Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright were sitting around a table...
The National Student sent Phil Dixon to go and sit there too.

Life’s funny. As a kid you run around, playing cops and robbers, not a care in the world, never thinking that it won’t be this way forever. The concept never enters your head of working a spirit-crushing job, eight long hours a day taking crap from customers and middle-management alike, wishing only to get through to the other side to get to the pub and complain about it to your similarly-disillusioned friends, asking the question: where did it all go wrong?

But there are some out there who manage to live out those carefree play-days on into adulthood. Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Nick Frost were just like you and me once. But somewhere along the line they managed to take a love and encyclopaedic knowledge of the films and popular culture they had used to escape the mundanity of life and use it to carve rather ascendant careers for themselves, in the form of their sitcom Spaced in 1999 and romantic-zombie-comedy (or ‘rom-zom-com’) film Shaun Of The Dead in 2004. The film was internationally acclaimed, appealing to both irregular cinema-goers and die-hard fan-boys with its mix of comedy and loving homage to the zombie genre in a very British setting. That success allowed them to go on to make new release Hot Fuzz, a film bigger in both budget and scope as they tackle another of their favourite genres: the buddy-cop action movie. It’s a success that leaves the rest of us aspirational film geeks wondering: where did it all go right? Pegg and Frost get to run around playing at shoot outs and car chases, doing the kind of things that their younger selves would have been thrilled about…

SIMON: Our older selves were thrilled! Just at the very act of making a cop movie. I think cops and robbers is probably one of the earliest sort of adversarial games you play as a child, and so doing that alone was fun. But then to be jumping through the air with two pistols and running from explosions and getting blown up and being in car chases with James Bond was…

They truly were living every boy’s fantasy in the making of this film, disregarding their own safety for the chance to take part in the stunt-play at every opportunity.

NICK: We always try and do all of them, really. But there is a point where our stunt coordinators will come in and say, “No you’re not doing that.”
SIMON: I actually have a clause in my contract that says I’m not allowed to argue if they tell me I can’t do a stunt.
NICK: But by nature we’re kind of rough and tumble fellas, aren’t we?
SIMON: We do like a bit of rough and tumble.
NICK: We do like a bit of rough and tumble, so it’s hard when someone says ‘no you can’t do it.’
SIMON: Yeah, we were doing the fight where I fight Lurch, the big trolley boy. We were just rehearsing that and Rowley (Irlam, stunt double) fell over and dislocated his collar bone, so he had to go to hospital and I had to do the fight! Which I was happy about because it meant that I got to, you know… And Rory, bless him, he’s giant, he’s like six foot something, with his giant hands… he doesn’t understand the concept of ‘gently.’ He’d grab me by my stab vest and just gather in a good handful of my tits as well. It was quite, quite agonising, I had massive finger bruises all down my pecs, it was, um…
NICK: What an erotic image…
SIMON: Put it in the bank! Yeah, I had some explaining to do to my wife… But to be perfectly honest it wasn’t the reason we did it. I mean a couple of times people said, “oh you’ve done this just ‘cause you wanna do that.” It was a very happy consequence, but as we were writing it I was suddenly thinking, “Hang on, I’m gonna have to do this as well! You bastards!” because I was in a lot of pain a lot of the time.

It’s not all fun and games, though, as Simon’s role did require a lot of physical action and a gruelling two-month regime of exercise and police training to prime him for the physical demands the action required (“I loved it, I got really obsessed by it. I bought special trainers and everything.”) - a requisite of a film that is not a simple Scary Movie-type lampooning of a genre but a genuine entry into the gamut of action films, with a Brit-com, self-referential twist. An undertaking that required an extensive period of thorough research:

EDGAR: When we were writing it was a three-point plan: to re-watch all the cop films that we really loved, for me to show Simon ones that I loved that he hadn’t seen and then for both of us to watch either bad ones that we’d never seen or really obscure ones that I’d always wanted to see. So it was over the course of maybe nine months just watching all manner of films.
NICK: Yeah, Simon and Edgar obviously, because they wrote the thing watched…
SIMON: …all of them….
NICK: … everything ever made, and then it got to a point where I was brought on and then we went through the Die Hards and the Lethal Weapons and Bad Boys II and Point Break. We had an afternoon to watch films, and they put Bad Boys II on first, and I went home after that. I mean what are you gonna watch that’s better than that? It’s just joy upon joy every time I see it!
SIMON: It’s so overblown. It was tough for me and Edgar because we had to watch things that aren’t great.
EDGAR: The Chuck Norris ones were not good. The Van Damme ones were not good. And Steven Segal, I don’t know… There was a whole generation of action heroes that were completely kicked into touch by John Woo and Jet Li and Chow Yun-Fat and Jackie Chan. Like, once you’ve seen them, Steven Segal beating somebody up with a towel just didn’t really cut it any more.
SIMON: The Chuck Norris and Steven Segal films do have entertainment value, namely in the use of the phrase ‘Yo fucknuts’, which made it all worthwhile for me. But Chuck Norris, bless his heart, he’s a great karate man but charisma-wise he pays for it, you know?
NICK: Who needs charisma when you’ve got great karate? When you can kick that high…
SIMON: And Steven Segal’s weird though ‘cause like I think he’s a good actor. He’s sort of like a cut price De Niro. But he’d rather punch people in the face than emote.

But it wasn’t just a case of ‘art’ informing art. The writing process also called for first-hand experience of life as a British police officer, which meant ride-alongs with the force both in Brixton and rural Somerset.

EDGAR: The Brixton ride along was quite, quite scary actually. The Somerset one was fun - zooming down country lanes at 80mph.
NICK: Yeah, I was down with the Somerset police for three days and I was struck by how little there was going on. The thing with policing a tiny community like Wells is that there is only a small amount of crime being done by a small amount of offenders and it’s such a small place that if you arrest someone on a Friday chances are you’re going to see them on the bus on Monday, so it’s a very different way of policing - you know who the people are and you just have to keep an eye on those eight people.
SIMON: There was an expression they used - completely figuratively and also with a huge amount of humour I must add because obviously these things don’t always sound good in print, but - there was the expression that, “If we just had ten bullets…”
NICK: See that makes me laugh as well, that police couldn’t find ten bullets!

EDGAR: Weirdly a lot of the broader stuff in the film is the stuff that comes from real anecdotes. The escaped swan is based on a true story, I kid you not. In Wells, there’s a swan that they’ve taught to ring the bell for food, no joke. This swan escaped and the inspector got this call saying ‘the bell-ringing swan has escaped,’ and he’s going ‘yeah yeah yeah.’ And then forty-five minutes later he’s chasing it round a field, trying to catch it with his jacket. So that was kind of nice, some of the sillier stuff and the more seemingly broader stuff is all the real stuff, which is funny.

So it must have been quite a challenge, then, setting a kick-ass, balls-out action flick in the sleepy English countryside?

NICK: It’s a terrifying place!
SIMON: It is. Don’t be fooled by the cosy exterior. I grew up there and so did Edgar and there is a wonderful sort of serene, almost worry-free quality to it sometimes but that’s, that’s not true. There’s a beating heart of evil there as well.

And bringing a hint of excitement to the British Police Force?

NICK: Yeah, I think that’s kind of why we did it, in a way. It was their time for an upgrade…
SIMON: Yeah, it kinda felt like it was time to turn the tables and address the law issue. And also we thought, well how are we going to make our police cool? I mean they wear jumpers for goodness sake! It was the idea that it might not be able to be done that made us want to do it in the first place. But we’re hoping we’ve reinvigorated the British police’s image of cool. We’re not going to get a speeding ticket ever again now. I really want to get pulled up and then to wind down the window and then for him to go, “‘Scuse me - Oh, Mr Pegg! Oh you can go on.”

On the subject of fantasies, the casting process for the film saw the boys able to work alongside some of their favourite actors, like Edward Woodward and former James Bond, Timothy Dalton…

SIMON: Timothy, he, I dunno, those guys… I came away from that film such a fan of those guys, even more than I was before just because they’re such professionals. And Timothy was just great, he was so up for it, you know? And at first he didn’t want to have a moustache but we were like ‘Oh come on, Timothy, you’ve got to have a moustache,’ and he was like ‘okay fine.’
EDGAR: Exactly, well no I insisted on that, I said to him “I think you’d look really good with a moustache,” and he said, “Well, you know, I’ve worn a moustache before in films.” I said “Yeah, in Flash Gordon! I love it! I love your Flash Gordon ‘tache!” And in The Rocketeer he had one as well. Dalton with ‘tache automatically means he’s evil. Dalton without a ‘tache, he’s a good guy, he’s Bond.
SIMON: I remember one day, doing a scene: it was a long day and we got all his shots but we didn’t get any of my reverses on him. And because I’m on the production team as well I was like look, we’ll do it tomorrow and I’ll get Nick to read Tim’s lines. But then Tim got wind of this and he came bursting into my trailer, “Simon I’ve heard they’re going to make you do the scene without me, I won’t have it! I’m coming in!” And it was like, “Alright, alright! Well that’s very kind of you.” And it was just that kind of old school, shop-floor unity that he was displaying there.
NICK: I was sitting in his trailer reading a magazine and he didn’t even see me - he came in, went off and went out and Simon went: “Bond.”
SIMON: “There’s Bond!”

Hot Fuzz is certainly a step up for the boys in a career path that shows a growing maturity. And if this film marks their adolescence, career-wise, then it is echoed in the fact that they’re able to play more rough-and-tumble, masculine games and also exercise proficiency in that other staple adolescent art: swearing. Namely in the reappearance of the one word used so effectively in Shaun:

SIMON: I lament the fact that that word is… it’s in a little field with wagons around it now as the last great word in the English language. As a writer you have this little box of magic words that you can use that actually cause an emotional response when you hear them, and how amazing is that? That you can say, you know, all the words I’m saying now, as soon as I say ‘cunt’ it’s like whoa!
NICK: [Getting up] Oh, that’s it. I’m out of here.
SIMON: Or ‘fuck!’ All these words are like great little tools that you can use and put them in the right place. One of my favourite jokes in the whole film is on the swearbox there’s a list of swearwords, and it’s the only one that isn’t starred out. It’s like S-H-star-T, F-star-star-K, CUNT.

The interplay between Nick and Simon is increasingly evident from that previous small display - a natural comic flow that comes from them being best friends for many years (some months of which were even spent sleeping in the same bed) and comes through in all of their on-screen partnerships. A relationship that is perhaps conducive to achieving the classic buddy-cop convention of the ‘homoerotic undertones’?

SIMON: I find that relationship really fascinating. Guys - heterosexual men - actually being affectionate with each other, it’s a really fascinating thing because it slightly goes against instinct in a way and because affection is perhaps deemed slightly feminine it causes a short circuit in men and I really like that idea. Nick is my best friend and I love him very much and I don’t have a problem giving him a hug if I want to and stroking his little head…
NICK: Get off!
SIMON: …and the idea that men sometimes find that difficult and find it hard to be straight and loving, it sets up a great little conflict which is not that often explored I think. And in the buddy-cop movie it’s such a present thing, you know, the great example which we site all the time is: Danny Glover holding a half naked, wet Mel Gibson…
NICK: In the rain.
SIMON: … in the rain at the end of Lethal Weapon, saying “I’ve got you, I’ve got you…”
NICK: While other men cheer.
SIMON: … and then the bad guy stands up and they both blow him away. With their big phalluses. And it’s… it’s gay porn, almost, you know? So that little thing obviously came out of our… because we’re riffing on the genre, that’s a very important part of buddy-cop films, is the love affair between the two central male characters.

There is another love affair evident within the film. Not just the love-which-dare-not-speak-its-name between the two leads, but also that between the film-makers and the material itself. All those hours/days/months spent trawling through every film in the genre and picking out every convention and rendering it on screen not just in affectionate homage but straightforward, professional action sequences:

NICK: Well it is a… even though it’s a comedy, it is an action film and it stands up as both, I think.
SIMON: It’s the same thing with Shaun of the Dead in that we didn’t ever want to make a spoof zombie film, we wanted to make a zombie film that was a comedy as well, you know. And with Hot Fuzz it was important to make it credible as a police action film and to have those pyrotechnics and those kind of grand expressions of physical action because if we didn’t do that then the central joke wouldn’t hold up: what is traditionally seen as a sort of Hollywood or Hong Kong film or whatever transplanted to a place where you wouldn’t ordinarily see it, i.e. the British countryside.

So they’ve done the zombie genre in London, the police action genre in Somerset, what’s next on the list of British-set genre satire?

SIMON: I don’t know, Shaun and Hot Fuzz are kind of similar in that the central kind of conceit is the idea of juxtaposing Hollywood, grandiose notions in small, parochial British situations and I don’t know if we’ll do that again just because we’ll become ‘The Guys That Do That.’ Me and Nick are writing something now which has a slight sci-fi edge which we’re writing together and Edgar I think will produce but not direct, and then myself and Edgar will do the third one in our… maybe we will do that, maybe we’ll do three Anglo-American sort of crossover comedies, I don’t know.
EDGAR: Me and Simon and Nick would love to do a third one, but finding the idea is… it’s not like we have a blindfold and a dartboard, going “Ssshk! Period drama!” We go from the story first. And it’s a strange thing because I think if there’s expectation about your next project the only way you can react to that is just listen to your gut and plough ahead with what you want to do. If you think too much about trying to please everybody you can drive yourself crazy.

With all these projects on the horizon it certainly shows the next step into maturity: responsibility. On top of these projects Nick has new series’ of Man Stroke Woman and Hyperdrive on the way, Edgar is currently working on new Marvel adaptation Ant-Man (co-written with Adam & Joe’s Joe Cornish), and Simon is the newest inductee into the Hollywood elite, having appeared in M:I III last year and several roles scheduled for 2007. Could this mean the departure of this triumvirate for the bright lights of Tinseltown?

SIMON: You know, there’s this great myth about this whole idea of people ‘Going to Hollywood’ like it’s a mirror that you pass through and you never come back and, you know, it’s some kind of club that you’re allowed in. And it’s just another centre of the industry. You can go over there for six weeks and do something and come back, it doesn’t mean you have to leave home or that you’re forsaking your own industry. You know if we can possibly swing it then we’ll make films here forever but if there’s work over there that’s worth doing then you’ll go. I just want to do good work, I think.

So what is next on your list?

SIMON: I’m moving to LA…

He’s joking, of course, but it would seem a natural step to fly the nest of relative safety of Britain on that continuing journey into manhood. You can’t see them losing that childish streak, though. They’ll just be playing with bigger toys.

OTHER THINGS:
Edgar says ‘weirdly’ a lot, before going on to talk about things that aren’t actually that weird.
Nick describes receiving an email from Eli Roth about how he and Quentin Tarantino described Nick as the ‘funniest man on earth’ as ‘the greatest rush of all.’
Simon on kicking a granny in the face on screen: “That was… that was a joy to do, believe me.”

Hot Fuzz review

Big Nothing: Simon Pegg

Big Nothing: Simon Pegg, Alice Eve
and Jean-Baptiste Andrea

Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz review

Simon Pegg
Big Nothing: Simon Pegg
Big Nothing: Simon Pegg, Alice Eve
and Jean-Baptiste Andrea