Quotes from Edgar Wright

What 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' and 'World's End' do is smuggle a different movie under the guise of a zombie movie or a cop or alien invasion movie. Even though they all have action and carnage, they are really films about growing up and taking responsibility.

The sci-fi movies I grew up with, the metaphor was very rich, and they used to really mean something: David Cronenberg's films, or John Carpenter's films, or the Phil Kaufman and Don Segel versions of 'Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,' or George Romero's early zombie films.

I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.

Usually in TV... A TV director could be anything from a main grip to just a glorified cameraman, and sometimes a director can be the person who is hired last. It's very much a producer's medium.

The first TV show I worked on was with the guys from 'Little Britian,' Matt Lucas and David Walliams, who did a show in 1995 I directed, 'Mash and Peas.'

Growing up, there were TV shows that were very funny but very traditional. Classic things like 'Fawlty Towers,' obviously, and 'Blackadder' were pretty traditionally shot. And then there were the ones that start to break the mold or be really ambitious. The ones that spring particularly to mind would be 'The Young Ones.'

When I went to college, I discovered the Sega console, and 'Sonic the Hedgehog' became very dear to me.

Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.

When I was a kid, I just figured we'd be living on the moon by the year 2000.

The idea of fighting your new girlfriend's ex-lovers, 'Street Fighter' style, is the ultimate geek wish-fulfilment.

Not everybody fantasizes about robbing a bank, but I think most people have that fantasy of being in a high speed chase.

'RoboCop,' when that came out, was like the best comic book movie ever, and it's not based on a comic book.

I would say 'American Werewolf in London' is like an unconventional buddy movie: even if the buddy dies 20 minutes in, he still remains throughout the picture, and their partnership is one of the best things in the movie.

I love the Zucker brothers' films - 'Airplane!,' 'Top Secret' and 'Police Squad!' - are my formative experiences.

Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.

We were shooting 'Hot Fuzz' in my hometown of Wells, Somerset, and I remember looking at the dailies and going, 'Wait, there's a Starbucks in the shot. I don't remember that being there!' We had to digitally remove it; the same thing happened with a McDonald's in another scene. I had this sensation of, 'What's going on here? Where am I?'

There are lots of films I wish stopped at installment number one. I like 'Back to the Future Part II' and 'Part III' enough, but I still like the ending of the first one better.

We got offers to make sequels to both 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz,' and they never really interested us because we like having these endings where it seems very final but could hint at some kind of future adventure that you'll never see.

I use music to focus, like an internal motor.

I always liked movies like 'American Graffiti' and 'Gregory's Girl.' 'Gregory's Girl' is particularly perfect because it really captures that summer holiday bubble of teenage utopia. Even though it's got a happy ending, there's a feeling that these characters may never see each other again.

I just remember watching 'Brass Eye' and being so utterly blown away by the scope of it and how much it managed to cram into an episode.

I guess a lot of comic-book adaptations strive for realism. Christopher Nolan is making Batman seem very real and very serious.

A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they're striving for some kind of realism, like 'Iron Man' or 'The Dark Knight,' or they're very stylised and gritty, like 'Sin City' and '300.'

Comics have years to explain this stuff, and in a movie, you have to focus on one thing. So it's about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus.