Simon Pegg, Nick Frost And Edgar Wright Have A Plan For The Apocalypse
The World's End hits Australian cinemas tomorrow. We asked them some questions about it.
It’s silly to assume that, when you meet them, filmmakers and actors will be anything like the characters they portray or create. It’s sort of like being disappointed when your dirty burger doesn’t gleam juicily or stand at attention like it does in the promotional material. We all know what’s in the bag.
Still, sometimes you connect with a character in a film so much that you hope against hope they were playing themselves. And so it was with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright, the trio behind The World’s End. The film, out tomorrow, is the third in the ‘Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy’, so dubbed for the iced confection that cameos in all three; The World’s End follows 2004’s Shaun of the Dead and 2007’s Hot Fuzz.
All three were in Melbourne for press junkets a few weeks back. I spoke with Pegg and Frost first, and their much-vaunted chemistry was on show; later, I spoke with Wright, who was either contagious or being punished for something, because he was all on his lonesome.
I was hoping for pint-swilling, swearing and adorably moronic hare-brainery, but there was none of that. That isn’t to say they weren’t perfectly delightful, amenable, intelligent and very funny blokes; they most definitely were all three.
The World’s End is about a group of childhood mates who go back to the sleepy town they grew up in to complete a pub crawl along the hamlet’s infamous “golden mile”, only to discover the town’s folk have been replaced with robots. The group of five, led by Pegg and Frost, slur, stumble and stagger their way through this hilarious misadventure.
Cue the debauched set stories… right?
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The World’s End Is Not Pro-Booze
Nick Frost: As a 41-year-old father, it’d be bad form to be out on the piss all the time. You just get to a point where you gradually leave all that behind. And then you get to a point where you don’t even get drunk on your birthday anymore, because you don’t like feeling shit in the morning.
Simon Pegg: Half the people who watch this say, ‘God, I don’t want to drink anymore’. The other half say, ‘I really wanted a beer when I came out of that film’.
Can I get a “woot woot” for camp two?
SP: If you came out of this film feeling that it’s pro-alcohol, then you’ve completely misread it.
Surely Wright has some boozy set stories to tell?
Edgar Wright: I stopped drinking during the whole movie as well, just because I like to stay sharp. I’ve done this on my last three films. As you might imagine, when you’re making a film about drinking and shooting in pubs, the last thing you want to do at the end of the day is have a beer. I’m sure if you worked in a bar, it’s not going to be your first thing — like, ‘Oh man, I really need a drink at the end of this’. I probably got quite tipsy at the wrap party, because it was actually the first time I’d drunk in, like, sort of, six months.
But Wright says that the film’s protagonist, Gary King — a bloated drunk trying desperately to recapture his youth — is still partly autobiographical.
EW: When I was younger, for way too long I thought, ‘I’m hilarious when I’m drunk. I’m so funny when I’m drunk. I’m going to contrive to be drunk a lot at social occasions, ‘cause I am a funny drunk.’ But then you realise you’re not funny. I learnt that lesson early on, but Gary King never did.
I do have frequent attacks of nostalgia, and I wonder why the past obsesses me so much, especially when I’m very happy in my life and career. I wonder why I want to look back so much. The whole moral of the film is to be careful what you wish for, because if you go backwards you might get a nasty surprise.
They Used To Be Like You. But Now They’re Rich.
No matter how much you dug seminal ’90s Britcom Spaced, there will be no more of it. Because when you’re making a show about people who are young and poor, it helps if you’re actually young and poor. Pegg, Wright and Frost are no longer either. So what does this mean for their future collaborations?
SP: We couldn’t write Spaced now, because we don’t live in shitty digs anymore. There’s an element of truth that we had to write into that show then which we couldn’t write now, because things have changed. We’ve all got married and had kids, and we lead really different lives. [But] it’s not as though we’ve become out of touch. Right, Nick?
NF: The next film we do will probably be about two guys who…
SP: Smoke a lot of cigars.
NF: …Smoke a lot of cigars, and who share a race horse and have problems with their lobster fork.
Sounds like This Is 40.
They Have A Plan For When The World Ends…
Two of the three Cornetto movies involve apocalypse scenarios, so it should come as no surprise that Pegg and Frost are doomsday preppers. The pair shared their tips on how to survive a zombie holocaust. Scoff if you like, but when the dead rise to feast on the brains of the living, you’ll be glad you read this.
SP: There was a sporting gun shop right near us, where we used to live when we made Shaun of the Dead — which is very rare in the UK. We were going to move along the roof tops to get inside it, arm up a little bit…
NF: Weren’t we then going to go to Enfield, where there’s that really big military magazine? We were going to go there and upgrade.
SP: We were going to steal a truck or something and get it out on the road… We had it planned out. You’d need to go somewhere very remote that you could essentially turn into a fortress, that you could sweep the zombies [out of]; an island. The end of [Day of the] Triffids is great ‘cause they just get on an island and sweep it, and you know you’re safe.
NF: But now, for me, it’s a sports stadium, because it has a ready-made — you know, that turf, it can be turned into an area to cultivate.
…But There Might Not Be Room In The Bunker For Wright
SP: Edgar drives us up the wall doesn’t he?*
NF: Yeah. I mean Edgar’s quite late often, [and] rude.
SP: Do that noise he made on the plane yesterday, when the water got delivered.
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Adam Kamien is a sports nut/film buff/Renaissance man. He has written for sportal.com.au, and sparred with film Gods like Mike Leigh, Quentin Tarantino and Judd Apatow.
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*(In the interest of balanced reporting and also not getting sued, it should be noted they were only joking and went on to say a whole bunch of much less interesting stuff about how they think he’s super.)