Anya Taylor-Joy, Edgar Wright Talk ‘Last Night in Soho’ at Venice: ‘It’s Dangerous to Romanticize the Past’

Naman Ramachandran
·3 min read

Filmmaker Edgar Wright and stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith were in sparkling form at the press conference for ‘Last Night in Soho’ on Saturday.

The London-set film travels back in time and Wright describes it as an homage to the “psychological thrillers I really adore” made by British filmmakers Michael Powell and Alfred Hitchcock and Italian genre directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento.

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“I guess I wanted to find a way to sort of make a London version of that,” Wright said. “I actually live around the corner from most of the locations in [Michael Powell’s] ‘Peeping Tom. So it’s something that’s never far from my mind, because it’s something I literally walk past every day.”

However, “It’s dangerous to romanticize the past,” Wright cautioned.

Speaking about her Emmy nominated breakthrough role in Netflix drama series “The Queen’s Gambit,” Taylor-Joy said, “I feel very, very fortunate to have worked on the things that I’ve worked on, and if anything, every day I fall more and more in love with what I do. And that is what’s so important.”

“I’m here for the work and successes is wonderful, but at the end of the day, what we do every single day is get up to go to work, and that’s what I love to do,” Taylor-Joy added. “So I just feel incredibly privileged to get the chance to keep doing that and the chance to work with such wonderful talented people.”

Matt Smith, who is best known for playing the time travelling cult character Doctor Who, brought the house down when asked about the time travelling aspects of ‘Last Night in Soho.” “I’ve done it before,” Smith said deadpan.

Elsewhere, Wright paid tribute to the late Diana Rigg, who died in 2020 after completing ‘Last Night in Soho.”

“It’s difficult to extricate the movie from working with her now because the thought of the movie was quite interesting, very emotional experience to conceive and make, and now that’s all tied up with the fact that Diana is not with us anymore,” Wright said. “In those situations where it’s desperately sad, I won’t to get to have another gossipy brunch with Diana Rigg. The only thing I can take away from it is like how lucky I was to work with her and know her.”

Wright revealed Rigg’s professionalism and insistence on wanting to complete the movie on time. “When we were told that she needed to finish her work very urgently, we also knew what that meant without asking anything,” Wright said.

Without revealing any spoilers, per Wright’s own request, it is safe to say that like his previous fiction feature “Baby Driver,” “Last Night in Soho” is crammed with an infectious, eclectic soundtrack. Also like “Baby Driver,” even the non-dancing sequences are elaborately choreographed.

“It was complicated but so much fun, and we were really up for it because I think both [co-star] Thomasin McKenzie and I really like to be challenged and having something that requires such synchronicity between not just the two of us but the camera as well, we really had to be focused on the other individual,” said Taylor-Joy.

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