You’re like in my head.” But, yeah, he’s a little bit more temperamental than he used to be, perhaps, because when things don’t get done, he feels it. It’s been thrilling to see him evolve and I love working with him because I feel like we are plugged into such an awesome creative resource with Edgar – right back to Spaced, when I showed him the script for the first time and he went, “Yeah, we can do this and this and this… ” and I was like, “Wow, you totally get this. He didn’t belong on television, his ideas were too cinematic. He was always gonna be a film director, even when we were making small television. SIMON: I noticed a change in Edgar from Spaced until now. MANDATORY: Have you noticed a real change in your dynamic from Shaun of the Dead up to now? SIMON: And there were lots of pretty girls in that, as well. NICK: Well, no, he’d have to be on his best behavior.
MANDATORY: So no weepy phone calls from the cast of Scott Pilgrim vs. He can’t sit there scratching his beard going, “Ehhh, Whaa?” So maybe he doesn’t solve problems as well. And that can sometimes be creatively stifling. Edgar, when he doesn’t work with us, he has to be on his best behavior. SIMON: Our job, when we work together, with Edgar particularly, is to give him the space to be as insular and angsty as he wants to be because we deal with the front of house, we keep the crew happy, we make sure the energy on set’s up, and that the atmosphere is good and that we’re all feeling very productive. In terms of being producers on the movie, too, you know. And it’s our job to do what we can do to help facilitate that for him. He’s not there to pander to our needs in terms of what we want – he’s making a film.
SIMON: He’s not always telling us what to do. Because we are so close, that enables you to not get moody about that. The thing about Edgar on set and us, because we are so close, he probably never talks to us, on set. Him and Bill Pope lit the shit out this, beautifully. NICK: Well, in terms of the lighting, you wouldn’t have to. Edgar’s got more buttons than a fucking remote control. MANDATORY: Do you know each other’s buttons? Like, if you want to piss off Edgar you know all you have to do is nitpick the lighting or something because you know that’ll get to him? NICK: Which you couldn’t say to someone, you know, that you didn’t know so well. SIMON: “Stop being so fucking grumpy, Edgar.” You also get to a point where that friendship enables you to say, you, know, “Enough.” So we can put up with all sorts of shit from each other and absorb it and understand it and…
The thing about us is that the working relationship is fundamentalized by a social one which existed, particularly with me and Nick, prior to us working together, and as such we have a relationship which is more familial than if we were just colleagues.
Is that the same after three movies? Have you learned ugly truths about your friends and collaborators? MANDATORY: OK, so it’s typical in movies that when groups of people are under duress, their true natures come out. MANDATORY: But did you take every chance anyway to walk around the set of The World’s End going, “Well, you know, on Star Trek, we had this…and this…” MANDATORY: If you start thinking like that, you’ll go insane. You get these ridiculous follies…I mean, the amount of human lives that could have been saved with that money…the amount of babies that wouldn’t have died… So we did everything we could to bring it in on budget and once we were sort of getting to the end of post production there were still effects shots we needed it was like going to the company and being like, “Look, do you want it to look like this or do you want it to look like that?” And they’d go, “OK, we’ll charge less for this.” You know? But when you’ve got limitless resources, I think it’s dangerous. So we literally could not go over $30 million, there was no option of overrunning. We could not go over $30 million on this movie, because if we did we would have entered a whole new tax problem. I think necessity is the mother of invention. These films – everything gets thrown into them and then there’s a scramble to fix them and they just keep throwing money at it. I mean…$250 million? How could it ever earn all that back? But it sounds like a bit of a train wreck. I’m still slightly surprised to learn that he’s just one person after Social Network. SIMON: Ah, I see my copy of Town & Country has arrived.
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