Auteur Theory

An auteur / artist I believe has a distinctive style and approach throughout his films would be Edgar Wright, he achieves an auteur approach through his use of quick pans and jump cuts and use of foley. What makes Edgar Wright an auteur is his significant reuse of certain shots and actors which makes his work recognisable from the offset. Over the course of his films he shows many techniques which follow across his work to make it his own, despite the genre of the film his style remains noticeable and recognisable from the offset.

One movie of his I want to focus on is “Shaun Of The Dead”, in the opening scene we are opened with Shaun is going to work, we get quick pans of him getting changed, walking down the stairs and then making toast. The use of quick whip pans makes his ‘dull’ lifestyle and routine everyday more up pace and exciting, he typically uses these quick whip pans in a montage-like manner to show a passage of time and how he focuses on the intricate details of him making the toast, buttering it etc.

Wright repeats this same technique of quick whip pans in the beginning of “Baby Driver” we are greeted with our first character played by Ansel Elgort, and then we switch to a quick close up each of our other characters who greet him in the car, they then are about to rob a bank so they all cover up their faces these quick fast intense shots give us a feel as an audience to what these characters are like and what they do for work. Wright typically uses a lot of zoom technique shots for dramatic effect which he mostly uses for comedic effect, especially in “Scott Pilgrim V.S The World’ when Scott is being hurt or when someone says something that he facially reacts to. The zoom ins keeps consistency in his editing and he adapts this to whatever film of his he is using it despite genre.

Wright’s work tends to be visually pleasing rather than as focused on the storyline, however “Shaun Of The Dead” goes deeper into that, for example : in the scene with the use of the red pen exploding in his pocket to foreshadow as ‘blood’ and death to come with the zombies, the colours are made to pop out due to colour correction, he uses colour correction a lot to enhance small aspects such as eye colour or clothing to draw the viewers eyes to the visuals. Wright also as an auteur tends to reuse scenes again / the same or similar actors on his movies for example ; Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are in all the ‘cornetto trilogy’ movies, and in Worlds End, Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead both times Simon Pegg jumps a fence at some point in the movie for one reason or another and doesn't always get over but this is a repeated technique Wright slyly adds in