Months of training and Jackie Chan’s stunt team were required to turn Michael Cera into a cinema version of comic book hero Scott Pilgrim. Steve Pratt talks to him and director Edgar Wright.

IS it a film? Is it a video game? Is it a comic strip animation? Or perhaps a musical? The answer is that the cool new comic book adaptation Scott Pilgrim Vs The World can take any label you care to pin on it. Edgar Wright’s film of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s comic emerges as one of the most original, most entertaining movies of the year so far.

“The challenges of bringing it to the screen were the same things that attracted me to the book,” explains director and co-writer Wright, whose directed Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz before it.

“The books are an amazing mix of comedy, romance and action. Everything I found interesting about the book and why it’s fresh and unique was irresistible to adapt.

“It really wasn’t like other comics, it’s like a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t a superhero story or a more generic sci-fi tale. It was like taking the trials of young love and presenting them as a visual metaphor.

“The inspiration for the book was the idea that when you date someone new you demonise their exes. The idea just snowballed from there. I loved that it wasn’t just a comedy or an action film but deep down like a date movie, a story about young love and rites of passage but with something a little bit different.”

The plot revolves around twentysomething Scott Pilgrim who must defeat the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend.

Anna Kendrick, best supporting actress Oscar nominated for the George Clooney movie Up In The Air, plays Scott’s sister Stacey and wasn’t worried about readers of the comic being too attached to the character. “But I definitely read the script and was wondering how the hell anyone was going to pull this off,” she says.

She knew everything would be okay after seeing a test scene of one of the fight sequences. That test was part of Wright’s meticulous pre-planning.

He wanted to arrive on the set every day knowing exactly what he wanted to do. “So I had it plotted out completely before we started filming,” he says.

“It was not something I could put together in three months, we had pretty much a good year’s worth of prep before we even started shooting.

“There was no easy scene to do because there was always some element of action or music, lighting or camera effect, always something interesting going on. I hope that we made the set fun, or at least give people the kind of forum to have fun with it.”

The seven fights were handled by stunt coordinator Brad Allan and fight co-ordinator Peng Zhang, from Jackie Chan’s team. “I’m a huge Jackie Chan fan and that was a real thrill.

Basically, they had acrobats and martial artists from all over the world. From Bejing, Australia, the States and Toronto, where we were filming,”

says Wright. “It was really inspiring to have those people around with two or three different people concentrating on special skills. They were really great with the actors too because most of them hadn’t done any fighting before.”

Music is one of they key elements in the film – Scott plays in a band called Sex Bob-Omb – with Wright working on the soundtrack for two years with Nigel Godrich, who’s produced the likes of Radiohead, Paul McCartney and Beck (one of the movie songwriters). “We had this idea that each of the fictional bands in the film should have a different artist doing them. So it was like casting the actors – who’s going to play this band, who’s going to play that band? – and cherrypicking out of a fantastic list of bands to do it.”

The actors had to try to reader’ expectations.

Mary Elizbath Winstead, who plays Pilgrim’s love interest Ramona, found it daunting playing someone that fans thought no real people could live up to.

“I just had to hope I could bring enough to it to make it work and bring what I thought about Ramona to the screen, and hopefully it would make sense to as many people as possible. I had to put having to please the fans out of my mind because I knew I wasn’t going to please everybody.

I just tried to focus on the human aspects of her.”

Fight training was part and parcel of the gig for the actors. Satya Bhabha, who plays first evil exe Matthew Patel, points to the kung fu fight he and Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim have – they did 80-85 per cent of it, having trained for months before filming began.

“We were working with Jackie Chan’s stunt team so if anyone is going to put you through your paces, it’s them. It was a lot of a fun, a lot of training,” says the New York-based British actor.

Cera. from TV’s Arrested Development and the movies Juno and Superbad, started his training in LA, followed by two months in Toronto before filming.

“We put ourselves through this terrible thing – waking up early and exercising. It was really great to be around this team of people that you never really expected to be around, and watch them work, so disciplined and focused and devoted”.

Jason Schwartzman plays Gideon Gordon Graves, perhaps the most evil of all the evil exes.

“We trained and I personally I also had to gain some rudimentary swordfighting experience. That was incredible. We each had our own personal trainer who was training the evil exes for whatever their style of fighting would be. We spent hours with them.”

Cera feels the scene with Bhabha stands out “because we’d been working on it for a while and involved a lot of hand-to-hand combat. And Jason’s fight was very challenging with the swords – a whole different way of fighting and very difficult”.

■ Scott Pilgrim Vs The World (12A) is out now.