacket, and he uses the same sort of tool-up close up montage in order to show this, but adds a comedic element to this as he is then seen tying up his shoes, but this is a lot slower than the rest of the shots and is put there in order to evoke a humorous response from the audience. Edgar Wright uses lots of short close ups and this is shown again in his other movie The World's End (2013) where he shows the beers being poured into glasses, again following the same techniques that he has commonly used in the past.