The tricky production Edgar Wright compared to a war of attrition
Shooting on location is always a gamble. On the one hand, it can lend a film some invaluable verisimilitude, with the setting becoming something of a character on its own in the best case. But at the same time, it’s a risky move, giving the control to a director afforded by a hermetically sealed soundstage and throwing the entire film-making process out to the elements—or, god forbid, the public.
So when Edgar Wright came to put together his much-anticipated 2021 1960s thriller Last Night in Soho, he had a difficult decision to make. The streets of the West End, where the story takes place, are permanently busy with life and pose endless problems for a film crew trying to recreate the 1960s on a grand scale. But at the same time, perhaps something is lost when London is portrayed via the Mary Poppins route – where English streets are dressed up studio backlots in Southern California.
In conversation with acclaimed Korean film director Bong Joon-Ho in 2021 for Filmmaker Magazine, Wright spoke about the challenges inherent to filming on some of the busiest streets in London – a process he called “a war of attrition”. Wright said Soho had not been put to film much in the last two decades aside from in the work of Michael Winterbottom, who shot films like Wonderland and The Look of Love in the area. And perhaps the paucity of Soho location shoots is with good reason: “Soho is a very difficult place to film because it is one of the few areas of London that is 24/7,” Wright said.
On top of this, road closures require months of warning to the City of Westminster, meaning shooting dates are essentially locked in stone, no matter how capricious the London weather decides to be. “We had a particular Sunday to shoot the first sequence when Eloise goes out into the street,” Wright said. “If it was raining or anything went wrong—well, that’s the Sunday we’re shooting that bit, and it’s been in the city diary for five months.”
Then there are the shots that Wright was amazed he and his crew pulled off at all. Despite permission to close streets to traffic, the public were still allowed to walk through the area, making it no tall order to create a reliably ’60s atmosphere on long tracking shots of leads Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith travelling through Soho. Adding, “The only way to do it was to dress all the streets and flood them with period extras to push the modern world out. You can close roads, but you can’t stop the public from walking through a shot.”
A bit of good timing plus a careful mix of physical and digital effects allowed him to create a believable ’60s version of the London streets. Wright explained, “Marcus Rowland dressed all the streets, then in the distance, there’s some digital work, where DNEG [the VFX company Double Negative] and our VFX supervisor, Tom Proctor, took out modern stuff and some tourists in the deep background. I always think the best digital effects are when they’re combined with physical effects.” Meanwhile, a hidden Steadicam in a rickshaw was used to follow another group of actors up Old Compton Street while the public’s attention was drawn to road closures and a besuited Matt Smith and bouffant-clad Anya Taylor-Joy nearby.
Joon-Ho sympathised with Wright, recalling the challenge of filming a scene in downtown Manhattan for Okja. “When I was shooting Okja in New York, I only had one weekend to shoot in Wall Street and remember that just being a total nightmare,” he said. “Soho is one of the busiest towns in the world, so I was really curious how you managed to shoot at all.” It appears no authenticity of the setting is achieved easily. While some reviewers criticised the film for an uneven tone and unsatisfying narrative conclusion, the consensus appeared to be that visually, it was a marvel.
