Frosty Interviews Simon Pegg

Its music called “Sharp Little Man”. It’s Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo, from the soundtrack to Rushmore.

How is it over in London when it comes to getting downloading ring tones onto your phone? Do you pay?

Oh yeah, it is a massive racket over there. I blue-tooth it over from my computer to my phone. It is from the soundtrack, I just sent it over.

It is crazy over here. It’s like two fifty or three, four dollars for a little track.

I know. They have to figure it into the charts now because it is such a big business. I like to just… go to my iTunes and then make it go in order of songs, the duration of songs, and if you find a track that is like twenty seconds long you can have it as a ring tone in its entirety.

It is actually ridiculous. But then again I have to make fun of

England

for a second.

The last time I was there I had a pre-paid phone, yeah everyone who is listening right now, this is great, great stuff.

I had a phone and it was one of those pre-paid ones from Virgin or Orange. It was cheaper to call the States than it was to call someone off my network. It was 15p to call the states but it was 30p to call someone on another network.

I will make fun of America. Well, let’s jump back to Hot Fuzz. You guys chose to do on location filming in a rainy country. So I am sure there were no problems at all.

None at all. If it had been a film about being rained on it would be very easy to make. No, it wasn’t too bad. It was a lot less studio based than Shaun of the Dead. It was pretty much eighty percent location with the exception of the police station and a few other bits and bobs. When we got down to Somerset in the west country… we were on location in London for five weeks, the weather had been on and off, and we thought for some reason when we go west it will be amazing it’ll be all sunny and it will be like a party for six weeks. It rained so much that there were a couple of days where we were completely rained off. And we were really up against it with the filming so it was worrying, but we got it in the end so it was fine.

Not many. We made up time. You know, you just double your efforts, as that guy said at the beginning of Return of the Jedi (both of us laughing). You have to do it. You’ve got no choice.

And how is Edgar different with this film? Was he the same guy, did he feel the pressure?

Oh yeah. Edgar always feels the pressure because Edgar lives every second and every facet of the movie. You know it becomes him, and he becomes it, and it is part of why he is so brilliant because he cares so much and he is so dedicated. That when the slightest thing maybe not goes wrong but when it looks like we might not finish something on time or adversity arises, he really feels it. I personally think he was a lot brighter on Hot Fuzz than he was on Shaun of the Dead. Shaun was particularly grueling. We had less resources, and I think Edgar sometimes found it difficult to communicate his visions and stuff. With Hot Fuzz he had this really great relationship with his DP Jess Hall, who was really good. It felt like the communication was flowing a lot more with everybody, and it felt a lot more fun. He would probably tell you different because he was facing bigger problems on a bigger budget and all that, but I personally enjoyed shooting Hot Fuzz more than Shaun of the Dead even though I did have a great time on Shaun.

Yeah, I had to run a lot. I’ve modeled my run on a cross between Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 and Tom Cruise. That kind of very serious I-have-to-get-there running, where your hands are very straight and your brow is very furrowed.

Well T2 is locked in my memory. For the film we looked at every cop film ever, everything from Freeby and the Bean to Lethal Weapon 4.

Are you the type of person, do you guys write while you are watching, or do you just watch and try to remember?

We will sit with notebooks and take down any little juicy bits of dialogue that we think is funny. In the film, we name check certain films that became set texts for the movie. Nick’s character Danny wishes he was like a cop in one of those films and he loves certain films like Bad Boys 2 and Point Break.

We did watch Tango and Cash. There is a great bit in it when Jack Palance has these two rats and he says “this is Tango and Cash”, and he puts one in a maze. It is this really bizarre way of explaining something which he does with rats and it is hilariously funny.

Yeah that’s right. We were going to call the pub “The Tango and Cash” but we thought that was too on the nose.

No, but there are a couple of little nods to Shaun of the Dead in the film. A very evident one as well. But we didn’t want it to be too self-reflexive. It is just there for people who notice it.

What did you actually find was the toughest thing about being on location, besides weather? Was there one thing?

Well weather was our main adversary in terms of stopping us. We filmed a lot of stuff in Wells and Somerset, which is Edgar’s home town and where he grew up and we were accommodated so brilliantly by the locals. And we caused a lot of disruptions as any film crew does and everyone was so patient. But sometimes we would have a lot of people watching. You walk through your home town and suddenly there is this big movie crew. What are you going to do, walk by? No, you want to stand and you want to watch. It’s interesting. Sometimes that was difficult if you were doing a scene and just off camera there are a hundred people all watching you. Sometimes that was difficult, but that was something that you had to accept and deal with. You hear of actors throwing tantrums, saying “Don’t look at me!” and stuff like that. You can’t do that. You’ve got to just bite the bullet. Sometimes we would set little things up like barriers just to encourage people to watch from another angle or something, but generally speaking you just have to put up with it. So that was sometimes difficult.

Were you treated a lot differently based on the success of Shaun, because I know that was a popular film over there?

Yeah, absolutely. There was this real buzz that we were in town. But I think that had more to do with Edgar, as he is the favorite son of that city. This was kind of his homecoming. He was making a film on the same turf that he made all of his amateur movies when he was a kid, so there was that buzz. But also Timothy Dalton was walking around town, Billy Whitelaw, Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent… there were some real stars on this film, and it was humbling to be around them.

Great. Honestly, we have been so lucky, touch wood – I am touching wood; no, that is marble – that the casts we have worked with so far have been great. These guys have been in the business for a long time, and they were all fantastic and gave great performances. We also had people that for fanboys like myself, working with Paul Freeman who played Belloq in Raiders, or Stuart Wilson who has been great bad guys in No Escape, Zorro, Lethal Weapon 3 to name but three. Working with people like that was enormous fun and they are all really good. You know, they came and did effectively cameos in a way. They are part of an ensemble. The people who live in the village. And we wanted it to be so that you watch the film and you think that is the guy from, he is the bad guy from Zorro and he is the local doctor. We wanted the town to be populated by English actors that had been in American films.

Yeah, we always wanted to have the older cast members be people like that, actors that we knew that had been in big movies. It wasn’t like just for the hell of it, part of it in a way, this place where Nicholas Angel, which is my character where he goes to work is populated by the crème of British acting. So that was something that we always wanted to do. We also have Paddy Considine in it, who is a great actor. They call him the Midlands De Niro at home because he is from Nottingham, which is around the center, and he this incredible actor. He hasn’t done much comedy really. His first film is called A Room For Romeo Brass, which is a great Shane Meadows film which I thoroughly recommend that everybody check out, and he gives an incredible turn in that film as this very funny character who actually ends up being quite sinister. But in films like Dead Man’s Shoes or Cinderella Man he is a very good serious actor, but he is very funny in Hot Fuzz and he demonstrated a real knack for comedy. He is partnered in the film with Rafe Spall who was in Shaun of the Dead. He played Noel the shop boy who abuses me. Who is now, in Shaun of the Dead he was maybe seventeen years old and had maybe a bit of puppy fat. He is now super lean, really good looking young man, and he will be popular with the ladies. And the men.

Let’s jump into another subject that we have talked about every time we have gotten together.

It would be some movie from the 70’s and 80’s, I don’t know what they are called.

Some war somewhere. That is what it should have been called: Some War, Somewhere.

Yeah, exactly. They are calling the new Transformers film Michael Bay’s Giant Fucking Robots.

So talking about Star Wars for just a second, you are kind of somebody who a lot of fans identify with regarding Star Wars because you have spoken about it a lot and it was involved with Spaced. You are a fan.

So how do you think things have gone with fandom with these new DVDs that are coming out in a few weeks, they are not being well received. It seems to be that the times are changing.

It all comes down to a number of things. If he had planned that all along, if he is that Machiavellian, George Lucas, that he always meant to release them and make a few more bucks, than that is really bad and we should all feel ripped off. If, however, as we have all moaned about it for a long time that we wanted to see the film without all of those arguably needless additions, then all he is doing is satisfying what the fans are asking for, and when you look at it that way, he is being quite altruistic. Because he has always said that you weren’t meant to see the film like it was released in the 70’s, the film that we have now is supposedly the finished film, and it is a shame because the film we have now is not as good as the one that was released in the 70’s, at least I don’t think. But people have been going on and on about wanting to see those originals and the whole thing about the Greedo issue, or the original band in Return of the Jedi and that sort of stuff, people have been wanting to see it, so he said, “Yes.” I don’t believe he is that much of an evil emperor that he would have thought, “Okay, what we will do is we will make Greedo shoot first, that will really piss everybody off, trust me, that is going to get people really pissed off and then after about five or ten years we will re-release it and make more millions of dollars.” He just caved in.