The day after the San Francisco premier of the last entry in the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy The World's End, which was followed by a brief Q&A session with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright,
Here is Nic's interview below:
I sat down for a round table interview with the trio.
Interviewer: Last night during the brief Q&A, you talked about wanting to show parts of England that weren't London. Then in your movies you have parts of England that aren't London have zombies, they have murderers, they have what we see in this movie.
Edgar Wright: Which is basically saying, “don't go to England.” (Laughs) Richie Curtis' films are a sort of tourist board, kind of like an advert, and ours maybe not so much. Don't stray out of the tourist zone.
Nick Frost: Stay in London, yeah.
Edgar: Stay in Zone 1.
Nick: Stay in Notting Hill.
Edgar: Don't go any further North, East, West, or South.
Simon Pegg: What was your question? (Laughs) The U.K. is seen in this certain light around the world, not least in America, as being some sort of chocolate box, green and pleasant land full of castles and stuff like that. The context, in respect of where we take it whether it be zombies or murderers or aliens, that’s by the by. What we're trying to set in the films is in a real part of England, is something more indicative of the real place.
Nick: Don't go to Northern England, because it’s full of unemployed miners who do strips.
Simon: They have to strip for a living, yeah. Cause you know, we always want to start off from a point of reality, and that's where our roots always are, is reality and then we go off to these places of fantasy and absurdity.
Edgar: But its also amusing to us having grown up in those places, when we watch those Hollywood genre movies, it seems so far flung to us. Even while watching American cop films for Hot Fuzz, it seemed like Sci-Fi to us, because it’s so far removed, especially if you are in the country or one of the satellite towns. So there is something about having grown in small English towns that you're sort of obsessed with about what goes on behind closed doors, and also that slightly mischievous desire to cause absolute mayhem.
Simon: Also, we're parochial. England is a parochial country. So we wanted to reflect that.
Interviewer: You've got this trilogy of films. Aside from ice cream, what you consider to be the connecting tissue of the three.
Edgar: I'm glad you ask that. I would say the overwriting themes would be the individual versus the collective, which is in all three movies. The dangers of perpetual adolescence, you know in Shaun of the Dead, Shaun has to grow up to kind of be the hero. In Hot Fuzz, if anything Nicholas Angel has to dumb down to be the bad ass. Then in this movie when Gary King decides to turn back the clock, with the magic time machine know as alcohol, things go very badly wrong. So, you know the moral of this film is actually said aloud by Rosamund Pikes, she says, “You've got to go forwards and not backwards.” I guess that is something that links all of them, three films about having to grow up.
Simon: Loss of identity and friendship.
Nick: Especially between men, and how they must change. Right guys? (Laughs) The different stages of friendship that men go through, or not go through.
Simon: And also, British-ness, contemporary British-ness. There are many many connective threads that are far more important, and relevant, than the ice cream. The ice cream and the fence jumping is a clever invitation in, it all gets a bit more cerebral after that.
Edgar: The ice cream is literally the dessert topping.
Interviewer: You are obviously walking a very fine line in terms of tone. Especially in the second half of the film, obviously you are very conscience of that. But what steps did you take in order to make sure it didn't go one way and everything was very balanced?
Edgar: That is definitely a tricky thing. I think we like that idea, and I think all of the movies we've done have that balancing act. Shaun of the Dead is pretty dark. It's funny to me, a few people have said, “Oh, this feels darker than the other two.” In Shaun, he does shoot his mother in the head. That's about as dark as it gets in a comedy.
Nick: Danny's dad points a gun at him in Hot Fuzz.
Simon: It ends with a weird proto-fascist utopia.
Edgar: I think the thing is because we're big comedy fans. Even some films that you really enjoy, you can be in the cinema and laugh for 100 minutes and have kind of forgotten the film by time you have gotten to the parking lot. We like to make films where you hopefully do have laughs and thrills, but they have some other nagging themes that might echo in your head for a couple of days later. That's our aim in a way, is to kind of have some kind of deeper meaning there.
Simon: And we've always been at pains to embrace and defend the idea of a slow burn. You don't just get in there and try to be funny straight away, or play all your cards straight away to try and fool the audience into thinking its hilarious. There is value in building characters and story, then when you do start taking left turns or making dramatic choices, the people have got a lot more invested in it, and its more effective that way I think.
Nick: You can get away with more as well, when people are invested in it.
Interviewer: To kind of follow up on that, you've said, Simon, that you take the audience's intelligence very seriously. Why do any of you think that that makes for good comedy?
Simon: Because, you should never underestimate the joy of audience participation in making links; and the joy of your own connections with making the film. I think anyone can laugh at a person falling over, and we know that better than most, because we put it in almost ever film we do. But there is also huge joy in working stuff out and solving puzzles and making connection between threads and seeing foreshadowing and things paying off and getting all that. It’s a far more gratifying experience than just hearing the word “cum” ever five minutes. You know what I mean? (Nick chuckles) He loves that shit.
Edgar: Nick is sold.
Simon: When an audience leaves the theater when they’ve been taken seriously, they feel good about it. We’re constantly being infantilized in the cinema, we’re constantly being underestimated, bashed around the head with it, and it’s turning us into mush. And I would hope in a summer that’s been populated by big dumb shit that you’d leave thinking, “Oh, that was tasty.”
Interviewer: You think the audience feels it when you are taking their intelligence seriously?
Simon: They should be, I mean I do. We try to make films for ourselves, and we try to make things were we would leave the cinema thinking, “Oh, that was enjoyable.” I remember the first time I saw Raising Arizona, I felt flattered that they thought that much of me, that I could get that film. I felt like I was complimented by it, in a weird way. I love that feeling of like I’m in on it, and I’m not just having fireworks let off in my face.
Edgar: I feel that all the films that inspire us, and continue to inspire us are films that I wanted to watch again as soon as it finished. Raising Arizona is a great example, I felt the same way, and I watched it immediately afterwards. And before I had to return it to our Blockbuster, I wanted to watch as much as of it as could. Just so I feel like I’ve seen everything, which is a good way to be. I feel like that is the greatest kind of movie, is when you want to watch it a second time half way through the first time.
Simon: I think it’s a good thing, but I don’t think you can watch any of the films we’ve made, particularly The World’s End, and entirely get it on the first watch. There’s stuff in there that you can’t possibly get until you’ve seen it all before. There are punch lines, which happen before the setup, so that you can’t get it until you watch it a second time. Because we feel like we owe it to the audience these days in the age of repeated viewing and DVD and downloading and ownership which we have a cinema now; you owe it to the audience in terms of, if they are going to spend money on what you’ve made, it needs to give back something. So when you’re watching it again and again and again, you’re still seeing new things five or six times in. And, if that means people on the first watch don’t entirely get it, well then that’s the way it is.
Edgar: And because in 2D it costs three dollars less. (Laughs)
Nick: We had the Olympics last year, and I’m sick of hearing the word “legacy” because we heard it about a trillion times. But, it’s about that thing. It’s about someone in ten years time saying, “Have you seen this film?” I was like that with Spinal Tap, its one of those things when someone says, “Hey, you’ve got to see this.” That kind of means a lot to us. Its not about a pop shot, it a about a slow build, and people watching it in ten years or twenty potentially. It’s like putting peanuts in a log.
Edgar: (laughs) what?
Nick: You’ve never heard that before? Animals at the zoo, if you just lay the food out for them, they get really bored and sad. But if you hide it and they find it, they fucking feel amazing.
Edgar: I have never heard that before.
Nick: People were thinking these animals are very depressed, what’s the big deal? Animals like to forage.
Interviewer: Make them work for it.
Nick: Make the work for it, yeah. That’s what they are happiest doing. So, they decided, lets hide food all over the place, and they became infinitely happier, because they had to work to find it.
Edgar: So what we are basically saying is “listen you monkeys.” (Laughs) We want you to work for your peanuts.
Simon: I thought it was a poop reference.
Nick: It is also a poop reference. (Laughs)
Interviewer: When it comes to creating a comedy that is also a horror. I feel like there is a very thin line and it could very easily become a self-parody. I feel like with this, and also with Shawn, I feel like the effectiveness is that the stakes are real, but we laugh with the characters when the situation is humorous. How do you find that line?
Edgar: It’s tricky. I remember when we made Shawn of the Dead, in the scene after the mum has died; we actually cut some jokes out. We realized that the audience needed grieving time. It is really tricky, because you’ve also got to move the film along. In this one there are some moments like that, were there’s not time to grieve some of the people who’ve gone. I guess we sort of know I don’t want to give too much away. It’s a tricky balancing act absolutely; you can’t make the characters look callous, but there’s got to be stakes. Most horror films you don’t give a shit about the victims at all. They’re basically there to be killed every fifteen minutes. But here you’ve got to feel bad for those who didn’t make it. Without giving too much away, but in the opening of the film you can actually see some of the fates of the characters. Its almost like the opening is a prophecy foretold at what’s going to happen at the end of the movie.
Interview: You guys have done more action, why did you decide on Science Fiction as a third one; and did it also refer to what you said earlier about themes, there seemed to be not just the individual versus the collective theme, but also an anti-technological theme?
Simon: More anti-corporate than technological, yeah.
Edgar: One of the twists on the tale is you got this character that likes to think of himself as a rebel, but to everybody else he’s pathetic. He’s the guy that didn’t grow up, and its you can’t be like the teenager flipping the bird to “the man” in your forties. But when it gets to the end, you’ve got to be on his side, because you don’t want to be with the aliens. You know you’ve got to be a human at the end of the day. So that’s one of the over arching themes of it. In terms of the Sci-Fi thing, its not like we just pick a genre out of a hat when we’re writing, it was a why of expressing an emotion we felt, we felt that bittersweet emotion of going back to your home town, and it changing around you. I don’t know if you were in the Q&A last night?
Interviewer: No.
Edgar: There was something in Hot Fuzz that really stuck in my head that informs this film. Hot Fuzz was shot in my hometown. And Sanford in Hot Fuzz is supposed to be really beautiful and parochial, and that how I imaged the town where I grew up. And yet, when we were shooting that film, I had to digitally erase a Starbucks from lots of shots, because it just didn’t fit. That doesn’t fit in my hometown.
Nick: And the NWA (Neighborhood Watch Alliance) would never allow it.
Edgar: Exactly, they would never allow a Starbucks. The irony of having to digitally erase the Starbucks was not lost on me, and that factored into this movie. So, I think there is something about using the social Sci-Fi or the paranoid Sci-Fi quiet invasion, that genre which was a big part of our upbringing through a lot of British and American Sci-Fi, whether its Body Snatcher or Village of the Damned or Quatermass and the Pit. I remember once expressing something to a friend that I felt like my town had changed, because when ever I would go back at Christmas to see my family I felt like they either didn’t recognize me or didn’t care. And both of those bummed me out. These were people that I went to school with. Even the thing with the bully in the film is based on a real incident. But, I remember saying to a friend that every time I go back to my hometown I feel like Body Snatchers, because the town changed without me.
Simon: It’s always story first. But as soon as you said the word, I feel a bit alienated at home, its obvious what you’re going to do.
Interviewer: Nick and Simon, of the three characters you’ve played now, which is the most like you, and which is the least like yourself?
Nick: For me, Danny Butterman (Hot Fuzz) is the least like me. And I think I was probably like Ed (Shawn of the Dead) when I was Ed. And now I’m kind of like Andy (World’s End) sadly, with out those violent pub rages.
Edgar: But if you were pushed into it you could handle yourself. (Laughs)
Nick: Yeah, sadly.
Edgar: You could do two robots, not ten robots.
Simon: The amount of Hungarian stunt men you knocked out in that scene was amazing.
Nick: Yeah there was a couple there; I wasn’t always acting there. It never has to get to that. If you front up and pretend to be a lunatic, people always back down. Unless they are a lunatic then you have a problem.
Simon: I once saw Nick threaten to tear a man in half it was brilliant. I am least like Nicholas Angel (Hot Fuzz). I was probably a little like Shawn when we did Shawn, and Gary is probably somebody I could have been if I hadn’t been so conscientious in my lifetime. It’s difficult to say, Shawn was a long time ago and I’m not like Shawn anymore. I’m a lot like Gary now, but Gary without the alcoholic depression.
Please Leave A Comment-
Comments