Edgar Wright Gets Spaced
August 10, 2008

It has never been a shown on American TV, and yet the clever, laidback and extremely cool Britcom Spaced, directed by Edgar Wright, has a growing fanboy cult on these shores that includes Quentin Tarantino, Matt Stone, Kevin Smith and Diablo Cody. They and other American celebrity fans are so into the series that they agreed to do audio commentaries for the first-ever U.S. DVD release of the show, which ran from 1999-2001 in the U.K. It hit the street a couple of weeks back courtesy of BBC Video.

Wright, who went on from Spaced to collaborate with its star, Simon Pegg, on the feature films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, speaks quite fondly of the show, noting that he, Pegg, and Jessica Hynes (who co-scripted and starred with Pegg) put much of themselves into the motley cast of characters, led by an aspiring comic book artist (Pegg) and a writer’s block-plagued magazine scribe (Hynes).

The thing that defines the characters, he notes, is that “they can only really communicate, visualize their lives and articulate themselves, through pop-culture.”

The celebrity Spaced fans are all individuals that Wright met thanks to the success of Shaun. He supplied some of them with copies of Spaced, but others — like Stone, Patton Oswalt and SNL’s Bill Hader — were already cultists for the show. Nine of the 14 commentaries provided for the American DVD release of the series’ full run (one for each episode) “were taped in one day!” brags Wright. “Quentin did two commentaries, Kevin did three, Diablo did two, Matt did two — all with myself, Simon and Jessica. The three with Patton and two with Bill Hader were just with me.”

Check back later in the week for the second part of Ed's interview with Edgar Wright!

Posted by Laurence Lerman on August 10, 2008 | Comments (0)