Nick Frost and Simon Pegg at the New York press day for ‘The World’s End’ at The Waldorf Astoria, New York. Photo copyright 2013 Jay S. Jacobs
Simon Pegg & Nick Frost
Hoisting Some Pints at The World’s End
by Jay S. Jacobs
British comic actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have made a pretty impressive career creating what Frost once described to me as "love letters to the genre."
Together the two have worked on several projects together (mostly with director Edgar Wright) which have been comic looks at romantic comedy (the BBC series Spaced), horror films (Shaun of the Dead), action adventure (Hot Fuzz) and science fiction (Paul).
The secret to Pegg, Frost and Wright's success is simple: the filmmakers are paying comic tribute to the genres, not parodying or patronizing to the source material and their audiences.
The group's uncanny ability to make serious examples of the movie styles, and still make them seriously funny, has lifted the guys to a certain cult heroism. In 2005, when Shaun of the Dead became a shock hit, the two actors (and their writer/director friend) became a comic force to be reckoned with.
Even apart, the two actors have been incredibly busy in recent years. Pegg has starred in the Star Trek movies, the Mission: Impossible movies and stuff like How to Lose Friends and Run Fatboy Run. Frost has had parts in such diverse films as Pirate Radio, Kinky Boots, Penelope and Attack the Block.
Their latest film together is The World's End, in which a group of old friends are doing a pub crawl in their old hometown, only to realize that the entire town has been taken over by intergalactic robots and that they are facing the end of the world. The new film is the final part of the team's loose trilogy (Frost fondly called it "the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy" to me in 2007) which started with Shaun and continued with Hot Fuzz.
A week before The World's End had its US premiere, we met up with Pegg and Frost at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel to discuss the latest flavor in the Cornetto trilogy.
I was hearing that the whole idea behind The World's End goes back to a pub crawl that was when you guys were young.
Simon Pegg: That was Edgar. That was before we met Edgar. He was a little itinerant youth in Western England, in Somerset. He [later] wrote a script called Crawl about a bunch of teenagers doing a pub crawl. Pretty much the first three or four minutes of this film – of a kind of glorious night of hedonism and abandon. [He] never did anything with it. When we were starting to think of what we would do with our follow-up to Hot Fuzz, Edgar kept mentioning this. (to Nick Frost) He had for a few years, hadn't he? He brought it up a couple of times.
Nick Frost: Yeah.
Simon Pegg: You guys went away and tried to...
Nick Frost: Yeah, Edgar and I went down to the West Country. Hired a cottage. We were really, really indulgent. Hired a nice Mercedes. To write. We went down there for a week to write and wrote not a sentence.
Simon Pegg: You should have hired a computer.
Nick Frost: Yeah, we should have hired a computer. We didn't do anything. Just drove around with the top-down listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
Is this your normal creative process?
Nick Frost: No! Listen, I mean, I'm sure... (pauses, then sheepishly) No. Not really. It was just fun to be with a mate. (to Simon Pegg) But then while we were down there, you joined us and we tried the pub crawl again, the one that Edgar had aborted when he was like 19. I think he did six pubs when he was 19. With us, I think we did four. He's a terrible drinker. You do a pub crawl with Edgar and by pub four he is literally out. It's ten to eight, what are we going to do now for the rest of the night?
Simon Pegg: We had to carry him home.
Nick Frost: We did have to carry him home.
Simon Pegg: This was when Shaun of the Dead was new. Wasn't it before Hot Fuzz was done?
Nick Frost: Yeah.
Simon Pegg: Yeah, it was. Then, when we came to think about the next film, we decided wouldn't it be interesting to look at going back to your hometown and that weird sense of detachment you get when you go home? You sense that odd combination of familiarity and alienation. Then we thought wouldn't it be funny if we gave a very concrete reason for that hard to identify feeling and that concrete reason being an alien invasion. The notion of alienation is taken to its literal extreme. That fit in quite nicely with Edgar's pub crawl idea so we kind of combined the whole thing and it came about. We had the idea in 2007, but we didn't write it until 2011 because we went off and did Paul and Edgar did Scott Pilgrim. And, I don't think we could have written it in 2007. I don't think our life experience was completely full, in terms of what we needed to do to write this film. So I'm glad we waited.
Nick Frost: Also, a good idea is a good idea. Unless it's topical, then you if you wait five years, you'll ruin it. You can just write it down. It's still there. Five years later you go: that's still a good idea. Let's use that idea.
Your character finds out that the world is ending, and he wants to finish the pub crawl. If the world were ending, what would be the thing you'd most want to do?
Simon Pegg: I'd just want to hug my daughter and my wife. (laughs) I think Gary's problem is that he's an alcoholic. That's the most important thing in his life. I think the thing you want to do when you know the world is ending is get as quickly as you can to the most important thing in your life.
Nick Frost: I have advanced exit strategy for a number of different apocalypse scenarios. As a human as a species it's very rare that you'll actually just sit and have a cuddle and wait for it to hit you. I think you'd try anything you can. I have a lovely big cellar, so I'd get in there. Stick some doors over the top of it. Cover it with mattresses. Unless it’s a tsunami, and then I've actually worked out a route I would take in order to get to a place called the Hog's Back in Surrey, which is like 300 meters (about 1,000 feet high). Unless it's a mega-tsunami. Then we're all fucked. But if it's just a basic one, then I'm on the Hog's Back.
The film made the beer look amazing. How was that done?
Simon Pegg: Yeah. That's Bill Pope. A fantastic cinematographer who Edgar had worked [with] on Scott Pilgrim. [He] has lit everything from Clueless to The Matrix. He's a very accomplished DP. Edgar thought it would be interesting to get an American viewpoint on a very British thing: the pub. So Bill lit those pints like it was amber nectar.
Nick Frost: They are the only pints that are real beer in the whole thing. Everything else is fake, but the one at the end that Simon walks in on, when it's lit on [pub] number twelve and then the ones at the beginning, they are the only real ones. Because nothing quite looks like foaming nut-brown ale. You know, then lager.
What did you use the rest of the time?
Nick Frost: It was like a burnt sugar, slightly carbonated with a cream soda head on top. We tried a few different things. Fake beer, even non-alcoholic or low-alcoholic beer, is still like 0.01%...
Simon Pegg: ... And it's heavy....
Nick Frost: ... And it's heavy.... And if you're drinking 80 pints of it a day, there is a placebo effect.
Simon Pegg: Even if you like the taste of beer. I like the taste of coffee, but I wouldn't drink 80 pints of the stuff.
Nick Frost: We drank so much liquid that we were really nicely hydrated.
Simon Pegg: A lot of bathroom breaks. There was talk of having us all catheterized.
Nick Frost: Just come out with a big bag underneath the table. I need to change my bag!
All of your films have paid tribute to specific genres: Shaun of the Dead was horror films, Hot Fuzz was action films, even Paul was sci-fi. It seems like you are setting yourself up in this film. Was that purposely done as closure?
Simon Pegg: I would argue that we've never set anything up. I would never call Shaun of the Dead a parody. Hot Fuzz is not really a parody. It draws attention to some of the formal aspects of action cinema, but not in a way that is satirical, particularly. It might, by changing the context, make you realize how ridiculously rambunctious these films are sometimes. But we've always used genre as... the films that I've made with Edgar are like Trojan horses to say slightly more important things about life. If you want to make a film about a guy breaking up with his girlfriend, not many people are going to go to see it. But if you put zombies in it... You can use them as a metaphor and make everything a little more poetic. The same thing about friendship and male bonding in Hot Fuzz. Or alcoholism and the sense of loss when you go home with The World's End. We always like the idea of taking the cinema that we love as kind of big kids and using it to say things we feel as adults. So I would refute the notion of anything we've ever done being a send-up.
I mean more in terms of the references to the things that you do love.
Simon Pegg: We didn't really want to make any... Nick and I, because we wanted to make Paul... one of the central jokes of Paul was that he'd had an influence on all popular culture. By that every reference we made in that film was to the fact that Paul had invented it, even to the point of him helping Spielberg make ET. That film is so referential. Edgar also got pissed off after Scott Pilgrim came out and the people were like: "Oh, yeah, there's a bit about some video game in there." There was a lot of invention and smart writing that was his idea. It wasn't all references. We decided to not make any of the references in The World's End. You can see references in its DNA if you put it under a microscope. You can see some of the social science fiction, the paranoia writings of what has become known as the cozy catastrophes of [authors] John Wyndham and John Christopher and...
Nick Frost: JG Ballard.
Simon Pegg: JG Ballard. Or from America, things like The Body Snatchers [a 1945 novel by Jack Finney which has been filmed several times] and Invaders from Mars [a 1953 movie by William Cameron Menzies]. Those insidious invasions where everything changes very subtly. But outwardly, the only references to other films that remain in The World's End are the connective tissue between Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End, which is the fence gag and Cornetto ice cream. But also stuff like the idea of... we've always been very interested about loss of identity. All of the films are about loss of identity in a way, whether it be zombies literally eating you or the NWA [Hot Fuzz's Neighbourhood Watch Alliance] reshaping you. Or this combination of the NWA and zombies, which is this huge galactic course of corporate change, which is what the Network is. But when you take away all the referentiality, what you are left with in The World's End is seemingly just references to ourselves. But those references are important in order to bind the films as a trilogy. This thing of trilogy has come up again and again, and it we're going to use a term as lofty as that (laughs) we want it to be actually true. Not like when The Hangover III came it was like: "The thrilling conclusion of the Hangover [trilogy]..." It's not a fucking trilogy! It's two sequels because they made some money out of the first one. I think the thing with this is that we wanted it to be a piece. You could one day watch all three films and go: "Oh, yeah, I see the connections." There is a trilogy. I'm not saying we ever meant it to be when we started out. The reason it became one is because after Hot Fuzz, we thought we could make a third film here. And we could make it bind the first two together. We would make a film where they are all separate. They all exist separately, but if you watch them as a threesome, it's even a three-part joke. It spans all three films. I think that's what it is.
Nick Frost: Also I think we were smart in that we never got to make a third season of Spaced [a 1999 British TV show they worked on], so it was important that we finished something.
If I may hook onto your idea of creating the message you want in a popular format, how do you balance serious filmmaking and accessibility?
Simon Pegg: I think any expression in art, even in popular culture, is a reflection of how we are all feeling at the time. All our preoccupations bubble to the surface in our artistic act, whether it be highbrow art cinema or fucking Jersey Shore. It all comes out in the way that we express ourselves and indulge in entertainment. I think you can reach more people. (laughs) What was that thing about the Yeager? The Pacific Rim Yeager [robots in the Guillermo del Toro film].
Nick Frost: Yeah, I think our film, this film, specifically is like a Yeager piloted by [arty British directors] Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.
Simon Pegg: It's good to adapt. You use the tools available to you to say what you want to, to as many people as you can. If you can harness popular culture, then you're likely to be less in the position where you are preaching to the converted. If you make a heavy piece of art cinema, then a lot of very intelligent cinematically literate people will go see it.
Nick Frost: But that's 50 people. Also, in terms of our output, we never try to second guess what people want. We always just make what will make us laugh. I think we realized quite early on that if you are going to try and pander to a particular group of people and second guess what they want, you're in trouble. What you give them is probably not what they want. And you've diluted the thing they liked in the first place. So we've always been really firm that we are making a film for our mate Peter, or my wife or Simon's wife, or our mate Robert or Ira. Mates who we've always hung out with and laughed with.
Simon Pegg: And trust that there are other people like them.
Do you think you were able to finance those projects because you already had a reputation?
Nick Frost: Yeah, I don't think it hurt.
Simon Pegg: Shaun of the Dead gave us a calling card. The popularity of that film meant that we could sell a film on a larger scale. Perhaps more internationally. Here, even. That gave us the chance to make Hot Fuzz. Then Hot Fuzz's success, not just theatrically but more on DVD, meant that we might even get a little bit more money to make this one. Shaun was $6 million [budget], Hot Fuzz was 17 and this is 30, so not quite double.
Nick Frost: Paul did very well, as well.
Simon Pegg: I don't think we'll ever do it again. I think that was the last big budget comedy we'll make. (laughs)
Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan are like a British dream cast. Did you have them in mind from the start? What were they like to work with?
Simon Pegg: Yeah, we did, to the point where when Edgar and I were writing the screenplay with their names in the script rather than the characters'. It didn't say Steven, it said Paddy Considine. It didn't say Peter, it said Eddie Marsan. That helped us write. We just trusted that we'd get them. We had this dream of assembling what Bill Nighy eventually referred to as... (laughs) I went to see him before the film, just to talk about [playing] the voice of the Network. I was at his house and we were chatting, and he said, "Who else is in it?" I told me and Nick, Paddy, Martin and Eddie. He said, "Well, you've got a team of assassins there." That was what we always wanted to get: a team of assassins. Represent the very best. I'm not including myself and Nick in this. We're lucky to work with these guys.
Nick Frost: You can include me.
Simon Pegg: I didn't want to speak for you. But for me to work with Nick and Eddie and Rosamund [Pike] as well. Knowing we were going to going to be releasing the film here, we wanted to bring the very best of our acting pool to the rest of the world. Those guys represent that.
Nick Frost: I'll also say as an addendum to that, not just the acting, but the commitment and effort they put into the training period was amazing. All of us. Especially Ros. She got really mad if we didn't let her do something. They just worked. They just came in for four weeks and just hit things and kicked things...
Simon Pegg: Did backwards rolls.
Nick Frost: and did awkward backwards rolls. You hear a lot about successful performers these days who don't want to do much. They can't be arsed. "Why should I?" "Get someone else to do it." That was the complete opposite of what we had on this. I think, to be fair, that says a lot about Simon and Edgar, in terms of their draw and the fact that people are willing to do that for our films, for their films.
It's a very physical film. Was there special training?
Simon Pegg: Yeah, we did. We worked with Brad Allan, who was one of Jackie Chan's boys. One of his team. A guy called Damien Walters, who is a British stunt performer. He's an incredibly adept gymnast and athlete.
Nick Frost: Look him up on YouTube. Damien Walters. Amazing.
Simon Pegg: He's got an incredible, incredible show reel. We were very keen that we maintain character throughout all the fights. Often in films, when a fight happens, you hand over to the stunt performers. You get a lot of cutaways. You come in and you can't really see the fight. Who is doing it. Because it's all very quick.
Nick Frost: Edgar was saying yesterday, if you see a film where you've got a very muscle-bound 6'4" waiter, you know at some point he's going to kick ass.
Simon Pegg: Yeah. (laughs) He's got to have a reason to be there. So we were very keen that the characters that we created be present through all the action sequences. That meant us doing them all. So we had Brad and Damien access us. What we can do physically. What we were uncomfortable with. Comfortable with. We had them develop fighting styles for all of us, whereby Nick was kind of like The Incredible Hulk. He's so full of repressed rage that it comes out in this berserker style. Gary is always fighting one-handed because he's protecting his beloved pint. By doing that, we could shoot the fights in wides and not have to cut in. Do them like one continuous shot. You have the camera moving around. Basically, what you do is you shoot it in pieces, so it's all previsited in the rehearsal room. The stunt team put on video. We learn each individual piece. Each bit is connected by a whip pan or something which leads into the next moment of the fight. Then you can have a fight where it is fucking Nick who is doing all of that stuff. It's Nick punching those guys in the face with stools. (laughs) It's not some guy dressed up as Nick.
Nick Frost: Poor them.
It's ten times more entertaining than any Pacific Rim kind of bit.
Simon Pegg: I haven't seen Pacific Rim. And I'm a big fan of Guillermo's, so I wouldn't comment on that. I would say that it's important, it has an effect that you see it's us. You see that that's Andy having that fight. That's Gary with his pint. It means you don't check out the film just to see a little bit of action, you know? Which is often impressive. That's why Jackie Chan is such an entertaining performer. It's always him. They don't cut away because he can't do a back somersault, because he can do a back somersault! He can do another back somersault.
I loved Gary's last stand. Still, I was thinking, what the Network was offering was kind of attractive. Galactic travel, eternal youth. I don't know if I'd turn it down.
Simon Pegg: Oh, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We didn't want to really have a stance on this whole notion of "Starbucking." They say "Starbucking" the whole time, but the coffee shop that was there before the Starbucks was shit. Just because it's all new and corporate and branded doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. Yeah, there is some individuality lost, but for the greater good – to take a phrase from Hot Fuzz – maybe it would be better to give yourself over to a higher power. We do need some control and someone to tell us how many guns you can own or how many this we can have. Maybe that will help us to not be such an erratic, dangerous species. Maybe that's a good thing. But it comes at the cost of personal free will and that is something we hold very, very dear. At the end, I hope this is not giving anything away about the end, but it does come down to just that. We wanted this whole notion of the Network to be a benevolent force. If they can possibly do it, they'll replace two people if they can. Have those two people indoctrinate the entire planet over the period of 150, 200, 300 years. Then they've got their nice safe planet which can interact with all the other planets.
Nick Frost: And they leave then.
Simon Pegg: They can leave. They're not War of the Worlds type murderers. They just want the galaxy to be a nice place.
Nick Frost: Or do they?
Simon Pegg: But it does come at a price. We love the idea that the human race is the first species they ever encountered that are such a bunch of colossal assholes.
Well it seems like the film is saying that everybody is conforming to something and that's fine.
Simon Pegg: Yeah. There is a very telling speech Steven makes in the service station early on in the movie. He says he had a company. He got bought out in '08, but he likes it. It's less stress, you know? That really is a very, very key line in the movie. It's kind of about what the whole situation with Earth is. Would it be less stress? We want people to go and really think about what's most important. Whether it is the right to choose to be a cock? (laughs) Also, with Gary's illness and stuff, there is a reason why there were 12 pubs. There is a reason he faces off against a higher power. It's this idea of are you responsible for yourself, and by that your planet? Or are you prepared to let someone else be? We all do it to some respects. We elect leaders to do things for us because we don't want to do everything ourselves. I don't know what the answer is. I just like the idea of coming out of the movie house and going: Wait a minute. Were they bad guys or good guys? (laughs again) The best thing you can do is inspire debate and conversation. The worst thing you can do is to make a film that people forget before they validate their parking. You can laugh from the beginning to the end of a movie, you can really enjoy it, but then the next morning you can think, "What the fuck did I do last night?" That is, for me, a bankrupt experience.
Copyright ©2013 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: August 22, 2013.
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