Jason Schwartzman started his film career with Rushmore and since then he’s played a variety of roles, from Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette to Ash the fox in Fantastic Mr. Fox. In his latest film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, he plays Gideon Graves, an ex-boyfriend who battles with Michael Cera’s Scott Pilgrim to prevent him from winning the girl of his dreams. Schwartzman was recently in London to talk about the film with his co-stars Cera and Brandon Routh, and he spoke about making people happy, getting power and working with director Edgar Wright.

Were you familiar with the books, and did that make you protective of the characters as they were in the books? And in preparation for the film did you play any video games?
Jason Schwartzman (JS): I’m probably the worst person to start with, because my character really doesn’t show up until much later in the comics. I’ve never been a part of anything before that has a following, where people know the characters and are expecting things. I’ve only worked on movies before where an audience is seeing the characters for the first time and learning about them for the first time, so that was scary for me personally.

I’m a people pleaser, in case you guys didn’t know. It’s on my website. I wanted to make people happy and do a good job, but there was a lot of pressure to get Gideon Graves just right, but to go back to Edgar Wright you just had to follow him. He’s our leader and I knew he was going to make a great movie, one that I would be excited about watching and hopefully satisfied all the time he’d spent with the characters. But everything I needed for Gideon was in the script really, it was all there.

Were video games part of the preparation at all?
JS: Personally I’m not a giant video game player. I listened to this book on tape by Robert Greene called The 48 Laws of Power, it was all about how to get power. That was my stimulus preparation.

How was it seeing the finished film, watching it without your character appearing for much of it?
JS: For like an hour and five minutes it’s an incredibly enjoyable experience for me, and then it really becomes much more sweaty. But it’s really fun for me to watch. Also, my first reaction when I was watching it – because I was so happy for Michael and Edgar, because of all the work and the hours that had gone into it. For Edgar it had been so many years, like six or seven years in the process of writing, and Michael worked so many consecutive days on set, almost double an average date movie shoot, this was double a big movie shoot. He worked every day.

I remember I got to Toronto towards the end and just the amount of energy and focus Michael still had was amazing, so when I was watching it I could see all the work that went into it. It was really fun. Their performances was all so great, and the other great thing was seeing how all the effects kind of came about because it wasn’t like we were shooting this in front of a green screen, most of it was done in camera and a lot of the sets were actually built. And seeing it look real was awesome, seeing the wires airbrushed out was amazing.

What’s that on your cheek?
JS: It says ‘Michael Cera’ and there’s a kiss next to it. We had a fun night, and what’s on my cheek is really a symbol of the Scott Pilgrim experience. It’s Michael’s and my last day of press together, so this is a symbol of the times that we’ve had. This is like the smoke from the birthday candle that just got blown it.

Was there much room for improvisation?
JS: Totally. Edgar was so open to everything in our rehearsal period and that was great. He had been writing it for so long that you could easily imagine a scenario where he was tied to one thing and not willing to bend. But if a moment happened, if someone said the wrong line but it could work he would laugh and he would write it in. So many things came about in rehearsal that ended up in the movie. Even off set, to the last minute, I found Edgar to be quite open to trying something. I’ve never worked on a movie of this scale, and what was amazing to me was how it didn’t feel any different. Like Edgar kept it feeling intimate to me.

That’s one thing that’s just great about the movie. A lot of movies feel like a lot of people made them, maybe not a director but tons of others. But I feel like when you see this movie this is like all of Edgar’s other movies, even though it’s bigger, it’s still crafted by hand by him. Everything is approved. On set he’s so open and stuff, but the real thing is that the movie has such a tempo to it, it’s as if it’s to a metronome. Why mess with it if it seems to have a life of its own? When you’re on set the lines come out in a certain way, naturally, because it’s just written like it. It has a rhythm.