On Playing a Bad Guy:
Jason Schwartzman: "It was really fun. It was really scary because when I showed up I guess they shot the Katayanagi twins after I shot my big sword-fighting scene. But, for the most part they had shot all the exes, I think, in chronological order so I kind of showed up toward the end. It was really scary for me because Edgar [Wright] was showing me a bunch of stuff they had edited together and it was like, 'Look at this!' and it was all so great. It was just kind of like a thing I was thinking to myself, 'This is a really great opportunity for me to ruin his movie.'"
"It’s like I’m coming in at the end and what if I f-ck this up? And I didn’t want to be too much. I didn’t want to be cliché, you know? And these things were floating around in my head. So I was just asking so many questions, like, 'What do you want? And where do you want Gideon?' Edgar and Bryan [O'Malley] were so helpful to me, and one thing Bryan said was great was, 'Just remember this whole movie is through Scott Pilgrim’s eyes, so you don’t play Gideon Graves as if this was in the real world. Don’t think like that. Approach it as you play how Scott sees Gideon. Be his idea of the worst nightmare ex-boyfriend.' So that’s really where I was coming from, like who would I hate to meet if my ex-girlfriend – like, 'This is my ex!' I would hate someone saying like, 'Hey!' and being nice, trying to help me, and being really sweet."
"Edgar said he saw Gideon as passive-aggressive. Well to me that’s a tricky thing to play because there are some passive-aggressive people where you can tell they are passive-aggressive instantly, and then there are other passive-aggressive people where you don’t realize it until it's too late. I asked Edgar about that. 'How overt do you want his douchey-ness?' I hate to say it. It was tricky, because it’s not like you're going to meet him and go 'Oh, he’s a great guy.' Obviously you know he’s got to fill this role of the seventh evil ex. 'He’s got to be that, but where do you want it?'"
"He came up with this great thing which was kind of like 10 is evil Satan, 1 is just a great person. You know, a wonderfully sweet guy with really no evil at all, and then we would do different takes of different levels of it just so he had it. Then in the editing room he could kind of put them together and, although I don’t like to watch myself, one thing I can see that Edgar did was take one take where I’m a real cocks--ker a--hole and another where I’m sincerely nice and it makes Gideon seem unstable – which I like."
On Being a Musician in Real Life Who Doesn't Get to Play One in the Film:
Jason Schwartzman: "I’m glad that I wasn’t because it’s very hard, as you’ll find with any musician, to just make them stop playing. Alison Pill was sitting at the drum set for so many hours and I was like, 'That is the exact person who should be behind that drum set for 12 hours.' When I was there I couldn’t, you can’t stop... If I had a guitar in my hand it would be so distracting. Any time there was an instrument around, it’s not like you want to show off, it's fun, you want to get your hands on them. It's fun. It’s hard to be around instruments and not play them."
On Being an Action Star:
Michael Cera: "I didn’t actually dream about it. This was just a weird opportunity that came out of nowhere. It was just perfect timing. I never expected it, but it just came along and felt right."
On His Favorite Evil Ex Fight:
Michael Cera: "I’ve been asked that and I can’t even pick one. They were all fun. I think the first one we shot, if I’m remembering right, was the Chris Evans one. That was really difficult because all of a sudden we were there and it was time to do this fight that we had trained to do. All of a sudden it was go time on set and we are actually going to commit this to film now. I remember that moment right before the first take because you get sort of, 'Okay, now it's time. We are doing that stuff we were training to do.' There is so much adrenaline right before the take. The stuntmen are amazing, right before the take they are getting pumped up and you’re like, 'Oh my god, here we go.' The feeling is insane! That was a fight with like seven guys, seven stuntmen, there’s a big fight. That one, I have just a memory of that being really scary, difficult and really cold too. It was really freezing when we were shooting."
How much is the stunt man and how much is him? "It’s mostly me. The stuff, the obvious stuff, like the scaffolding fall - that I didn’t do. Riley, a 16 year old kid, did it like eight times."
On Taking Scott Pilgrim to Comic Con and Being Among the Fans:
Michael Cera: "Oh, it was great. I didn’t get to do the t-shirts but I did a signing where people come and they waited a long time. You only get a moment with them because they moved it along so quickly so everyone could get through. But they were all really nice."
Jason Schwartzman: "I just went and got a bunch of shirts made and people were like, ‘Can I take your picture?’ I think it’s a different thing for someone like Robert Pattinson because I heard he really gets – people will try to grab him and really try to hold him and rip his clothes. I’ve never experienced anything like that, except at home."
On How Scott Pilgrim Will Play to Non-Comic Book or Non-Video Game Fans:
Michael Cera: "I can’t think of any reason why only comic book fans would appreciate that stuff. I mean it is what it is. I think it's fun, personally."
Jason Schwartzman: "I’ll tell you tomorrow because my mom has never played a video game in her life and she’s coming tonight to see the movie. I’m curious to see it. I’m pretty sure the reaction will be that she will be happy. The best case is that she will be happy, but I think it will be mesmerizing to her. People love to see stuff also that they don’t know anything about, new worlds. I think that people that don’t know a lot about video games will be just like, 'What is that?' I think it will be a sense of wonder or something."
On Using the Graphic Novels as a Resource:
Michael Cera: "Oh yeah, definitely. Just to get a sense of the tone of the humor. The facial expressions and the other characters facial expressions and just the world that’s created. It was so helpful to know what we were going for, to know where the inspiration was coming from."
Asked if he saw himself in the illustrated version of Scott Pilgrim, Michael Cera replied, "Not the first time I read it. The first time I read it I was seeing it for what it was. I wasn’t even aware they were making a movie. I didn’t think of myself in it until Edgar told me he was considering me for it. I was just wondering if I could pull it off or not."
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Scott Pilgrim vs the World hits theaters on August 13, 2010 and is rated PG-13 for stylized violence, sexual content, language and drug references.
