The film is from the makers of Shaun of the Dead - which if you haven’t seen - should be at the top of your Netflix list immediately. And just like Shaun, it stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and it’s directed by Edgar Wright. But while Shaun took on Zombie’s, Hot Fuzz takes on the American action film.

Here is the synopsis from the studio: 

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the finest cop London has to offer, with an arrest record 400% higher than any other officer on the force. He’s so good, he makes everyone else look bad. As a result, Angel’s superiors send him to a place where his talents won’t be quite so embarrassing -- the sleepy and seemingly crime-free village of Sandford.

Once there, he is partnered with the well-meaning but overeager police officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). The son of amiable Police Chief Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), Danny is a huge action movie fan and believes his new big-city partner might just be a real-life "bad boy," and his chance to experience the life of gunfights and car chases he so longs for. Angel is quick to dismiss this as childish fantasy and Danny’s puppy-like enthusiasm only adds to Angel’s growing frustration.

However, as a series of grisly accidents rocks the village, Angel is convinced that Sandford is not what it seems and as the intrigue deepens, Danny’s dreams of explosive, high-octane, car-chasing, gunfighting, all-out action seem more and more like a reality.

It's time for these small-town cops to break out some big-city justice.

Written by Pegg and director Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz reteams Pegg and Frost alongside a killer cast. In addition to Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, the stellar lineup of talent includes Paddy Considine (In America), Steve Coogan (Night at the Museum), Timothy Dalton (The Living Daylights), Martin Freeman (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Paul Freeman (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), Lucy Punch (The Class), Anne Reid (The Mother), Billie Whitelaw (The Omen), Stuart Wilson (The Mask of Zorro), Edward Woodward (The Equalizer), and plenty of surprises.

During the interview Edgar gives updates about what’s he working on, is Spaced ever going to get released in the U.S., why Domino was such an influence on Hot Fuzz, and he covers a ton more. If you are a fan of Edgar’s you’ll dig the interview.

And I strongly recommend listening to the interview as Edgar is much better when you’re hearing him speak. So click here if you’d like to download or just listen to the interview as an MP3. If you’d just like to read it the transcription is below.

And if you haven’t seen a trailer yet click here. Hot Fuzz opens April 20^th.

Edgar discuses a few of the surprise appearances in the movie…you are warned.

Edgar Wright: Look at all this.  Hang on I’m going to be a bit OCD here (he grabs all the recorders and lines them up) Hang on a second, this is kind of like a game.

Question: Are you like this on the set all the time?

You know what I kind of realized that I did that all the time in restaurants and stuff with kind of placemats and stuff and putting them together. I remember seeing that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David pretends to have OCD and starts doing that and I said that's what I do. Maybe I have OCD. There you go.

Can you talk a little bit about shooting the end of this film?  That's seemed bigger than Shaun of the Dead. Was it like oh my God all of the shootouts and everything. Was it a challenge for you?

Yes, absolutely. The film cost like twice as much as Shaun of the Dead but the ambition in the script is probably 5 times that in terms of the amount of characters and the sort of like the plot and the action. It was really tough and a real challenge and I came out of it with even more respect for the action directors that I love. Doing that stuff is really tough and doing it in the UK with the terrible weather was even worse. What's funny is in that end shootout in the town square is that we never really had the roads closed off. We didn't really have the money to close down. It's kind of like the center of that town so what's funny is that if you imagine every shot where you see if you can imagine behind the camera 50 school children and old ladies watching. It's really, really surreal. You have lots of French exchange students coming through all the time. It's really crazy.

The style was so intense throughout the whole movie even in the paperwork scene. How hard was it to maintain that?

Well, all the stuff I'd done before like has been like from Spaced to Shaun of the Dead has been visually very dense and I kind of like things being really snappy and having lots of transitions and stuff. Given that this was in the sort of cop/action genre and given the way that cinema has gone with Tony Scott and Michael Bay in the last 10 years. It was gift to go completely over the top. So I really enjoyed ...I'm probably the sole member of the Domino fan club.

I know someone…

Oh, another one. What about you? No, he's out. Me and you against the world.

It's not me it's someone I know.

Oh, someone you know?  Jerry Bruckheimer?

I have a friend who loves Domino, but you explain your passion for it.

With the recent Tony Scott films, I just like the fact that a 60 year old director is directing like a 20 year old. Man on Fire, the direction of it is absolutely crazy. I think it's too easy to dismiss him as an MTV sort of director. I think it does him a disservice. It is like style over content sometimes but the style is fucking amazing. I'm just a big film fan and I don't get snooty about different films because I appreciate different films for what they are. You can have something with long held steady cam shots and you can have Domino. There's room for both.  So it was fun doing this because say the paperwork thing you mentioned, the idea for that was taking the most boring aspect of like cop work and making it so amped up and so it was funny doing those scenes and that was exactly the intention of sort of ....when we conceived the idea there's a show in the UK called Heartbeats which is kind of like a really boring cop show about a cop in the country and it's sort of like Sunday afternoon TV. Our thing was what it Tony Scott had to direct Heartbeat. So it was to take a really sleepy mundane end of the cop work and amp it up. And we did research with real police officers whilst we were writing. We interviewed lots and lots of police officers both over the phone and in person. We went around London to some of the rougher neighborhoods and we went down to the country as well and we had this questionnaire for all of them and one of the questions was which part of the job have you never seen dramatized on the screen and every single one of them said the paperwork is 50% of the job. It's like being a teacher actually teaching the kids is like half of it the rest of it is going (he starts scribbling away)....So with that in mind and I remember vividly we went to one rural station and there was this tiny room, smaller than this with like 8 police officers were all like hunched over their things kind of going like that.  There were all in their star vests and stuff and it was just this forlorn image of these officers doing their paperwork. So that's was the idea of that. Let's make the paperwork the most exciting bit in the film to really amp it up.

How much of that is the British sort of take on this genre and how much of it was specifically filtering these American movies like Bad Boys 2, and such with British Sensibilities.

Oh, the whole thing is that basically. In a way Hot Fuzz is on one hand very British and the other hand trying to be very American and that’s kind of the joke. The film kind of mutates half the way through and it's that point half way though were they watch Point Break and Bad Boys 2 after that it starts to go off the scale. That's the idea really is that's kind of like the turning point in the film.  Our idea was that they fall asleep during Bad Boys 2 which is quite amazing. I had this idea that Bad Boys 2 was the loudest film ever but Danny and Angel fell asleep during it. I had the idea like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix is like this Nicholas Angel is asleep but Bad Boys 2 is filtered into his brain. You know if you fall asleep with the TV on and you start dreaming about what's on TV, is the idea is that he didn't see the last half of the film but he heard it. He woke up and now he knows Kung Fu.

Nick Angel is the name of your music composer, so is that just kind of a homage to him?

Yeah.

Why him as opposed to anyone else you know?

Well, his name, Nick Angel, sounds like a great cop. That was the thing even before we had the idea for the film we had a meeting with him and when he left the room I said Simon, Nick Angel is one good cop. So that was it. We never refer to him as Nick in the film. He's never referred to as Nick. He was really pleased we name-jacked him. Then during the film he started to freak out a little bit because he thought he was going to get the piss ripped out of him for the next 20 years. Now you see at the start of the film Nick Angel's commendations--those certificates of like outstanding work on operation crack down and Nick Angel's got one of those on his wall.

I was going to ask Scott Pilgrim, Them, Mike White what's going on with that whole bunch.....

Ask Mike. He's next door.

We'll speak with him later today.

The Mike White one is Them.

Can you expand on your horizon now that this film has wrapped?

Yeah, there’s several things in the works. Even before Hot Fuzz I wrote an adaptation of this comic Scott Pilgrim with Michael Bacall who's in Grindhouse.  He's a great kind of writer but also an actor. Me and Mike White had been working on Them and also working on an adaptation of Ant Man so there's 3 things in the works.  On top of that me and Simon have an idea for #3 in what we're calling the 3 flavors corneta trilogy. We know the 3 films with feature blood and ice cream so that's the only kind of linking variables. So it's just a matter of what is next and stuff. It's weird because it feels like we haven't even stopped working on Hot Fuzz because like Hot Fuzz was finished about 2 weeks before it came out in the UK and then while we’re still doing the press I shot my trailer for Grindhouse like a month ago which is insane. It's so weird. With something like that it's like handing in homework.  I had total carte blanche doing the trailer for Grindhouse. They read the script and they liked it. Here's a little bit of money go do it. Then I hand it in and he goes “great it's in the film.” Ok, cool. It's so weird.

Is your trailer the Don’t trailer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you're thinking about making that into a feature?

I don’t know. If anyone wanted me to, I'd happily do it. The thing about my trailers unlike maybe the other ones is that the whole point of it is that there's no plot. Sometimes you see some of those trailers for European films and you're thinking I have no idea what the fuck that is about. My idea to make it look like it was a 90 minute film condensed is to have a different actor in every single shot so it seems like its a new cast every…nobody ever reoccurs. So in like 90 seconds there's like 30 actors in it which is crazy.

Do you have a plot if you expand it?

Don't? I like the fact that it's turned into the don't conference. I'd rather talk about that than Hot Fuzz. If it was into a feature it'd have to be like I've always really admired Dario Argento and Superior is one of my favorite films. Superior is I think one of the few films that feels like a dream you've had when you've had too much cheese. It's just like the weirdest bad dream you've ever had. I love those films that have the nightmare logic and don't really have any plots or story. It's just like horrible bad dream after bad dream.

What are your thoughts on cake flushing?

This is a thing that's going to come up.  Nick Frost's birthday was like a week ago, we'd been on this tour and this is our 11th city we've been to. It was Nick Frost's birthday and he got in the space of like 24 hours 2 big birthday cakes.  His theory was he didn't want to add to his girth so the only thing to do to give it ceremony was to flush it down the toilet and film it. Nick is very impressed by America's toilet flushing. Very powerful flushing in the UK we don't always have those. It was a great way to see kind of like a birthday cake go down in flames. Now, we have all of this on tape. We'd done 3 so far.

DVD?

Yes. The thing is---we've been doing this... Focus wanted us to do like a tour documentary and the truth is, is that we have like 50 minutes off each day. So the documentary is us in our car on they way to a hotel, then being in a hotel the whole of the day and then being in the car on the way to the screening and then the Q&A and in the car on the way to the hotel. Actually in San Francisco 2 days ago, I had like a hour off in the middle of the day so me and Jay Cornish went around and tried to do as many cop locations as we could in a hour. Then we did and saw Steve McQueen's apartment in Bullet, the Denny's that he goes into, we saw the hill where they had the chase, we found the diner that Clint Eastwood says make my day in Sudden Impact which is now a McDonald's. We found Michael Douglas' apartment in Basic Instinct. San Francisco is like the perfect place because all the locations are right round corner from each other.

And that will be on the DVD?

Yes.

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