Edgar Wright is an English director, screenwriter, producer, and actor.
Let’s find out some fun facts about him!
1. Edgar Howard Wright was born 18 April 1974 in Poole, Dorset.
2. He grew up predominantly in Wells, Somerset.
3. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Wright directed many short films, first on a Super-8 camera which was a gift from a family member and later on a Video-8 camcorder won in a competition on the television programme Going Live.
4. These films were mostly comedic pastiches of popular genres, such as the super hero-inspired Carbolic Soap and Dirty Harry tribute Dead Right (which was eventually featured on the DVD release of Hot Fuzz).
5. From 1992 to 1994 Wright attended the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art (now Arts University Bournemouth) and received an ND in Audio-Visual Design.
6. He is best known for his comedic Three Flavours Cornetto film trilogy consisting of Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), and The World’s End (2013), made with recurrent collaborators Simon Pegg, Nira Park and Nick Frost.
7. He also collaborated with them as the director of the television series Spaced.
8. He also co-wrote, produced and directed the 2010 film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
9. Along with his friends Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat, he co-wrote Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin.
10. Wright and Cornish co-wrote the screenplay for the Marvel Studios film Ant-Man, which Wright was intended to direct before departing the project.
11. Though he has stated that the film that most influenced him was John Landis’ American Werewolf in London (according to his interview in The Film That Changed My Life), Wright also mentioned Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II and the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona as films that made him want to be a director.
12. When he met Raimi and told him so, Raimi joked to him, “Don’t say that, you make me feel old.”
13. In December 2007, Wright began guest programming at repertory theater the New Beverly Cinema following a sold-out screening of his films.
14. He curated a two-week series of his favorite films dubbed “The Wright Stuff”, hosting interviews with filmmakers and performers for each screening.
15. The festival concluded with a double-bill of Evil Dead II and Raising Arizona.
17. Wright returned for additional “The Wright Stuff” events in January 2011 and December 2011, the third series consisting entirely of films Wright had been recommended by friends Bill Hader, Daniel Waters (screenwriter), Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, John Landis and Joe Dante, but had never seen before.
18. Wright’s attempt to narrow the list based on public comment from visitors to his blog “produced another thousand suggestions.”
19. In August 2013, Wright programmed an additional double-feature series at the theater, “The World’s End is Nigh”, consisting of 12 movies that he called “stepping stones to our new movie” The World’s End.
20. Wright is a friend of fellow director Garth Jennings, and made cameos in his films The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Son of Rambow and Sing.
21. Jennings himself had cameos in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End.
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