While doing Ringo Starr in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story may have made Jason Schwartzman’s walk through Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World a breeze even if he’s not making music, going at it with periodically digitalized co-star Michael Cera was something else entirely. The opportunity to get a little deeper into these puzzling matters materialized when the double trouble screen adversaries stopped by to clear up matters, if not cloud them further.
Q: How did you go about getting into these strange characters?
JASON SCHWARTZMAN: I did buy The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of War, and I would listen to those every morning on tape; book on tape.
MICHAEL CERA: I have that on tape too, The Art of War.
JS: It’s great, it’s great. It’s a classic. But The 48 Laws of Power is an incredible book. I’m on law 15; that’s all I was able to cram in. I could only get 15 chapters of laws and power into my guy. But I would have all these crazy ideas, and Edgar listened to all of them—but dismissed the ones that were improper!
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Q: Michael, you were overheard saying at Sundance about this movie, that “I’m going to do as little as I can.”
MC: And I think I’ve stayed true to that!
Q: Well, what first lured you into the movie?
MC: I can’t remember!
Q: But there’s a lot of stuff that looks like you’re really into it.
MC: Yeah. I guess the only things we don’t do are like falling from the scaffolding and going through walls and stuff. But I didn’t try to go against the energy in the books.
JS: Yeah.
Q: Neither of you guys have a history as action heroes, so how did you pull this off?
JS: You’ve never seen any of my other characters without their shirt on.
MC: Or any of my home videos!
JS: It entailed conditioning training with trainers who were cruel. We would do medicine ball work, we would run on treadmills and we would do leap frogs and all kinds of stuff. Then we would have lunch, and each one of us afterwards would break off and learn their particular skill. I would not say that I’m a swordsman, but I would say that we all got to a place where we were able to learn the choreography and feel like it was OK. But it was definitely hard. The team that was around us was Jackie Chan and Jet Li’s team combined. So we had a lot of amazing, beautiful, incredible choreographers really being taskmasters on us. And it was just incredible to fail for them! Wasn’t it wonderful?
MC: Hard but wonderful, yeah. So much nicer to fail for them than anyone else I’ve failed for.
Q: Jason, you’ve got this musical background, but you’re playing one of the few characters who’s not playing an instrument. Is that weird?
JS: No, it’s fun, it’s fun. I’m happy. They all look like they’re playing instruments, and I’m happy to watch. I get to sword fight. We got to do so much fun stuff in this movie. Like I was hanging upside down from a harness, and I looked around at everyone’s feet, because that’s all I could see. And I thought, “Man, if some of my friends in high school could see me now.” You know, especially the ones that were mean to me. Those weren’t my friends. They’re just some of those people in high school, and if they could see me now.
