by James Mottram
As the title suggests, it’s set in London’s once-notorious seedy square mile, where coppers, crooks, showgirls, and singers rubbed shoulders. Or at least, that’s what modern-day student – and Sixties obsessive – Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) dreamily fantasises about when she comes to London to pursue a course in fashion.
Wright, 47, didn’t grow up in the Sixties, but spent his youth pouring over his mother and father’s slim record collection. “My parents would work, so, left in the house on my own, I would tend to obsess over these records. Especially, in a pre-internet age, just looking through the sleeves and the photos… reading all the fine print. You just start to obsess in a way that is so granular, given that this is all you have to go on. And your parents’ own stories of the time don’t necessarily make things any clearer.”
Eloise, who loves her late mother’s old vinyl records of artists like Petula Clark, is clearly a surrogate for Wright. “There are lots of autobiographical elements in it, even if it’s not [all] specifically me,” he admits. His sister-in-law, for example, came from Cornwall to study fashion. His co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (the Oscar-nominated scribe of 1917) used to work in The Toucan, the famous Irish pub just off Soho Square, where Eloise bags a job. And both his mother and Wilson-Cairns’ grandmother “had the same story of coming to London, not being able to afford anything and just copying the designs from fancy clothes shops.”
Yet, Last Night in Soho is not meant as a pleasant nostalgia-trip down memory lane. Every night, when Eloise goes to sleep in her room rented from her ageing landlady (Diana Rigg), she dreams herself into a vibrant version of the Sixties, but only ever as an observer, unable to interact. “It’s my nightmare of the idea of time travel,” says Wright. “What if you could go back but you couldn’t do anything? Marty McFly [in Back to the Future] can go back to the Fifties and change the outcome of the Eighties, but Eloise can’t do anything.”
What she does do is become obsessed with Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a confident chanteuse first seen in hip venue, the Café de Paris. Soon, she is preyed upon by Jack (Matt Smith), a sleazy would-be manager who promises her the world, but ultimately exploits hers – much to the helpless Eloise’s horror. “If there is any tragedy to him, [it’s that] he doesn’t have the talent to take Sandie where she needs to go,” says Wright. “Somebody clearly talented in his hands, but he has no other ideas, other than the quickest shortcuts to making a lot of cash.”
Although Eloise’s first experience of Sixties London sees her come across a glitzy cinema marquee advertising James Bond movie Thunderball, the film dives into the less glamorous side of the entertainment business. Reflecting on toxic masculinity and the male gaze, it may be set in 1964, but according to Taylor-Joy, the resonance to contemporary times is there for all to see. “I think any woman will tell you… that’s just what it is at this current moment in time.”
As Wright adds, “Even just in Soho itself, there are several rungs to the showbiz ladder. And the further down you go, the darker it becomes in a way. That’s something you could say about contemporary Soho. The later in the night it gets, the more chance there is for a wrong left turn. You might be in the fanciest club, but not all of these people are who they say they are.”
Taylor-Joy, who started shooting Last Night in Soho directly after playing Jane Austen’s spirited heroine in Emma, was immediately sucked into Wright’s intoxicating vision of the past. The script itself came with a complete playlist of all the tunes that would appear in the film. “Personally, I had never read a script before that already had the music in it. And it was such a wonderful experience to read a script like that. It gives you such an interesting insight into the tone of the scenes.”
For the actress, it was heavenly. “I was lucky enough that the first music that I ever fell in love with – and still probably the era that I most listen to – is the Sixties,” says Taylor-Joy. “And for Sandie, I just went back to all of the music I listened to [from that era], which was wonderful.” Wright also gave her a “dossier” of films to watch and books to read, including Shawn Levy’s Ready, Steady, Go! Swinging London and the Invention of Cool, “which was really helpful [in]…encapsulating London in that time period,” she says.
Wright also brought in some remarkable Sixties icons to help out – like A Taste of Honey star Rita Tushingham, who plays Eloise’s grandmother, and Terence Stamp, who features as a sleazy Soho denizen. “Terence Stamp, when I first met him, said, ‘My nieces love Baby Driver and they said I have to do your movie’. And then, when he read the script, he left me a note that said, ‘It reminded me of taking Peyote!’ It’s probably something you could put on the poster!”
The director even got Matt Smith to watch a young Stamp in Ken Loach’s movie Poor Cow. Not unlike Jack Nicholson when he was prepping The Shining, repeating ‘I’m a mad axeman’ over and over, “Matt Smith before takes would repeat one of Terence Stamp’s lines from Poor Cow. And it would be, ‘You can eat your dinner off my back! You can eat your dinner off my back! You can eat your dinner off my back!’ And it became this weird mantra of him saying that line to get in the zone. Never in front of Terence, though!”
The most poignant aspect for Wright was working with Diana Rigg, in what turned out to be her swansong (she died last year after filming wrapped). “I got to take Diana Rigg onto the set of the Café de Paris because we built this Sixties recreation of it. And when I mentioned the set, she said, ‘Oh, I went to see Shirley Bassey’s first London gig at the Café de Paris on my 18th birthday!’” Her co-stars were left hugely impressed. “She was every bit as feisty and watchable [as you might imagine],” says Taylor-Joy. “Just brilliant.”
Performing her own singing on set, Taylor-Joy crafted Sandie with her usual inside-out approach, looking at the way she holds herself when she enters a room. “Sandie’s energy just goes straight out. Immediately. She’s not trying to make herself small in any way. And I think as women, we’re trained to make ourselves small. So, it was really interesting to make myself as big as I could be.” It’s something that immediately chimed with the actress. “I really admire the way she takes up space throughout the film, really, even as – without any spoilers – things unravel a bit.”
As the film unfolds, so horror fan Wright delves further into the tropes of the genre, as Eloise’s obsession with Sandie becomes all-encompassing. “Sandie is everything that she is not,” he says. “And then she starts to try and be that confident, look like her, wear the same clothes.” The director cunningly plays with mirror images throughout, as McKenzie’s Eloise becomes a reflection, quite literally, of Taylor-Joy’s Sandie. “Because they had all that mirror choreography to do… that kind of sisterly bond was created. They became incredibly close.”
Making the film was the perfect way for Wright to sift through his own obsession with Soho, where the British film industry also has its heart. “I think a big part of it is that there are people who walk around the city without ever thinking about the past, or even what’s really going on behind closed doors. And there are those that do – and I’m one of those people who thinks about it a lot. It’s that thing where the shadows of the past start to weigh heavy on you, even if you weren’t there.”
Watch Last Night in Soho and it might the closest you get to Swinging London.
Last Night in Soho is in cinemas from November 18, 2021
