GQ Magazine (UK); February 2007

Shaun Again

How to follow up the greatest British zombie spoof movie of all time? Simple: remake Lethal Weapon in the West Country. Shaun Of The Dead co-writer and star Simon Pegg on the making of Hot Fuzz, the funniest action film of 2007

I don't suppose anyone really considers the "consequences" when they're pummelling someone's brains in. You're very much in the moment. You're not even thinking about short-term ramifications such as mess and laundry. It's all about the pummelling. Fortunately for me, and the inert figure at my feet, my next cognitive process didn't involve an appraisal of the various methods of disposal available to the home-pummeller, it was more about whether the blood had hit rny face in a dramatic enough fashion. If you haven't guessed, I'm not a murderer, I'm an actor and I was participating in a fakery. A ghastly but light-hearted simulacra mounted with syrup and melon bits, and fashioned to dupe a spectator into believing I was smiting a bloodthirsty ghoul with a cricket bat. On this occasion at least, I was simply making an award-winning zombie movie. Although at the time I had no idea (about the awards, not about the fact I was making a film).

Perhaps because we had never done it before, perhaps because the process of making a film is so intense it clouds any notion of "tomorrow", but the fact is, I never really considered the future of our project beyond the day of final wrap. In the thick of film-making, only the vain and the twatty consider what will happen after release (unless of course, you are a producer, in which case it niggles you most days). For actors, writers and technicians, such speculation seems pointless when the sun is setting at the speed of light and you still haven't picked up the shot of the four dead children feasting on the entrails of the recently deceased ice-cream man. Eventually, though, the time comes to pack your little creation off into the big, bad world, and it is at this point that the consequences of your endeavour begin to become apparent.

It was a worrisome time for us. There were marketing meetings around big tables laden with croissants and cafetieres. Discussions about strategy and packaging and soundtrack albums and release dates hinted darkly at the fact that Shaun Of The Dead might actually be watched by people other than our mums. Focus groups and press screenings were followed by tense hours waiting for the first indications of the projected general opinion. An opinion entirely constructed by the emotional and intellectual responses of people you've never met and who have no idea what a delicate and sensitive person you are. An opinion that will nevertheless form a strong indication, not only of the impact your enterprise will have but also whether or not you will be allowed to do it again.

Fortunately for us, it all went rather well. The reviews were good, the box office was healthy and the cheque-signers were making noises that didn't sound the slightest bit like angry regret. So began a period of my life I came to know as "the whirlwind" (or "2004 and some of 2005", which is less catchy).

With the film doing good business in the cinemas and my face peering out of seemingly every phone box in the capital, news reached us that Papa Bear himself, George A Romero, director of Night Of The Living Dead, had seen the film. He watched it alone, in a small cinema in Miami, while a Universal Pictures security guard stood by, as if Romero, the grandfather of all contemporary zombie films and one of America's most important maverick film-makers, was going to record it on his camera phone.

After several tense hours of pacing around my kitchen in Crouch End, London, I picked up the phone to hear a voice familiar to me from countless documentaries and DVD commentaries consumed over the years. There followed a conversation I will never forget. It went something like this:

Me: "Hello."
George A Romero: "Hello, is that Simon?"
Me: "Yes."
George A Romero: "Hey Simon, it's George Romero."
Me: "Hi George."
George A Romero: "Oh boy, Simon, I've just watched Shaun Of The Dead and I gotta tell ya, I thought it was great!"

To be honest, I have forgotten exactly how the rest of the conversation went, as it was drowned out by the sound of me smiling.

It was the greatest validation we could have hoped for. This, together with the success of the film at home, led to an inevitable assault on the world at large and it was at this point that the whirlwind truly began to get windy and indeed whirly.

We screened the film at the famous San Diego Comic-Con in July 2004. This is the biggest and perhaps best-known event of its kind, a huge coming together of comic collectors, film fans and memorabilia enthusiasts. Edgar Wright, the director and co-writer of Shaun Of The Dead refers to it as "Geek Pride" and that sums it up. For four days in the Californian sunshine, the costumed and the overexcited gather together under one indefatigable philosophy: "We here, we weird, get used to it." It's a place where people can literally wear their obsessions on their sleeves without fear of getting an atomic wedgy. Once inside the vast conference centre, it's pretty much a sneer-free zone, no matter how bizarrely you're dressed, or how loudly you quote Stargate: Atlantis. There's obviously a little inter-genre rivalry. The Klingons are a bit up themselves and you can never tell what the Stormtroopers are thinking, or the Boba Fetts for that matter, but generally there is a palpable sense of enthusiasm and camaraderie. What better place to launch a modest British film about zombies into the thermal exhaust port of the commercial Death Star that is the United States of America? (Yes, I am a geek too.)

The film went down a storm and we got to meet a bunch of genre superstars including Sam Jones (Flash Gordon), Lou Ferrigno (The Incredible Hulk) and, most importantly, Ken Foree (Peter from the original Dawn Of The Dead) and Greg Nicotero, whose special effects make-up expertise has spattered more classic films with glorious gore than I can mention here without appearing to flesh out the word count. Look him up on IMDB.com and reap the geek out.

With a ground-level geek buzz resonating at a rat-spazzing frequency (see Raiders Of The Lost Ark), we embarked upon a massive American press tour. Edgar, myself and the actor and canal boat enthusiast Nick Frost travelled across 18 cities in 28 days, each stop entailing a screening, a question-and-answer session and round of TV, radio and print interviews that would usually finish just as the car arrived to take us to the airport and subsequently another state. It was a breathtakingly fun, emotionally taxing and, at times, overwhelming experience. It began in Los Angeles at the Arclight Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, on an evening that culminated in us getting a standing ovation in the back room of a West Hollywood bar, led by Quentin Tarantino, and ended in Atlanta with me having to "assist" Edgar through airport check-in after he ate two innocuous-looking brownies given to us by some delightful Spaced fans from Georgia.

In between we saw more of America than we had ever seen before. We boogied at the famous First Avenue club in Minneapolis, played pool at the Magic Stick in Detroit, drove through Deeley Plaza in Dallas and had one of the best nights ever at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, where we beheld the wonderfully peculiar sight of Sin City director, Robert Rodriguez, standing up and waving his cowboy hat in the air, as the credits rolled on that night's raucous screening. All the while word was getting to us that the very people who had inspired and influenced us over the years were coming out in support of the film. Not only Tarantino and Rodriguez but also Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, Frank Darabont, Stephen King, Guillermo Del Toro (and I don't drop these names lightly) were all offering press quotes and words of congratulation. Life had suddenly got a whole lot weirder than those afternoons spent in a north London garden, throwing records at a dead checkout girl and a big man with no mouth.

We returned from America straight into press interviews for the DVD release in the UK and then further press tours of Australia and France. Eventually, however, a year after the film's domestic release, the rumble gradually faded into a pleasant hum and it became harder and harder to ignore the insistent whisper that had been hissing in our subconscious for some time, drowned out by laughing and clapping (ours mainly)...

"Sssssssssssso, what next?"

This was a question that had seemed laughable during the making of Shaun Of The Dead. How many mothers entertain the notion of a second baby, while straining and sweating through ejecting their first? Sure, we'd tossed ideas around idly, unappreciative of the gravity of our actions, like children playing piggy in the middle with a hand grenade. Suddenly, here we were, holding the hand grenade and Working Title Films holding the pin (it may have been the other way round).

After a lot of deliberation and some arguing we settled upon a police actioner in the vein of Lethal Weapon, set in the green and rustic quarter whence myself and Edgar sprang forth, the West Country. We it called Hot Fuzz. The film wasn't my idea. I'd had a few suggestions, one of which involved a dinosaur but Edgar felt we had to up the ante on our last effort and create an even more vertiginous thrill ride, rather than a character-led, dialogue piece called "Dr T-Rex Goes To Barbados".

We began, as we did with Shaun Of The Dead, by watching a lot of films. From the brilliance of The Wicker Man, Dirty Harry and Point Break, through the inadvertent brilliance of Bad Boys 2, Lethal Weapon and Sudden Impact to the sheer shocking direness of Silent Rage, Invasion USA and Tango & Cash. We watched as many police movies as we possibly could. And yet, I was finding it hard to get truly enthusiastic. Zombie movies had been a life-long obsession for me but my love of the cop genre wasn't quite as fervent as Edgar's. For a while I felt more like a passenger in the Hot Fuzz squad car, a gun for hire rather than a partner, and it worried us both. Fortunately, all this changed when we started hanging out with the rozzers.

We'd had a few nights out with police officers in London. These occasions were always entertaining, as the booze flowed and the bizarre tales began to jostle for trumpage. On one memorable occasion a grizzled CID officer asked me for an autograph, then immediately regretted the tiny shift in status. He quickly informed me that I was no different from anyone else just because I had achieved a small level of success. "You all look the same on the slab," he growled.

Edgar and I smiled nervously and sipped our riojas, while simultaneously inventing the character that Paddy Considine would go on to play in Hot Fuzz.

After getting a measure of the city we absconded west, to experience the rural side of policing. At every station (seven in all) the welcome was the same. Suspicion initially, due to us being London "film types" doing research for a comedy about the police; then, when they twigged we weren't interested in taking the piss, the suspicion was replaced by an enthusiastic willingness to share stories about their experiences in the surprisingly understaffed world of the country copper. In that week, I found my connection to the project, that spark of excitement that would inspire Edgar and I into penning a highly ambitious follow-up to Shaun Of The Dead.

After 18 months of preparation, an intensive script-writing fortnight in Somerset and a whole other article's worth of personal training, muscle building and weight loss, we began what became, for me at least, the most challenging, exhausting and fun shoot I have ever been involved with. Once again, life was all about the moment. We were a little wiser, a little more aware of how things would progress (the weekly video blogs were an all-new experience in forward thinking) but still, it's hard to see beyond lunch time when you're having a high-speed car chase/gun fight with an icon of British cinema.

Yet here I am, writing an article for GQ as the whole crazy circus kicks off again. The fun of the process inexorably morphs into the naked vulnerabilty of the product, giving way to the sick feeling of anticipation as your little one wanders lonely into the schoolyard of public opinion. I'm not too worried though. There's a grimace on his face and a grenade in his lunchbox and whatever the consequences, this little sucker is gonna go off!

Hot Fuzz is released on 16 February.

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