Edgar Wright on why he wasn’t afraid to demystify Sparks, his favorite band

For many Edgar Wright fans, the most striking thing about his films has always been the music. From the zombie fight set to Queens “Don’t Stop Me Now” in Shaun of the Dead to the different fighting bands in Scott Pilgrim vs. the world to the entire music-based premise of Baby driver, Wright’s films are based on pop music as much as they are on pop rhythms.

And he thinks that is how his brain works. “I have a Video in 2015 with Pharrell Williams, and he’s got synesthesia. When he listens to music or writes, he sees colors, ”Wright told Polygon. “That’s when I thought I had the movie version of synesthesia, where listening to songs evokes visual images. That’s the way it is Baby driver originated – I hear songs and think of scenes. “

And yet he has never used the music of any of his all-time favorite bands in a movie because that skill wouldn’t work for them. Sparks, the eclectic and deeply eccentric rock band Wright, portrayed in detail in his first documentary, The spark brothers, is kind of an obsession for Wright, but he says, “They’re not like wallpaper. Sparks requires your undivided attention. “

Sparks has been fighting for mainstream attention since its inception in 1967, and Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael have released 25 studio albums without ever actually breaking through. Wright has thought about this for a long time. “I tried to put a Sparks song in Hot fuzz, “he says.” I wanted to “This city is not big enough for both of us” in the scene where Timothy Dalton and Simon Pegg fight in a miniature village. I mean it makes perfect sense! However, when I put it on, I wasn’t watching the scene, just hearing Sparks. So I thought, ‘Maybe this won’t work.’ “

Instead, he penned a 140-minute love letter about her career, touching all 25 albums, and getting fans from Weird Al Yankovic to Neil Gaiman to praise her and talk about how influential her work was. “The basic structure that I had in my head was like,“ Where are you from, such a unique band? What’s in their DNA that inspired the band? ‘”Says Wright.

“Usually when you create a style you try to tear something down, you fail and you create something new. I wanted to ask: ‘Who are you and what inspired you?’ Their trip became to this boulder that gathers all these other fans who make music and art that are derived from them. If you’ve never heard of Sparks, you’ve probably heard the music of many people in the documentary willing to go on record and say, ‘Sparks inspired me.’ That was the story for me that their footprint in music is so big and bigger than we can possibly understand. As Beck points out at the end of the documentary, there are bands who are inspired by the Sparks-inspired bands who don’t know that ancestry goes back to them. They fathered all of these artists who don’t know who their grandfather is … And they are in some ways too humble to point out. You don’t want to be rude. So I had the feeling that it was my job to show the receipts. “

There’s a fun moment early in Sparks Brothers, where Scottish pilgrim Actor Jason Schwartzman admits he’s not sure if he wants to see the documentary when he’s done because Ron and Russell have been so mysterious over the decades that he’s scared to learn too much about them and find out about the Ruining Sparks experience. Wright loves her deliberate puzzles too, but he was willing to take the risk to make the film and he says the process didn’t break the spell for him.

“In a 50-year career, there is still enough to talk about to give you some kind of magic of how it exactly happens,” he says. “I think that’s one of the reasons people are still fervently discussing bands like Sparks because there is just so much to unzip. There are other bands that are massively successful in their prime, but there really is nothing more to say about The Eagles, is there? ”He laughs as he points out that he still likes the Eagles’ music, he just got that feeling that “there is really nothing else about them. But Sparks asks as many questions as it can answer. “

Part of the documentary consists of fan testimonials from a library of musicians and creators, but it also includes narrative sections that guide viewers through the Sparks story. Wright says he had to start filming before he could figure out how to shape these parts. “Sparks doesn’t have a career with a simple three-act structure,” he says. “Most music documentaries are like Rise, Fall, and Rise. And Sparks paced up and down like an EKG machine all the time.

“Even after doing all of the interviews, me and producer George Hencken took them Hollywood beat sheet and said, ‘If you put the Sparks story into a three-act structure, what would it look like?’ We kind of figured it out. There was an obvious low point in the late 1980s when there wasn’t a new Sparks album and they postponed everything [while working on a Tim Burton film that eventually fizzled]. You learned the lesson not to bet all your chips on one thing. Suddenly six years have passed and they are no longer a known entity in music. The music scene moves very quickly. “

The film also features weird in-between spaces with Russell and Ron Mael themselves delivering fake Sparks factoids face-to-face into the camera or mimicking little metaphors for where their careers were at any given point in history. “I had all of these ideas, but they helped,” says Wright. “Like the FAQ sequence at the beginning, I wrote the questions, but they wrote all the answers and memorized them like actors.”

He says the fake facts segment was inspired by something the Maels did in their own newsletter in the 1970s. “They claimed in a fan newsletter that they were the sons of Doris Day. It was before the internet and people believed it for decades, ”says Wright. “Another was: ‘They used to be hand models.’ So there are all of these like bullshit facts on the go. So I figured, why not just include a bunch of bullshit facts at the end of the documentary? I think you wrote all of that. “

For the factual portions of the documentary, Wright says he spent about nine hours in four sessions interviewing the Maels. “They are very funny,” he says. “You are really accomplished. And they are sincere in what they do. They really believe in the art of writing pop songs. Many other bands that have been around for so long feel it is secondary to trying to captivate an audience with a four minute song. And I’ve always been impressed how Sparks never shrank from it. And then how much effort they put into the visuals and that they can laugh at themselves, all of that made them perfect interview partners and perfect topics. “

Meeting his idols is always a tedious process, but Wright says the Maels were no different from what he expected when he approached. “Getting to know you – I knew before I even started that there was nothing behind the curtain. Ron and Russell stood behind the curtain. The line between them and Sparks is permanently blurred for them too. That’s what they say in the documentation, and I totally believe it. “

And one of the joys of meeting Russell and Ron was sharing his feeling that image and music are connected. “Sparks has always had a cinematic claim that is expressed in music. The songs are often like little operas about the slightest social interaction or observation. They become those little four-minute films. They are gifted in a way because their approach to music is not dissimilar to the way I have made some of my films.

“I’m not saying that I am Jean-Luc Godard. But as Ron says in the documentary, they loved French New Wave films because Jean-Luc Godard could both make films and make comments at the same time. And then Sparks has this nifty talent of making songs that are utterly sincere in their songwriting, songcraft, and emotions, yet are self-reflective. I think it’s one of the things that may have put them off a super mainstream audience because sometimes they’re a band that you have to work on and even decipher what exactly they want to achieve. ”

The spark brothers is currently in theaters.