During a set report via Devin Faraci of Chud.com - Faraci got a chance to visit a filming location in Toronto, Canada and interview some of the people on set - including Director Edgar Wright - who showed him the entire unfinished movie on his laptop on high speed fast forward in between shooting the final fight scene of the film.
"Edgar's a maniac, he's the hardest working guy I've ever met," said director Edgar Wright's co-writer, Michael Bacall. "We started working on the first draft just before he went into pre-production on Hot Fuzz years ago."
Because the script and movie were being made when the book was only half complete as a whole story , constant communication between Wright, Bacall and the book's writer Bryan Lee O'Malley had to be made so that they had an idea of what the characters' story arcs would be and even what they would look like.
"We've been extremely faithful to the first volume because that's the setup, it's really kind of a perfect first act," said Bacal, "As we went, Bryan was writing the other volumes. He had written up sketches and character profiles for all of the evil exes up through the seventh so we had that to work with, and we had a basic outline of where he wanted the whole story to go. As we worked on consecutive drafts, every time we got to the point where we might get stuck or we maybe had to turn something in, he would send us the script for the next draft or the galley for the books about to come out and that was very helpful."
Wright chimed in and reaffirmed that O'Malley couldn't care less about deviations from his book and thinks it'll be great that fans will get a different movie ending than the book's ending when Volume 6 comes out right around the release date of the film this August.
"The funniest thing that Bryan has said in a couple of interviews is that the person who cares least about the changes in stuff is Bryan Lee O'Malley," said Wright. "What's been really great about him is that not only has he been heavily involved right from the first draft but what's interesting is he really understands what an adaptation means in terms of what we're trying to do. We are putting all six books into one film in a sense. It's definitely in the spirit of the books."
The cohesiveness between Wright and O'Malley has really been interesting as they've both thrown ideas between each other to the extent that even O'Malley has borrowed ideas from the script to use in his upcoming books.
"There's a couple ideas in Book 4 and 5 that are from our script, only two lines but they're ones that we'd written and then he (O'Malley) said, "Oh, can I have that?" In that respect, he's been a great collaborator," said Wright.
For the full interview and set report visit www.chud.com and check up on Devin Faraci's long length report for interviews with other people on the movie. This will not be your average CBM folks - bad guys will be punched and turned into coins. Like the poster says - this should be epic.