The director talks about his love of British film and 1960s London – and the ‘quarantine movie club’ of little-known gems recommended to him by Scorsese
In March of 2020, at the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, Edgar Wright was in post-production on his new movie, Last Night in Soho. With a cast that includes Anya Taylor-Joy, Diana Rigg, Terence Stamp and Rita Tushingham, it’s a ghostly tale of young 60s-obsessed fashion student Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who travels from Redruth to London where she finds herself drawn back into the capital’s swinging past – with all its dark and sometimes horrifying secrets.
Finding himself on an enforced film-making hiatus, Wright decided not to waste his time, but to attempt instead to fill “the yawning gaps in my film knowledge” by working his way through a list of essential international cinema that Martin Scorsese had prepared in 2007. A few months later, Wright wrote to Scorsese, thanking the maestro for turning his attention toward such life-changing gems as Sansho the Bailiff, Rocco & His Brothers and Umberto D, and describing the “profound experience” of discovering or revisiting these classics.
