“COMIC-CON 2010: ‘Scott Pilgrim’ and its music will be major backbeat in San Diego”
Nice background piece on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on the LA Times’ movie blog “Hero Complex” from guest writer Todd Martens:
One doesn’t have to get far into Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-part “Scott Pilgrim” series to realize some of the inherent challenges in bringing the pop-culture-obsessed comic to the big screen. From the first few pages of “Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life,” released by Oni Press back in 2004, O’Malley’s creation unfolds like a video game being played at a frame-by-frame pace.
At its heart, it’s a tale of dating mishaps and a fear of relationships unknown, and the commitment-phobic themes unfold amid the series’ grand martial arts-like fight scenes with “evil” ex-boyfriends. Yet Michael Cera, who has the title role in Edgar Wright’s cinematic interpretation “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” wasn’t worried about the metaphor being obscured by the cartoonish fight scenes and the outlandish plot, in which Scott Pilgrim must win the heart of Ramona Flowers by taking on her seven ex-boyfriends.
That’s largely because “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” due Aug. 13, is not only a comic book movie; it’s arguably this summer’s most rock ’n’ roll-centric film. Cera’s Pilgrim is a twentysomething slacker who despite declaring himself awesome is a below-average bass player. With half a dozen original songs, including pieces from Silver Lake’s Beck, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” will live and die by its music as much as its action and script.
“Whenever you see a band in a movie, the music is barely passable,” Cera said. “It’s like when you see a film, and someone is writing a book. Whenever you hear excerpts of the writing, it’s just terrible. You’re like, ‘That’s what they’re writing?’ It’s kind of the same theory.”
So how did director Edgar Wright (who co-wrote the Pilgrim screenplay with Michael Bacall) assure the music would be more than “barely passable?” He signed up Beck as the movie’s music supervisor:
“We wanted them (Pilgrim’s band Sex Bob-Omb) to sound like a garage band,” O’Malley said. “We wanted them to sound rough and really distorted. There’s this band called Times New Viking who had just released an album, and I was like, ‘These guys are perfect.’”
“Edgar wasn’t completely taken with them,” O’Malley continued. “So we start down with Beck, and the first thing he said was, ‘I think they should sound like Times New Viking.’ So Beck totally understood what we were going for. Edgar and I just kind of looked at each other.” (One can hear a snippet of Beck’s Times New Viking-inspired tunes in the “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” trailer below).
Though only four Sex Bob-Omb songs are on the soundtrack, of which The Playlist has compiled a detailed track-by-track, O’Malley said there’s plenty of Sex Bob-Omb songs in the vaults.
“Beck writes a dozen songs in one day,” O’Malley said. “So that’s what [Beck and Godrich] did. They wrote about 21 songs, and we picked the ones we liked. That whole thing was done in one day.”
A dozen songs in one day! Think on that the next time you feel creatively challenged!
For more on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, go here and here.
Interview with Edgar Wright here.
The movie’s trailer:
It comes out August 13.
For more of Martens’ article, go here.
Martens is the lead writer on Pop&Hiss.