Is there any temptation to do an American big budget movie? 

You know I'd like to a film over here as long as I can make my stamp on it. The worst thing is to lose your identity. As long you keep your identity and make films there's no reason not to do a film here. It would be a challenge. It would be fun. 

With the success of Hot Fuzz and Shaun your budgets have gone up but the money has been going up as well.  If you stayed in the UK, I'm sure they'd give you obviously more money for the 3rd for the blood and....

Yeah. We have an idea for a 3rd film that would be in the UK. The thing I'm proudest of with Hot Fuzz and Shaun is that we made 2 films set in contemporary kind of Britain that's something you don't always see because a lot of the films that you see have a slight fairy tale quality to it. Richard Curtis and Guy Ritchie films are equally bullshit in terms of their depiction of what London is like. Not that their films are necessarily bullshit but sort of like the London you see in Snatched doesn't really exist as does the London in Notting Hill doesn't really exist either. To make the film in Notting Hill and not have a single black person in it was really quite something else.

How did you guys get Cate Blanchett to do that one little cameo?

I'd met her in LA and knew that she was a fan of Shaun of the Dead, so that was kind of a start. The first thing we wrote in Hot Fuzz is the kind of the girlfriend scene wit the CSI sort of ....and the first joke was basically that you have an emotive scene with him saying farewell to his girlfriend and being very sentimental and you can't see her face and so also the idea of classically taking your glasses off but you still can't see her face. Then we started to think of who could be that person. I thought why don't we get a really heavyweight actress and then in a weird way it's funny there is something a bit subversive about it, it’s funny you saying about like getting bigger budgets in the UK and stuff, you would still not believe the amount pressure you're under to put really big stars in it. It's funny, there's a review in the UK that kind of criticized us for having too many famous people in it. And I was thinking like man, if you knew what they wanted us to put in there because I swear to God you do get people saying… this is not the name they suggested but if you put Ashton Kutcher in your film you could get an extra $5 million. Nobody ever suggested putting Ashton Kutcher in there but like having American comedy stars doing a cameo in the film and thereby like that's more marquee value and we wanted to keep it really British.  In a weird way this whole Cate Blanchett thing was sort of a slight kind of joke on that. Let's get an Oscar winner in there but not see her face. And she was totally up for that joke. She loved it. And for the record and this is why Cate Blanchett goes to heaven, she gave her fee to charity. So she is one nice lady.

You had a second person in there that might be...

Oh, yeah, Peter Jackson is in there as well.  The irony of Peter Jackson is that we got him to play Santa Claus and the irony is that we had to give him a fake beard and pad him up. The 2 things that 3 years ago would be the prerequisite for the role like he'd both lost. He was in the UK and he was a big supporter for Shaun of the Dead since it came out. I'd become friends with him which was great and I actually went over on a little holiday when they were shooting Kong which was great and hung around on the set like a work experience kid and so I was telling him about Hot Fuzz and he said I'll be in the UK and I'll do a cameo if you want. Then I thought, fuck he should play Santa. It was brilliant actually. It was really cool because it was so sweet. He was in London for a week and we actually shooting outside and he came all the way down. His cameo is like 5 seconds long. He was really cool. The night before we were shooting the scene in the castle which was really tough. We were shooting night scenes in June and we had like 6 hours of night. We had a scene with 15 actors and there all sorts of technical problems in it. The night before had been pretty disastrous and then the next night Peter said he was going to come down and I said what do you want to do in the evening because we're going to be shooting and he said oh, I'll come and watch. I said oh fuck.  Peter Jackson is going to come and watch and last night was a.... It was funny because before we started shooting I had a cup of tea with him and I told him exactly what had happened the night before and it was great because it was like this scene around a table and maybe what you call it a dinner table scene is always a complete bitch because of the numbers of eye lines that you have to get and coverage if you have people around a table. It’s just tougher than shooting a shoot out. So I was telling him about this and he says the scene in Riverdale in Lord of the Rings in Fellowship of the Rings was my least favorite scene to shoot just for the same reason. I could not wait to get out of that scene.  It was really sweet. It was like having him there and having him on my shoulder for the rest of the night. Actually it was really, really cool. It was like a good omen. It's nice.

Is Spaced ever going to come out here in the U.S.?

I hope so. You know what, I actually wrote an email this very morning because we'd been asked this on the hour. I wrote an email to our producer saying what the fuck is happening with the Region 1 DVD release of Spaced?  The official line is there's about maybe 10 tracks within the 2 seasons that we can't clear for North America. We really don't want to go back and redub it with another track. Actually, in the case of the 1st series the sound tapes which have the M&E track where they have the split off have been lost so if we had to change any of the tracks we'd have to redub the scenes and that ain’t' going to happen. So basically if we can clear the tracks then it will be released. And several US distributors want to release it and we've had many people over the years say ...so hopefully it will be sorted out. I really hope so.

Is that like The Hobbit to your blood and ice cream trilogy?

The Hobbit, I suppose so.  Have you ever seen it?

No. I haven't.

Well, you know like I would heartily recommend and not just for Spaced but for all Asian cinema, I would heartily recommend buying a region free DVD player. They're only about $50 and then you can go to Amoeba, go to the import section and buy anything you want.

In your grizzlier set ups, where there any ideas where you said oh no that's too over the top, we've got to toss that idea?

No. It was fun doing the murder scenes. The idea for those was to really on one hand do an amped up Agatha Christie because the Hercule Poirot films have a high body count let’s not forget.  I suppose the idea of the with the violence in the film was to kind of recapture the kind of the spirit of the hard R’s that cop films in the 80's used to have, even Beverly Hills Cop was more violent than you would remember and I think so because of an age where most of those films I saw on VHS usually I was watching them when I was too young to see them rather at a brother's friend's house and sort of try to recapture he illicit thrill of watching Die Hard or Lethal Weapon or Robocop or The Last Boy Scout you know films that got increasingly kind of spectacularly violent in terms of people's demises and stuff. That was definitely the vibe we were going for of R meaning R and I like having an otherwise pleasant comedy having a kind of brief outbursts of swearing and ultra-violence, scattered showers.

I don't know if you've seen the Reaping yet but it has a similar ending in terms of the townspeople and stuff like that.

Oh really… No. You know what I love about The Reaping? I love the fact that the poster answers the question. What hath God wrought?  The Reaping. What has God brought to plague us?  The Reaping.  Isn't that brilliant? I haven't seen it yet.

I'm curious. With the success of Shaun and with the critics and with Hot Fuzz, are you being offered more studio stuff and are you amazed at what you're being offered or are you turning down stuff?

Well I got offered stuff after Shaun and it's funny I was at a party in London and somebody chastised me for kind of developing a Hollywood feature and they said you should stay in the UK and stuff and I said listen I turned down lots of things to do Hot Fuzz. I got offered some big kind of U.S. films and I wanted to do Hot Fuzz. I wanted to make a British film and we want to make a 3rd film. So yeah, it's very flattering and stuff but when you're offered things there's a big, big difference between a film that you read a script and say hey, that's funny, I'd go and watch it. I'm saying I'm going to spend 2 years of my life making this. The things that come through in the latter kind of option are very, very rare. There are plenty of things you read and you're thinking hey, that's really funny. I love a film like Anchorman.  Anchorman is one of my favorite comedies in the last 10 years, but if I'd been offered to direct it, I wouldn't have done it because I think this film can exist without me. Do you know what I mean? There's no reason for me to make that film because somebody else can do it. When you get sent a script and you think sort of I can do this better than anybody else and I've got like this angle on this and this I really like and it hits home then that's the film you do.

So I guess the question is--is the next film going to be the 3rd the trilogy or....

Don't know.

So it's really up in the air?

Yeah, absolutely. Literally for the first time in ages I have sort of a clean calendar after the end of the month which is great.