The cannibalistic nature of online film news went to the next level yesterday when a plethora of sites published the same round-table interview with the same talent from a set visit on Edgar Wright’s upcoming book adaptation, “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.”
As is the case with most year-old interviews, much of what was said was just recapping what’s already been said/confirmed, etc, however there were a few tidbits of info we found interesting:
• Wright revealed that several scenes of music performances in the film were shot entirely the way through capturing the entire song in full. Remember, Sex Bob-omb’s music was written by Beck while Clash Of Demonhead’s was written by Metric. We’re also told the footage will likely feature on the DVD but may also be released in another form before then. Maybe a music video if they have time? We hope so.
“In a couple of instances, we shot whole songs, because the songs are so good. I kind of had it figured out how long they’d appear in the film. On three occasions, I really pushed to shoot the whole thing, thinking, “We’ll need this at some point.” So two of the Sex Bob-omb songs and Clash Of Demonhead song, we shot the entire thing, so we’d have it.
• In a short dialogue, Michael Cera and Jason Schwartman discussed the possibility of one day performing the music written specially for the film as their characters live.
Press: “Will you play a live concert?”
Cera: “I don’t know. I really want to. I wanted to play the songs at some point.”
Schwartzman: “It would be incredible.”
Cera: “They’re really fun to play. Yeah. That would be so cool. That would be fun.”
Schwartzman: “I would say that the stuff I’ve seen of the music looks so good. It looks so real. Sometimes music’s not handled correctly, like they don’t look like they’re playing. It really looks like you guys are playing.”
• Wright revealed that Canadian all-girl rockers Plumtree, whose song ‘Scott Pilgrim,’ will of course feature in the film as well. Everyone pretty much already imagined, but it’s good to hear the now-defunct band are making the cut as they are integral to the story (Their song “Scott Pilgrim” obviously inspired Bryan Lee O’Malley).
“We’re definitely going to use that song and probably one of their other songs, and that t-shirt is on prominent display in the books, so Plumtree will have their name splashed over a huge portion of the film.”
• Wright discussed the collaboration with Bryan Lee O’Malley, noting that some differences in the script from the graphic novels were in fact ideas of O’Malley that he eventually decided to change; that the adaptation began when only two issues of the graphic novel were out but O’Malley tracked out his plans for the entire series for Wright and co-scribe Michael Bacall; and that there are some lines in the graphic novel that come from the script and, at the same time, O’Malley did some rewriting on the script.
“People said [our first script] had loads of things that weren’t in the books was all stuff from the books that [O’Malley] later changed. And, so there are bits in the film which are truer to his original plotlines and he ended up changing his mind. There’s even little bits of dialogue that were in the books and we kept them in the script but he cut them out [of the books].”
“We wrote the first draft after he wrote the first two books and then we kind of picked his brain up here in Toronto, me and Michael Bacall. We sat down and he had bios for the other ex’s and some ideas and we basically picked his brain and he went off and thought about it and wrote out the plotlines for the other four books. So we had that to work off. So some of our script takes stuff from that which has since changed a little bit.”
“There’s a couple of lines in book four and five that are from our script. There’s only two lines but we had written and then he’s like ‘can I have that?”
“Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” hits theaters August 13th and co-stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Anna Kendrick, Alison Pill, Johnny Simmons, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh, Satya Bhabha, Mae Whitman, Kieran Culkin, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Aubrey Plaza and Ellen Wong. [Collider, among many others]