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Tripwire Talks Exclusively To Edgar Wright About The Sparks Brothers And More

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5 years ago

August 1, 2021

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Bright Sparks

Tripwire’s contributing writer Stephen Dalton just spoke to cult director Edgar Wright about his new documentary The Sparks Brothers, Scott Pilgrim vs The World and more…

A hugely charming love letter to pop’s oddest couple, The Sparks Brothers is locked in a tight race with Summer of Soul to become this year’s most beloved music documentary. Edgar Wright’s richly layered portrait of LA’s most enduring art-rock misfits, Ron and Russell Mael, has snowballed into a must-see sensation since it world premiered to rapturous reviews at the Sundance film festival in January. Charting the fraternal duo’s five-decade journey through glam, disco, synth-pop, orchestral opera, avant-garde cabaret and beyond, Wright’s first ever documentary is heart-warming, playful and hilarious.

Arriving on British screens this week, The Sparks Brothers is an inspired career swerve by a director best known for genre-spoofing action comedies like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World and Baby Driver. Mischievous and affectionate in tone, this richly detailed tribute to stubborn self-belief and wild creative ambition is more of an evangelical passion project than standard rock documentary. Indeed, Wright has spent so much of this year on promotional duties with Ron and Russell, he has virtually turned into the third member of Sparks.

“Ha! I’d need to lose some weight before I can be one of the Mael brothers,” Wright tells Tripwire. “They’ve been red carpet ready for, like, 40 years. Ha! They really keep themselves in shape, it’s extraordinary.”

Although the 47-year-old Wright grew up loving classic Sparks songs like This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us, Beat The Clock and The Number One Song in Heaven, he acknowledges that the band’s arch lyrics and sharp-angled melodies are not for everybody. Given the band’s wildly eclectic 25-album catalogue, and disjointed history of sporadic chart success scattered across different countries at various stages of their career, he knew The Sparks Brothers would need to have broad appeal to hardcore fans and non-fans alike.

“I knew that in making the film, it had to be as much an introduction as it was a celebration,” Wright nods. “And that was even true for the people who financed the film, MRC. It’s not like any of them knew who Sparks were. So that line on the poster – your favourite band’s favourite band – that was my pitch to them. I wanted to make a documentary about this band who are possibly the most influential band that you might not have heard of.”

To reinforce his thesis that the Maels have been hugely inspirational both inside and outside music, Wright crams The Sparks Brothers with glowing testimony from dozens of famous fans and friends including ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones, Jonathan Ross, Beck, Bjork, Mike Myers, Giorgio Moroder, Pamela Des Barres and Neil Gaiman, plus members of New Order, Duran Duran and more.

“What’s amazing to me is the diversity of artists,” Wright says. “That’s what I wanted to show, that their footprint is enormous – from members of the Sex Pistols and Joy Division to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Haircut 100, Squeeze, Depeche Mode and Erasure. To have that wide range of acts was the important thing. Ron and Russell were quite taken aback by that.”

Inevitably, a few big-named stars rebuffed Wright’s interview requests. “Some people made positive noises, like Paul McCartney or Brian May or Elton John, but actually getting them to sit down in the studio was a different story,” he nods.

In truth, the film’s only glaring absence is Morrissey, a famously devout Sparks fan who invited the Maels to play his Meltdown festival line-up on London’s Southbank in 2004. The former Smiths singer did send Wright a “typically enigmatic response”, wishing him well with the documentary, but declined an interview. Given Morrissey’s thorny reputation in recent years, this omission was probably for the best. “It was fine to not have him,” Wright says with a diplomatic grin, “let’s say that much.”

Unlike most bands, age has not mellowed Sparks but made them even more deliciously weird. Now both in their seventies, but still looking freakishly dapper and eerily youthful, Ron and Russell continue to make innovative, experimental, adventurous music. Shrouded in self-created mystique and surreal humour, they are arguably their own greatest creations, a living artwork. Crucially, Wright says, the Maels are still widely regarded as creatively engaged artists rather than a “legacy band like the Rolling Stones, who have been doing a greatest hits tour since 1981”.

In recent years, Sparks have enjoyed one of their most fruitful creative and commercial comebacks. Following their supergroup collaboration with Franz Ferdinand in 2015, FFS, they scored heir first two UK Top Ten albums in more than 40 years. This summer, they attended the Cannes film festival with the world premiere of their first fully realised big-screen collaboration, Annette, a macabre musical fable starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. It won Leos Carax the festival’s Best Director prize.

“All these things don’t fit into the box of what a traditional career trajectory is,” Wright argues. “OK, Sparks never got as big as Queen in the 1970s, but they have this self-belief which has kept them going so long, through long periods of indifference. Not that they could have imagined they were going to have a year like this, where there is this career documentary and they also have the opening film at the Cannes film festival, ha! And it wins Best Director, and Leos Carax isn’t there so they accept the award on his behalf! I was watching that and thinking: this is like a fucking fairy tale come true!”

Wright’s common ground with Sparks is as much cinematic as musical. Indeed, he was delighted to discover both he and Russell made similar student shorts at film school, each spoofing the French New Wave. Long before Annette, the Maels racked up numerous ill-fated film projects, including a mid-1970s satire called Confusion with French comedy legend Jacques Tati. In the early 1990s, they collaborated with Tim Burton on a musical adaptation of Kazuya Kudo’s manga comic Mai, The Psychic Girl, but that also fell apart. Their 2009 concept album The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman further confirmed their arty cinematic tastes.

“Once you know about their love for cinema you see it running through all the albums,” Wright nods. “It’s not just that the music is very cinematic and conjurs up a lot of images, the stagecraft is also very visual. You can see that Ron did graphic design and Russell did film at UCLA. The album covers are all like stills from a films that don’t exist. The Jacques Tati one is the craziest one for me, you see photos of them together and you think: can you imagine that film? I would love to have seen that film.”

As well as covering Sparks during their sporadic periods of chart-topping glory, Wright’s film also delights in their wrong turns, misfires and mistakes. Ambitious failure is always more interesting than boring success. “I wanted to diligently cover every album,” he says. “The flops are as important as the hits, because sometimes the misses are the ones that go on to be the most influential.”

In that sense, Wright’s hyperkinetic 2010 comic-book adaptation Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is arguably his equivalent of an underrated Sparks album. Despite bombing at the box office, it has since become a much-loved cult classic.

“It cracked the Billboard Top 100 a couple of weeks ago!” Wright says with an incredulous grin. “Brie Larson’s single got a re-release as part of the expanded edition and got into the charts, ha! But too much weight is put in the first three days of a movie at the box office. It’s not a horse race. All of our favourite movies – be that Blade Runner or Raising Arizona or The Thing, you could count them off endlessly – these things shouldn’t be judged by the first three days. Reporting box office scores like football results is not what cinema is about, and it’s the same for albums, It doesn’t matter how something did in the charts at the time, it’s about how it’s appreciated now.”

After The Sparks Brothers, Wright has multiple other projects at various stages of development, including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s offbeat 2013 children’s book Fortunately, The Milk and a sequel to his own hugely successful 2017 comedy thriller Baby Driver. He confirms that both remain possible, but cautions that both were announced a little prematurely. “Then the pandemic happened and everybody’s plans went to shit, ha!”

A script for Baby Driver 2 is actually complete, but its future prospects are far from certain. “Obviously there are sequels like Mad Max: Fury Road, and you can see why they made that movie,” Wright argues. “But the idea of doing something that’s exactly the same doesn’t appeal. The Sparks film shows how difficult it is to get films to exist, so sometimes when something doesn’t come together in an efficient time schedule that’s because any film getting made is a miracle. Ron and Russell’s projects have proved that.”

But of course, miracles can happen sometimes. Amazingly, The Sparks Brothers is not Wright’s only film release this year. Set for world premiere in September is his Last Night in Soho, a mind-bending retro-noir thriller set in 1960s London starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, Terence Stamp and the late Diana Rigg.

“It has very little overlap with Sparks,” Wright laughs. “So for my mental health, promoting two films in one year, that’s probably a good thing. I haven’t quite shifted gear to start talking about Last Night in Soho, but I’m excited for people to see it. It’s very music heavy as well.”

Wright co-wrote Last Night in Soho with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, whose credits include the gothic TV series Penny Dreadful and the Sam Mendes-directed wartime drama 1917. Stepping outside his usual comfort zone of action comedy and genre parody, he promises this dark trip into the Twilight Zone will be unlike any of his previous films.

“You have to keep challenging yourself,” Wright says. “So in the same year I get to do my first ever documentary and also my first every serious movie, in the sense that is not a comedy. To go back to Sparks, they are always trying to do things they haven’t done before, that’s definitely something to take away from the film. If you have the opportunity, then whatever project ticks off something you’ve never done before, that’s always a good thing.”

The Sparks Brothers is out in cinemas now and Last Night In Soho comes out later this year

Here’s the trailer for The Sparks Brothers