Time seems to fall apart in Edgar Wright’s trip back to the 1960s of a neon-lit London. The director’s follow up to Baby Driver had been gestating for a decade but perhaps could not have been made without the techniques evolved with Paul Machliss, ACE, to time music with movement. “This is a psychological thriller and something neither of us had attempted to such a degree before,” says Machliss, who first worked with Wright on British sitcom Spaced and went on to cut The World’s End and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

“The challenge was how to convey that tension and ambiguity to an audience. In doing so we took the technical concepts we learned on Baby Driver and advanced those for this story.” Almost all of the sequences on Baby Driver required a level of musical and editorial choreography in which the edit would affect the shot as much as the shots would affect the edit.

This time around Machliss became the fulcrum of music, picture and the lighting. Co-written (with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) and co-produced
by Wright and funded by Working Title and Film4 Productions, the Focus Features and Universal release delights in evoking London in the swinging ‘60s. Alongside the lead actors, Wright cast British ‘60s acting legends Rita Tushingham, Terence Stamp, Margaret Nolan and Diana Rigg (This is Nolan and Rigg’s last film. Rigg passed away in September 2020). Machliss says the film deliberately echoes films such as Roman Polanski’s 1965 thriller Repulsion about a young woman in London experiencing vivid hallucinations and nightmares as she comes into contact with men and their desires.

Soho is set in the present day, following Thomasin McKenzie as fashion student Eloise, who arrives in London from the country. She soon comes to idolize Sandie, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, a singer from the 1960s whose story begins to permeate Eloise’s dreams and reality. The film has a deliberately more measured start than Baby Driver which kicked into action during the credits to ‘Bellbottoms’ by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

“Soho starts very gently by comparison. You might initially be lulled into wondering whether this is an Edgar Wright film,” Machliss says. The slower start is deliberate. Once Eloise takes lodging in the attic of an old Georgian building in Goodge Place, Soho, her world changes dramatically along with the tilt of the film. The audience first notices this as Eloise dreams (or appears to). Machliss explains, “Her bedroom is next door to a French restaurant and on the wall outside there are neon lights flickering in a sequence of red, white and blue. In the evening these lights cast a shadow into her bedroom. It’s one of those subtle things that might take a few viewings to appreciate but you find the neon lights are in rhythmic sync with whatever track she listening to on her Dansette record player. Whether slightly faster or slightly slower the red, white and blue light is magically in sync with the track.”

Eloise never acknowledges this but the audience might subliminally notice that the lights go from red, white, blue to red, white, blue, red, red, red, red, red. When that happens Eloise magically transitions into the past. “Every time we do it in slightly different way,” Machliss explains. “The first time it’s a very dramatic transition from the present day as she nods off to sleep and wakes up in the ‘60s.

As we get into the story the transitions become even more abrupt and severe. Her first few visits to the past are really happy ones but as the story gets darker she realizes she doesn’t want to will herself into the past but the past is going to take her back whether she likes it or not. She starts getting more paranoid as elements of the past start to appear in her present.”

Like Baby Driver, Wright had made certain songs integral tohis script. Taylor-Joy’s eerie rendition of Petula Clark’s sprightly 1964 “Downtown” being one of them. Music editor Bradley Farmer prepared a beat sheet for the lighting cues by breaking down each song into lyrics, verses and chorus. “Using this we could work out what had to happen where,” Machliss says. “For example, a transition needs to happen by the end of the first chorus but by the drum break we need to be at this point. A bit like in Baby Driver we’re trying to line up bits of song to the music.”

Machliss next made a sequence on the Avid consisting of full-screen images of red, white and blue colors alternating with black and with burned-in timecode which corresponded to the timecode on the music track. “This emulated the order of colors on the flashing neon sign from the restaurant. I could export that sequence from the Avid as an XML file that could be imported into the lighting panel’s operating system.”

On-set playback operator Pete Blaxill would play the music for the actors to help cue them with their positions or choreography while simultaneously sending the timecode to the lighting desk. “When we cued the track the lighting desk would know exactly where we were in the song. For example, my programming on the Avid for the lighting to go red, red, red, red created a timecode cue point that came out of Pete’s Pro Tools and triggered the lighting panels to flash the right colors at the right point.

“As on Baby Driver, Edgar was able to say something like, ‘Give us four pips into the third line of the second verse,’ which iswhen we are going to pick up  the shot.” That’s technical enough but then there are the increasingly dreamlike-turning-nightmarish moments of these sequences that Wright wanted to record at 32fps. “Once again we got our fantastic sound team to help us out,” Machliss says. “We prepped for the lighting and soundtrack to be locked in at exactly 1/3 faster speed. What’s more, we pitch-corrected the audio for those scenes so the tempo would be faster but the song would still be in the same key – which was beneficial for the actors.”

He continues, “The wonderful thing is when you screened the footage shot at 32fps back at 24 fps and the music (now playing in real-time) ran completely in sync with the lighting but all the action had a wonderful dreamy feel to it. It also intercut perfectly so you cut from a shot filmed at 24fps to one at 32fps and the action and lighting remained perfectly in sync across the cut.” Yet another wrinkle in this set up was that some shots were filmed using a motioncontrol rig. “When I realized that the computer running the motion-control camera could be triggered by an external timecode cue, that’s exactly what we did. Pete Blaxill rigged up another timecode feed from his Pro Tools to the motion-control camera — so now the Pro Tools was responsible for music playback, triggering the lighting cues and starting the camera. All the hardware was now working in harmony with each other and I got goosebumps watching it all come to life!”

The motion-control shots were used to show Eloise and her doppelgänger apparently occupying the same space, even though
one is a reflection in a mirror. Machliss also enjoyed playing with the initial sound design for a script that required Eloise to think she is in the present day when in fact it is the past that has permeated her reality.

“We were meant to be hearing voices from the past when Eloise is in bed and hears these key phrases repeating. There was nothing in the script about how we achieve this so I went ahead and used sound tools on the Avid to come up with something frightening and unsettling.”

Machliss recalls his childhood playing with his father’s (a radio presenter) quarter-inch open-reel tape machine. “I watched him use a razor blade to splice and I learned how to take tape and put it back to front to play the sound backwards and also how to create tape loops. The tech may be archaic but all the ideas are still valid. I began just applying those ideas to Soho to mess with sound on the Avid.”

He played with filter sweeps and looping phrases, playing the audio clip backwards, adding some echo, playing it forwards. Supervising sound editor/designer and rerecording mixer Julian Slater (Baby Driver) ended up using some of the processed audio as the basis for his sound design.

“All these ideas are tried-and-tested ideas and done to death in the ‘70s but what is wonderful about Edgar is that he will allow you the time to experiment to create something unique,” Machliss says. “Instead of using off-the-peg plug-ins we’re working out how to get some nice old crunchy analog sound more appropriate to the period and atmosphere of our story.”

Last Night in Soho had its original release delayed when COVID shut the production down in March 2020. With additional photography only able to resume under COVID conditions in July, the period was a rare opportunity for the filmmakers to take stock of the cut.

“We were lucky in that the forced reprieve enabled Edgar and Krysty to make further improvements to the script and Edgar and I also had many discussions about what could be improved editorially. The team came up with new ideas for material we would ultimately shoot in July as well as how we could repurpose some of the material already shot. Revisiting the edit after the initial four-month hiatus caused us to re-evaluate the film in a way we would not have done had world events been different and we’d stuck to our original delivery schedule.” He continues, “At the beginning the story is flowing and gentle but as things get much more psychological and demented over the course of the film we take all the elements at our disposal to create
a sensory overload.

“When making a film of this nature you’re always aware that the aim is to induce an element of fear in the audience and that can be a tricky thing to get right,” he adds. “Our aim was to take the audience on Eloise’s journey and have them experience the intensity of her visions and her enveloping sense of paranoia and despair.

“Edgar’s creative approach is unlike any other director I’ve worked with. The finished film is a testament to his artistic vision and I’m incredibly proud of the end result.