Jason Bateman, Joe Lo Truglio, Greg Mottola, Kristen Wiig, Simon Pegg, Sigourney Weaver and Nick Frost have been in London all week promoting Paul, their new extra-terrestrial road movie. The camaraderie and good humour between the cast was evident in spades as they discussed Spielberg, alien life and creative swearing.
**WARNING THIS REPORT CONTAINS SPOILERS**
What’s your favourite movie alien?
JB: My favourite movie alien? I’ll go last on that… Paul is my favourite movie alien! Except for Paul? The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I am sure he was an alien? No he’s human. Well he’s a ghost. Doesn’t that count? It’s my answer goddammit.
JLT: I’m a purist; I’m going with the alien from Alien. My favourite alien is Alien.
GM: I’m going with Yoda. That’s really, extremely dorky.
KW: Is Chewbacca an alien?
SP: No he’s human.
KW: Great, I’m gonna pick him.
SP: In Starship Troopers, in the scene where they’re attacking the base, about five rows back on the left – that guy. He’s giving it more than the others, you know what I mean? You can tell he’s got something. I never saw him again, weirdly.
SW: I always liked the Pod People, the version of yourself that’s completely humourless. It’s sleeping under your bed and while you’re brushing your teeth, becomes you and suddenly you have an expression like that and your spouse can’t tell. I love that concept.
NF: ’78 version or the ’53?
SW: I liked both.
NF: My spouse didn’t know. (Laughter) I think ET. Or the lovely water aliens from The Abyss. They’re quite nice.
SW: Oh they are!
How much of the script was down to the cast saying yes and how often did you have to approach people in order to make reference to their work?
NF: Well it’s names isn’t it – there were a few names that we had to change. One Graham Willie – because of him, we had to change Simon’s character’s name to Graeme Willie. So it’s tiny weird things like that. We couldn’t find that Graham Willie to ask ‘do you mind if we use the name ‘Graham’?’ [So we had to change it] because he might sue.
SP: In terms of the script, obviously when the cast comes on board you have to play to everyone’s strengths. You want everyone to bring what they want to bring to it and not feel too constricted. Probably the most famous [borrowed] line is Sigourney’s ‘get away from her you bitch,’ which Blythe [Danner] says. I think I said to you [Sigourney] on the night that we were going to use one of your most famous lines against you and you were like, ‘bring it on!’
SW: I was so drunk.
KW: Blythe was asking you how to say it because she wanted to get it right.
SP: You were giving her a line reading and Nick and I were just geeking out like crazy. I think all our Christmases had come at once. The script is very much a love letter [to sci-fi]. There’s nothing in it that anyone would take offense at that were involved in those movies that we reference. The Spielberg cameo was his idea, we didn’t even ask him. He was like, ‘hey, why don’t I be in it?’ And we said, ‘no. I don’t know. Oh, all right!’
Do you think you’re going to get flak from the Bible Belt in America?
NF: Who doesn’t get flak from the Bible Belt? I don’t know, as I said to Simon earlier, it’s a road movie with an alien in it, if they’re going to get annoyed at that, then…
SP: Really if you have faith then a film about a dope-smoking alien isn’t going to affect that. We were interested in the idea that someone could have their belief system shattered by a single moment and that’s why Kristen’s character [Ruth] is a Creationist, a very specific kind of wing of Christianity; you can’t have a film with an alien in and it not be counter to that idea. Even Mac and Me is an anti-Creationist film because there’s an alien in it. We’re not being anti-religion, it’s just that that’s the universe that the film takes place in. Paul at one point – I think the line was lost in the end – said, ‘look, I don’t know, I’m saying there probably isn’t [a god]’. Certainly that particular dogma [Creationism] can’t exist if Paul exists. And we loved the idea of Ruth suddenly changing from one thing to another in a second, and that was it. It wasn’t kind of a crusade against organised religion.
JB: In the interest of equal time, you’d have to go along way back and make a lot of movies to balance the scales of people thinking that’s not the way everything happened. It’s like come on guys.
SP: There wasn’t a massive atheist protest when The Ten Commandments came out. There was a protest at my local school at the nativity play this year! It’s just a film.
Were there any references to films that didn’t make the final cut?
NF: Deep Throat (laughter).
SP: We shot it too.
NF: I don’t know I think there was lots and lots of things that didn’t make it but in the bigger picture some things that Simon and I thought would absolutely make the cut or we’ll absolutely shoot, you get to a point where you think, ‘we don’t need it’. It’s about taking a piece of work and trimming it down until essentially what you’ve got is a very tight very good hundred minutes that people will laugh at. We had to say to ourselves throughout the writing that if this is joke very funny, the audience will never know that that joke didn’t make it. It’s all about the finished film.
SP: We didn’t just do stuff for the sake of it. The film is referential because the idea is that Paul has influenced every science fiction film ever. We’re retroactively ripping everything off saying it was all his idea. It’s very clever when you think about it! I don’t think there’s anything we that we thought, ‘oh we could have got that in’.
Joe, Seth Rogen voices Paul, but you actually played him yourself, didn’t you?
JLT: I did. I was on my knees for most of the shoot but still kept my dignity.
SP: That was the Deep Throat reference.
KW: You kept your knee pads didn’t you?
JLT: I did. I did have knee pads, so that made things easier. It was great being with Simon and Nick for two and a half months; I’ve been such fans of theirs. Since Shaun of the Dead, so I was thrilled to be the stand in for Paul and play O’Reilly, who was a fanboy with a badge [a sci-fi nerd secret agent]. This mission in the movie for O’Reilly is probably the biggest thing that’s happened to him since he saw Lethal Weapon 2 and was thrilled when that came out.
GM: We couldn’t have done it without Joe. Seth was shooting Green Hornet so he couldn’t come on set. So we recorded Seth doing all of the scenes with Simon and Nick in pre-production. Joe was very serious and went through all the tapes and saw what Seth was doing and channelled it, but also then improvised and gave a real performance that Simon and Nick could play against as opposed to just having a script supervisor read lines. I think that’s a big part of why it has life to it and doesn’t feel like they were standing around looking at a stick with two ping pong balls for eyes, which they were.
KW: We did that too.
GM: When Seth came back to rerecord his lines he stole a lot of Joe’s improvs. It was a weird collaboration. Seth and Joe know each other and they know each other’s style. It just made it richer.
SP: I find watching it now, I was saying to Sigourney, you think, ‘was he [Paul] there?’ It feels like he was and I think that’s got a lot to do with the fact that we had someone who was able to fill him with enough life for us to bounce off. It’s hard sometimes when you have to lines with a script supervisor and the character’s not there because the script supervisors are brilliant script supervisors but they’re not always brilliant actors, whereas we had someone who could give us a bounce board that the scene required. Joe was an unsung hero.
Do you think there is life on other planets and if you met an alien, what would you say or do to them?
NF: Do to them?
SW: After we probe them?
I meant say to them or do!
SP: Are you alright?
NF: It would be a bit… of course there’s life out there, but it doesn’t look like us, I’m sure. It could just be germs or bacteria and in that case I wouldn’t say anything to it. I would say… ‘Hello. Are you alright? Have you eaten?’ and then we’d sit down and have a lovely meal.
SP: Cooked by you?
NF: Yeah that’s it.
SW: It’d be a lucky alien.
That’s your answer for the group? You’d eat with the alien?
NF: No that’s my personal… Or he’d eat me.
[SPOILER]I’m struck by the sense of peril in the movie. At least one person dies at the end of the film and the dog gets it at the beginning; was there any pressure to leaven that in anyway, for certification purposes more than anything else?
SW: Are you referring to my death?
KW: Paul the dog dies.
SP: We’re going to have Christians on us and the dog protection league.
JB: It’s not clear that the dog dies – the dog gets abducted.
SP: No you hear the dog scream in pain.
JB: That’s a scream of delight! I’m going on a trip!
SP: We wanted it to be perilous. There needed to be danger. The reason we killed Joe’s character first is because he’s so lovable and O’Reilly’s the knockabout funny one and as soon as he dies you think if he can die, anyone can die. So the rest of the film is like, ‘who’s going to get it next?’ We used to joyously talk about blowing you up on set.
JLT: Yes, I was looking forward to it.
SP: You love O’Reilly because he’s funny and innocent and he loves sci-fi and if he hadn’t done what he’s doing, he probably be with Graeme and Clive. So blowing him up was joyous and squashing Sigourney was something of a coup.
PB: And then you have one of the aliens hose her off the landing craft! That was a bit aggressive. A bit hostile.
SP: You’ve got to have peril or there’s no danger. It’s important that there’s some threat in the film and that something’s at stake. They’re not just going to tickle Paul if they catch him, they’re going to cut his head off and scoop his brain out of his skull.
Was there pressure to leaven that in any way?
GM: The one thing that ruffled feathers with the studio was the scene where Bill Hader shoots Moses and it looks like he’s killed him. People felt that was out of character from the rest of the movie. I loved it because he’s about to die and we should feel like he’s done something terrible. He’s kind of the worst villain in the movie besides Sigourney. Sigourney’s death, when I read it on the page, I felt that it was a great Monty Python moment. It’s hilarious; there’s too many endings in the movie, I think we’re all willing to admit and [when Weaver turns up] we’re like, ‘oh no, another ending,’ but no, not really!
PB: There’s a bunch of things that trigger an R rating, a lot of them we don’t have in the movie, but the tone, or the lack of apology to certain elements – people are say ‘you can’t kill a dog!’ But it’s an R movie, so people come in with their knees a little bit bent, a little bit more willing to accept stuff that’s outside the box, where the edges aren’t as rounded and it’s nice, I thinks it’s part of the experience you get seeing an R rated comedy.
SP: Otherwise it’s kind of bland. You need a bit of light and shade.[/SPOILER]
Simon and Nick – how similar are you to the characters in the film?
NF: We look like them. I don’t think we are. If you took these two characters and everyone we’ve played in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz and combined them all, you’d probably have fourteen per cent of what we are as people.
SP: We’re kind of nerdy like them, but we’re higher functioning nerds.
NF: We’re married.
SP: We’re married for a start; we don’t live alone, our skin’s fairly clear.
KW: You wouldn’t travel in an RV either.
SP: Well we’d get a driver. But the relationship between them – Nick and I are best friends before we’re colleagues so we channelled a little bit of our own romance into it.
KW: Would you guys like to sit together?
Sigourney, is it more fun playing a heroine or a really hard arse bitch?
SW: I try to put the two together. I loved playing a character which was the voice at the other end of the phone, who does finally appear gloriously, stepping out of a helicopter and after a brief scuffle gets squashed. I loved the movie and being part of this ensemble, with these guys and everyone in the cast and Greg Mottola. Even if they hadn’t let me wear such a nice dress, I probably would have wanted to do the movie.
How important a part did producer Nira Park play, especially with Edgar Wright not being there?
SP: [correcting the questioner’s pronunciation] Nira. She always gets that. It makes her sound like she’s near a park. Nira’s our long-time collaborator and great friend. We work out of Big Talk which is Nira’s company. Nira’s always been with us and is a very important mentor and creative collaborator. She’s vital. She’s as much an important part of the unit as I or Nick and she’s an extraordinary presence to have. She’s a great sort of mood livener. When things get really difficult she takes it all and she’ll run it. We love Nira and hope to continue to work with her forever.
Kristen, when your character is ‘awakened’, she begins to swear a lot. Did you have a swearing coach?
KW: These guys. What they wrote in the script, we did that, but there was a lot of talk of…
NF: Hairy love eggs.
KW: I’m not gonna say…
NF: One of my favourites was ‘baby with a hard on’. Baby boner.
PB: That’s gonna be the name of my production company.
SP: I liked ‘tit-burgers’. It was just a question of getting disparate words and putting the together. Ruth doesn’t know how to swear so she’s learning as she goes and doesn’t do a great job. ‘Get away from me you stupid vaginas’ was also a good one.
NF: We have a great heritage of swearing, so why not use it? I remember asking a Danish friend of mine once what the worst swear word you could say to someone in Danish was. He thought about it for ages and what came up with was, ‘long-haired communist fag’.
Sigourney, are you regularly pestered with offers to send yourself up, as in this film and Galaxy Quest and am correct in thinking that your role was originally written for a man?
NF: It was written like that.
SW: I like it when they just write the character and don’t really care if it’s going to be a man or a woman, that’s the way our world is. I actually would be quite careful [of sending myself up]. I love the Alien franchise. This was done within a context that I found somewhat believable. It was just a wink and there are winks throughout the movie. Even though all classic comedy characters, what they say and do are done fully without any winks, there are homages to different science fiction masterpieces, to the extent that you need an annotated DVD because I am sure that, having only seen it once, that I’ve missed some of these things. I think if it weren’t in the hands of Greg Mottola and these guys, I wouldn’t have done it. My reservation was whether it would be organic and just pop out and we’d laugh about it as it happens and I knew that they’d so it in that seamless way.
Were there any on set practical jokes?
JB: Kristen, you had loads.
KW: There was a lot of glue.
JB: She loves a glue stick.
KW: There was a lot of singing on set.
SP: Every day we’d write songs. Paul The Musical was being written as we were filming, which featured songs such as ‘Who’s the Alien Now?’ ‘I’m Just a Poor Little Creationist Girl’. There’s a lot of time on a film set and we’d spend it hanging out rather than going back to our trailers. We made up a lot of odd games, like ‘What Noise Do You Make When You Fly Away at the End of Sentence?’ ‘Making a Face after a Trumpet Solo’, that kind of thing. Rather than practical jokes, it was ways of relieving the occasional boredom of being on a film set.
GM: I’ve never been on a movie where people stayed out of their trailers as much.
SP: I had my dog Minnie who was always on set, which was a draw for everybody. She’s under the weather at the moment, but she’s going to be fine, don’t worry.
Kristen and Sigourney, a lot of comedy right now seems to be about men behaving like children. Are there limited opportunities for strong comedic female roles?
KW: I don’t know if it’s limited. Definitely this movie wasn’t something I’d experienced before. A lot of times the female role in comedies like that is the nagging wife or the crazy neighbour, something like that. One of the reasons I was so drawn to this is they actually thought about the female character and gave me so much comedic play.
SW: A good comedy is very hard to find. It has to come together in a kind of magical way. It’s true that there aren’t as many female driven comedies that are just about being goofy irreverent and I think that will come. You know now they have to be about shopping or getting married or something and you think it’s too bad because we can be just as goofy as guys. I think with the new emphasis on geeks and nerds and everything, women have to be not far behind and we’ll have our moment.
Greg, the movie is a love letter to Spielberg, were you conscious of channelling your inner Spielberg?
GM: There’s a lot of things I had to try and do in this film that I’d never done before, like… show up to work sober.
SP: You were sober?
GM: I grew up at the perfect time for being a Spielberg lover, I was twelve when Star Wars came out by George Lucas which meant I was thirteen when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, those films were my childhood. I can’t pretend that I could ever touch him as far as technique. I don’t have those skills that he has. There are things I would have loved to have done. Strangely I ended up watching Sugarland Express and Duel more than any movies other than the obvious ones like ET and Close Encounters, just to see what shooting the south west American landscape was like. For me, those movies, like Close Encounters or Star Wars, those films couldn’t have been made a decade prior. The special effects had changed to such an extent that they could do movie magic in a way that couldn’t have been done before. Just like 2001: A Space Odyssey was made in 1967; you probably couldn’t have done that movie in 1962 [and laid the way for the films of the seventies]. A film like Alien; it’s such a beautifully designed and acted film, it’s such a perfect movie. I think that’s why the references are so obviously of that time – science fiction movies changed in that time; they became a different thing. Now we’ve seen where it’s gone since. For me, that was when I first loved those movies. I read the script and had all the same nostalgia and love and the same feelings about it. I was intimidated because it involved a lot of stuff I hadn’t done before, but I had a great DP and Simon and Nick were like a walking encyclopaedia – we could talk about shots from movies…
SP: And you had to direct Steven Spielberg as well which was a big day for you.
GM: Yes, Steven Spielberg came in and did the phone conversation with Seth in a sound studio in LA. We were shooting Seth with multiple cameras because we recorded everything he did for the animators to reference, so I was waiting for them to tell me when all the cameras were up and running for me to call action. It was my first moment of calling action for Steven Spielberg and I missed the signal that the cameras were ready somehow. So everyone was waiting and I was waiting for them and finally Steven Spielberg said, ‘…can I start?’ (laughter). So I blew it! But he was really nice and actually had to give him direction and he got better, so I directed Steven Spielberg very well!
Jason, you also had to channel your inner badass and become a bit of an action hero.
JB: It was a lot of fun, I haven’t gotten to play that guy. Joe and Bill were doing such great comedic work, you often need a straight man against people that are being so damn funny, and this guy was written as a prototypical straight man, he was basically expressionless. My job was pretty easy in that sense, except for trying to keep a straight face when doing their stuff. It was a really fun threesome, a sort of three handed character all the way through, us men in black.
SP: When we cast Jason, we had been very adamant that Zoil, his character, be someone who was a credible threat. We thought we would get someone who wasn’t a comedic actor, but the studio were very keen to have someone who could do funny and I was very against that. Then they said Jason’s name and I kinda went, ‘…okay!’ Jason’s one of the few people who can do both convincingly, you believe both sides of him. If you look at Arrested Development, in that show, Michael is essentially the straight man in that show, yet he is one of the funniest characters. It’s a rare gift and exactly what we needed for Zoil. [SPOILER]Without it, we couldn’t have had that extraordinary double take at the end where he realises his name sounds like Lorenzo’s Oil which was a joke we wrote a long time ago. On set that night we came up with the idea that he’d never realised it before, so we say, ‘Lorenzo Zoil?’ and he goes, ‘yep… huh?’ I can watch that over and over again. I’m so happy that that decision was made. He’s the only man for the job.[/SPOILER]
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