Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Interview

Through a set of rather surreal circumstances, I find myself and three other bloggers interviewing Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, not within the plush rooms of Claridge’s Hotel, but rather inside an RV parked on the street behind it. Pegg and Frost are here to talk about Paul, their latest film, which sees them embarking on a road trip across the USA with a foul-mouthed alien in tow. Pegg and Frost were genuinely lovely people and were great interviewees, more than willing to tell us everything they could and also very, very funny.

Was Paul named after any Paul in particular?

Pegg: No. The idea was – we were just spit-balling, it was literally like, ‘What are we going to do today? The weather’s nice’ and we were like, ‘Okay, yeah, he’s an alien and what if his name’s Paul?’ and, you know, it was the most human name we could think of. There was no real rhyme or reason for it – we just wanted him to sound very naturalised. The idea was that he’d been on earth for a long time and was more human than the human protagonists

Frost: It was the first name we came up with. We never changed it, never thought about changing it.

Pegg: We were big fans of Paul Danan from Hollyoaks at the time.

Frost: And Paul Rudd.

Would you say they’re your favourite Pauls?

Pegg: My favourite Paul is Paul McCartney.

How did working with Greg Mottola differ from working with your usual collaborator Edgar Wright?

Frost: It was just different, you know? It’s like having two different wives, they’re both nice…

Pegg: They’ve got old tricks that’ll keep you happy.

Frost: Exactly.

Pegg: More hair on Edgar’s side.

Frost: Greg’s a more generous lover than Edgar, but Edgar’s a lot rougher, so it depends how drunk I am and what mood I’m in.

Pegg: They’ve both got different dynamics on set. Edgar becomes quite insular and intense when he’s on set. He’s also still fun, but Greg, I would say, is more laid back in terms of approach. We picked Greg because we wanted to make what felt like an American indie movie, with a very sophisticated special effect in it and we wanted Greg to bring what he brought to Daytrippers in particular actually, but also with Superbad, which was a comedy director directing comedy but also giving it some directorial heft behind the camera. Some directors when they’re doing comedy just point the camera at the funny people and that’s not enough. You watch a film like Raising Arizonaand you see how the camera can be funny.
There can be comedic intent behind the camera and Greg has that.

It was great to see Kristen Wiig in the film; can you tell us how she got involved?

Pegg: The Wiigles.

Frost: She’s probably the funniest person we’ve ever worked with. She has that kind of charm where she’s not sure if she’s that funny. You kind of want to hold her and have her make you laugh endlessly. That’s what she does.

Pegg: She reminded me of Julia Davis – of our own Julia Davis – because she has that – she’s supremely funny but not entirely aware of it as well, which is almost, in a way, as important, because it means that she never relaxes, she’s always striving to achieve the funny. And on set she was just – I mean we were just in love with her, you know. She’s amazing. And I’m so glad that she played Ruth because it helped us develop that character. It’s hard for guys to write women because they’re not women, so she was an extraordinary asset. And I think at the very beginning of what will be mega-stardom. If Hollywood could make sense of her, she would rule it, you know? She’d be the next Tina Fey or whatever.

Frost: Whenever she was doing her stuff and we weren’t in it, there would always be a lot of people around the monitor, watching what she does. Because sometimes it’s so small and subtle that you don’t really appreciate it till you see it on the big screen as well, so watching Paul – we’ve watched it a couple of times now on a massive screen and it kind of upscales her looks [in the sense of glances, not appearance] and her acting – it’s amazing. It’s amazing to watch.

Obviously, there’s a lot of CGI –

Pegg: No, there was none (laughter).

How did you find interacting with the CGI character, coming from a background where there’s a lot of ensemble playing?

Pegg: That’s what we wanted to make sure we retained, you know. It was like, when we set off to make this and we set ourselves this challenge, we had to figure out how to do it, it was like, we’re going to make a bigger, broader – for a start we had to adapt our writing style a little bit because we wouldn’t be allowed to make a film that was – I don’t like the word niche but a Shaun of the Dead for this amount of money. We had to make it more appealing so that Universal would be confident that they would get their money back, you know? And also, how would we adapt our comedic style to a character that isn’t going to be there on the day? So we had to wing it and what we did was we worked with Seth [Rogen] in LA intensively before we started shooting – we shot the movie on video, with Seth in it, in motion-capture. We went to set, we shot it with Joe Lo Truglio, who plays Agent O’Reilly as our sounding board, so we had a funny actor who could carry the movie comedically, even though nothing he did in the film would ever be seen, as far as his Paul was concerned.

Frost: He got to keep his knee-pads though.

Pegg: He kept his knee-pads. And then after Joe had – because we wanted it to be very conversational, to be like he was there, like we were riffing with him, like you had that Apatow feel where people are almost making it up as they go along, but it’s a CG character. You know, the problem with Jar-Jar [Binks, ‘comedy’ Rastafarian frog man from the Star Wars prequels] was never really that he was animated – even though that was in its infancy and there are holes in it, it’s still an achievement to put a CG character in a film. The fact that he was overshadowed by his dreadfulness says something about how dreadful he was.

Frost: And lack of eye-line continuity. We tried really hard to avoid that.

Pegg: Yeah, that was hard. But it was all about characterisation and getting that right, so after we’d shot the movie we went back to Seth, played him all of Joe’s stuff so he could listen to the little tics that Joe picked up, play with that a little bit and then integrate himself, as Paul, into the movie so it felt more like he was there. And I’m so thrilled with what Seth did. And Seth is a very recognisable voice – part of the reason we hired him is because he sounds like an old man, even though he’s a young guy. But he listened to a lot of Neil Young, speaking, before he did it. And when I watched the film, it is minutes and you buy that he’s there, you buy that he’s with you and that was what we wanted to do.

Frost: And we were always saying as well that we could write the best script in the world but if Paul was rubbish in any way then it’s done, you’re done.

Pegg: You pop out of it. Like a stray bollock.

Frost: What? Yeah. The stray bollock thing threw me.

Would you like Paul to come back? Or if you were to do another one, would you rather go to him next time?

Pegg: Like Crocodile Dundee 2, when it all swaps round?

Frost: The cost of one Paul means that if we went to his planet, he would be the only person on it.

Pegg: laughs) Yeah. We’d have to be given a lot of money for the next one.

Frost: I think, you know, we have talked about a Pauls, potentially.

Pegg: That’s what the sequel would be called – Pauls.

Frost: With a Z on the end, maybe, like Antz. But it would have to be a great story and we’re not just going to do it because it’s expected of us.

Pegg: This is the first film we’ve done that I think warrants a sequel. I think Shaun of the Dead – we often get asked about a Shaun of the Dead sequel but only because people want to go back and see those characters again. Narratively speaking there’s no point – I mean, Nick’s character was dead. It’s like, why do another one?

Frost: What? I don’t think you get that from the film…

Pegg: That story ends. And Hot Fuzz is all about them becoming those characters. The minute you start acting like Hot Fuzz it’s less interesting. You see Danny and Angel being like supercops, it’s not as funny, whereas Paul I feel there is an opportunity to bring him back and we have had ideas. It’s just a question, like Nick said, of if we can write something that’s worthy of it.

At this point, a member of the PR team attempts to wrap things up, but Pegg and Frost, like the gents that they are, insist we all get another question each.

[Nick Frost: Ten more minutes each...]

Sigourney Weaver was a real casting coup. How did you approach her?

Pegg: Usual channels. We finished the script and sent it to her.

Frost: I think with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz though it meant that the script wasn’t immediately binned when it came to her agent – which I’m sure happens, you know, it just never gets to the person you want it to get to. And we were fortunate enough that she read it and then we got a phone call to say, ‘Will you come and meet Sigourney in LA?’ and we did it and we talked to her and she liked the script and she’d seen Shaun of the Dead.

Pegg: She’d liked Superbad as well, because Greg was on by that point. It’s nice to have a bit of weight behind you when you go to someone so they know you’re not just some punk kid.

Frost: And she did it, she said yes. We did a dance, obviously. You know, it is an amazing coup – she’s an amazing woman.

Pegg: And such a team player as well, you know? She really pitched in on the movie and on the promo, so…

Frost: She didn’t have to do any of it [the promo] at all, you know.

Pegg: And I wrote a poem about her when I was 19. I used to do a thing in my stand-up about being in love with her and she found out about this and demanded that I recite it to her. And I’ve been unable to, because I just blush so much that my eyes bleed.

Are you concerned at all about how the religious jokes will play in America, in terms of reviews and so on?

Pegg: Not concerned. I mean reviews are reviews – what’s important is that people go and see the film. It’s not an attack on Christianity – what we were interested in was what would happen if you had a very rigid belief system which was whipped away from you in a single second of empirical proof. It could be any religion. And the very fact is that any movie that has an alien in immediately contradicts certain notions of organised faith. Suddenly you’re not the centre of the universe, which is where most religion places us. It’s just – it’s a comedy about an alien.

Frost: We’re not saying God doesn’t exist, we’re just saying God doesn’t exist in this film.

Pegg: Or that God doesn’t exist.

Frost: And I think if your faith is rocked by a comedy with an alien on a road trip then maybe your faith wasn’t as firm to begin with, you know what I mean?

Pegg: And why shouldn’t we be allowed to say these things? Nobody picketed The Ten Commandments and that was pretty pro-religious, so it’s just another way of looking at things. And we’d hate people to get really offended by it.

Frost: If you were a true Christian and believed in God you should have that weird smugness where you think, “Oh ho ho ho – no, no, no”. You should be sorry for us, not angry for us.

Pegg: And also, as Bill Hicks said: “Forgive us.”

When you’re filming abroad, what’s the thing you miss most about London?

Frost: West Ham and PG Tips.

Pegg: I would say probably family.

Frost: Oh, now I seem shallow.

Pegg: Well, just London life then. Just the vibe and feeling like you’re at home and all that sort of stuff. When we live in LA, we live in Santa Monica and Venice and there are shops down there where you can buy HP Sauce and Jaffa Cakes and you can buy OK and Heat and shit like that.

Frost: They show football at 6am. You can have a pint and watch the football at 6am.

Pegg: There are pubs called The King’s Head. But just the feeling of being at home, you know.

Frost: Right, hang on, let me do another one then. I just like sometimes to hire a bicycle and drive through the city and –

Pegg: The Thames, I’d say the Thames. (Laughs) No.

With thanks to Neil Davey (@DineHard), Matthew Turner (@FilmFan1971) and Alan Simmons (@v_for_vienetta) for additional questions and Matthew Turner for additional transcription!