Bad lads, bad lads

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, April 16, 2007

When visiting Austin, many celebrities like to go shopping for something distinctly local or Texan, be it Robert Duvall sampling regional barbecue or Jason Schwartzman heading to Waterloo Records for aural rarities.

Simon Pegg, the slight, blond, balding star of the 2004 zombie comedy "Shaun of the Dead," wants to buy a Western shirt, perhaps to replace the ragged Space Invaders T-shirt he sports on a gorgeous April day in Austin.

Asked where he's going to shop, Pegg replies, "Sixth Street."

Pegg is from England. We forgive him and promptly re-route his plans. We point him to SoCo. It's a start.

Pegg is here to push "Hot Fuzz," the action-flick/police-buddy spoof he co-wrote with director Edgar Wright and stars in with Nick Frost. He and Frost play an unlikely cop team in a sleepy English hamlet that's hiding dark criminal secrets. Action-packed and ingeniously funny, "Hot Fuzz," opening Friday, succeeds in its stated goal to "bring Jerry Bruckheimer/Joel Silver carnage to picture-postcard England."

Pegg, Wright and Frost are the crew behind "Shaun of the Dead," the hit horror spoof tagged a "rom zom com," or a romantic zombie comedy. All three guys are staying at the Four Seasons Austin, though Wright has dashed over to the Alamo Downtown to present a marathon of classic police action pictures, from "Police Story 2" to "Freebie and the Bean," as a warm-up to a sneak peek of "Hot Fuzz."

Austin audiences have been especially receptive to the cheeky but astute brand of British satire Wright, Pegg and Frost have pioneered. They did a similar American tour to promote "Shaun," and, says Frost, a stout man, "Austin was the best of the bunch, really."

Their other Austin connection is "Grindhouse," for which the threesome made a fake vintage trailer for a fake vintage horror movie titled "Don't." Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, avowed fans of "Shaun," handpicked Pegg, Wright and Frost to join their sleazy soiree.

At the hotel, we chatted with Pegg and Frost, who made a little mess picking and peeling the label on a bottle of Coke, waiting for Wright to join us. When he finally arrived, we were done.

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American-Statesman: Were you shocked by the massive international success of "Shaun of the Dead"?

Simon Pegg: I can't say we expected it at all, but it was a pleasant surprise. It wasn't until we came back to the States for "Hot Fuzz" that we realized how popular it is here.

Nick Frost: But it's not like we sit back and think, "Yeah, we did great." We're still surrounded by the same people we've been surrounded by for the last 10 years. For us and our gang nothing has changed at all. It's only when you come to Austin or Washington, D.C., and people go mental.

Pegg: On paper "Shaun" only took in $40 million worldwide theatrically, a modest success. "Hot Fuzz" did $40 million domestically (the UK) in six weeks. We don't know how "Shaun" did on DVD. It's only when we come out here, or to Australia, Sweden, Amsterdam, that we realize how well it did on DVD, which is where its real success is.

Frost: We recently went to a tiny, tiny place in Nevada in the middle of nowhere. It took two days to get there and there was nobody around, and we walk into this diner and the first two people in there yelled, "Hey! 'Shaun of the Dead!' " It happens all the time.

Pegg: In Waco yesterday, we stopped at a gas station and these two kids were like, "Shaun of the Dead"! It's amazing. It's a nice validation.

What do you think of the States?

Pegg: It's massive and it's great. It's a mass of contradictions. Our only complaint is there are too many adjectives used in the descriptions of food. It's all, like, "buttered," "smoked," "milked," "apple-baked."

Frost: (shaking his head) Oh, my God. You know what? It's a steak. "USDA approved, tri-tip, rump, sided?" It's a steak!

Pegg: That's a fairly low-level complaint.

"Hot Fuzz" strikes all the notes that made "Shaun" so satisfying: a lot of heart, a lot of gore, a lot of action and wads of comedy.

Pegg: And some ice cream. Cornetto (a very popular ice cream cone in the UK). We used them as a joke in "Shaun" as well, which got a big laugh in England, but over here it was (makes chirping cricket sounds). And that goes to show the real differences between our senses of humor. It's entirely cultural. We don't really have a different sense of humor. Socially, we use humor differently. I think we're slightly more self-deprecating and maybe less into our emotions, so we're more ironic. But in what we perceive as funny, we're exactly the same. There's this myth in the UK that Americans don't get irony. But hang on. What about "The Simpsons," "Arrested Development" and "The Larry Sanders Show"?

Frost: Though we don't get jokes about Martha Stewart.

Pegg: We work from the point of view that people are going to get it, and you shouldn't underestimate audiences. Even though "Hot Fuzz" says it's OK to switch off your brain, I don't like the idea of playing to a crowd's basest urges. Yeah, a guy falls through a fence in "Hot Fuzz," but at the same time you do have to engage with and follow it.

Right. The movie isn't just a lark. It's fairly layered and thought out. And then you think it's going to end and you get a long, exciting coda.

Pegg: That's the joke about endings in these kinds of epic action movies. You make it normal length, then you do an adrenaline injection and it goes on for another 25 minutes.

Frost: It's the "Bad Boys II" ending, except we don't go to Cuba.

For a comedy, the editing is really impressive — dynamic, even overblown — and the sound design is deafening.

Pegg: There are more than 6,000 edits in it. When we did research with police we asked them what was one thing you never see depicted in police dramas, and they all said "paper work." So we even shot paper work scenes like a Tony Scott action sequence. Edgar covered those scenes with so much footage. He chopped it, over-layered it, cranked it.

Watching, I kept wondering, amazed, "How many setups did he do for this film?"

Frost: We did so many. On "Shaun" it was 800 setups.

Pegg:I think it was just over 2,000 set-ups for "Hot Fuzz."

And it shows. It's beautiful, much like a Michael Bay movie. His movies have no substance, but I think he's an absolute genius with action.

Pegg: That's what he's all about. The cognoscenti will criticize him, quite rightly in some respects, because it's hardly art. But it's (expletive) entertaining. It's unpretentious. It's like a fireworks display.

When you look at his work as pure cinema and appreciate the craftsmanship, Bay is out of this world.

Pegg: We were left with an abiding respect for people who make action films, because it's hard.

You, Simon, essentially had to do a dramatic turn in "Hot Fuzz," which must have been a challenge.

Pegg: I had to play it straight, which was hard and frustrating at times when everybody else was sort of goofing around. I don't smile for the first 43 minutes. My instincts were always telling me to do funny faces. In fact, there'll be a whole extra on the DVD of me pulling funny faces after cut. It was a release.

There's a fine tradition of screenwriting duos — Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond to Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson — now Simon and Edgar. What's your process as a pair?

Pegg: I think it's the ideal situation as a creative team to be writer-director and writer-actor, because you are present at every single step of the process, conception to execution. That sounds despotic, but the product then has such consistency. For "Hot Fuzz" we began by watching 138 different police movies, from all the Hong Kong films to even Korean ones like "Memories of Murder." We also watched "Local Hero" and "Straw Dogs," films about small communities. We reacquainted ourselves with the language of action cinema, the beats and clichés, and became fluent in it.

We also did a lot of research with police, talked to them, did ride-alongs. Then we wrote all of our ideas on index cards and a flip chart. We went to Wells, where we filmed it, and hashed out the screenplay. The first draft was about 180 pages, far too long, so we whittled it down and down. Nick is always the first actor to see the script, and anything he brings to it we incorporate.

(Edgar Wright finally walks in, just as the interview is concluding, and all three are spirited off by a photographer for their close-up.)