DEAD FUNNY
It’s finally here. After we’ve been deprived of Spaced for three long years, Simon Pegg is back with his comedy tribute to the zombie genre. Steve O’Brian goes on set with Pegg and director Edgar Wright.
There’s a photo in Simon Pegg’s collection of Nick Frost made up as a zombie for an office Halloween party. That was a decade ago now. “I just found it again,” says Pegg. “I looked at it and just thought, ‘How fucking weird is that!’ Now, almost ten years later, here we both are on a movie set at Ealing, getting properly made up. That’s cool!”
Ealing Studios is a fitting place to be witness to the first British zombie movie in 30 years. Where most homegrown movies now practically beg for American acceptance with levered-in Yank talent and any utterances of “Gordon Bennett” judiciously snipped, Shaun Of The Dead shouts from the rooftops about its Dog And Duck spirit. If the Ealing that made The Lavender Hill Mob and Passport To Pimlico was still going today, who’s to say it wouldn’t be doing a movie about a zombie invasion of North London? The tagline for Shaun is “Bought Coffee, Called Mom, Dodged Zombies” and it’s totally fitting. This is the world’s biggest story seen through the eyes of regular Joe. You’ll recognise the streets, know the pub, be familiar with the people. This is Minder as directed by George Romero.
As SFX crashes the set for Shaun Of The Dead, there’s a fanboy spirit in the air. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone looks about 12, even though they’re all carrying copies of Mediaweek. Even Edgar Wright, the director, who’s wondering about looking half as stressed as he might be, looks like a truanting schoolboy in a fake beard. Today, they’re filming a big fight scene which comes near the end of the film between Shaun (Pegg), Ed (Nick Frost) and Liz (Kate Ashfield) and a fat zombie. It involves the gang attacking the zombie with pool cues to the glam strains of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”. We can’t actually see the set itself – a warmly rustic suburban pub called the Winchester – but we can view it, and the scrap, on a flicery video monitor, in front of which are gathered a dozen people, who’s jobs it’s impossible to identify. Suddenly Nick Frost winces in pain on the little screen. “Nick’s just banged his balls!” exclaims one of the gathered hordes. “There’s nothing I can do about that,” says the nurse, settling back behind her paper.
They won’t say so much in interviews, but Shaun Of The Dead is as much about another dollop of Spaced as it is a great big zom-com. It’s been three long years now since that series breathed it’s TV last, and much of that time has seen Pegg and Wright beavering away on this script, their first real feature venture. Pegg’s bleached his locks back to their Spaced glory, and Nick Frost, his own one-time flatmate and Spaced cohort, is present too. And what about Edgar Wright? Spaced was as much his baby as Pegg’s and Jessica Stephenson’s. It had a cool so-hip-it-hurt whip-pan style and it’s difficult to imagine that Shaun won’t have his sticky visual fingerprints all over it. On this film, he’s also Pegg’s co-writer, something he’d had some experience of on Spaced, albeit without an on-screen credit. They spent 18 months going through draft after draft of this film, before signing to Working Title and then embarking on the biggest project of their careers thus far.
So how different was writing with Wright rather than Jessica Stevenson? Simon? “I didn’t have so many scratches when I got home at night,” laughs Simon, between takes. “It was different in a way. There was still a similar dynamic. Although, actually, I think when I was writing with Jess, I tended to be the motivator. When it didn’t work anymore and she couldn’t write, I was the one who kept us going. With Edgar, he tended to do that with me because he’s slightly more conscientious than I am. He used to kick me up the arse quite a lot in terms of getting down to work.”
Zombie movies loom large in Pegg’s and Wright’s lives. Look back to Spaced and you’ll see countless references to George Romero’s zombie trilogy (baby, we even did a zombie Couch Potato feature in SFX with the cast once). Both of them cite Dawn Of The Dead as their favourite film (though Evil Dead 2 sometimes pips it), and you’re just as likely to see Wright standing in a queue at the Fangoria convention as propping up the bar at the BAFTA building. It was a brief scene in one of Spaced’s first season episodes that gave birth to Shaun Of The Dead: a blink-and-miss-it fantasy sequence featuring Tim (that’s Pegg) shooting away a roomful of undeads after playing Resident Evil. The scene caused Channel Four to warn viewers of a nervous disposition, but Wright says the spark of the idea came from that, as they had so much fun filming it.
“It was just about trying to find a framework for it,” he says. “This isn’t just a horror film, though. It would be too easy to do a film about a bunch of strangers holed up somewhere and zombies attacking. I mean, there’s about an hour of preamble leading up the apocalypse.”
“It was quite funny last night,” says Pegg, “when we were watching some of the rushes and there was an out-take of me jumping on a picnic table, a scene where I try to make the zombies follow me to save my friends. There were basically 150 or so genuine made-up, scary-looking zombies and they all came towards me and I had to stop the take because it was just so overwhelming!”
It’s a smaller crew than you expect here at Ealing’s Stage 2. Over in the corner, a woman with an officious clipboard is getting frantic. “Have you scene Kate’s body double?!” she yells desperately. “She came earlier totally tanned! She looks bloody African!”
They’ve stopped filming for a moment, so a huge metal stage door is opened, flooding the dim room with an overwhelming wave of Summer light. This is when the fags come out and the echoey room judders to the sound of a dozen Clippers being flipped.
If Spaced represented where the boys were in the late 1990s, this certainly reflects their newly-thirtysomething predicaments. The waster theme continues, but Shaun is a lot more emotionally settled than Tim in Spaced ever was.
“I think Shaun would see Tim as slightly immature and grumpy, although I think he’d admire hid rakish good looks,” Pegg laughs, sitting in a crumpled and blood-stained shirt and tie (he’s in character). “It’s weird, I can’t imagine them in the same room. But there are similarities, obviously; more between Shaun and Tim than Ed and Mike, I think. Ed isn’t like Mike at all. He doesn’t have any enthusiasm and he doesn’t do passion. He does have a strange chunk shaved out of the back of his head, though. It’s a little bit of method.”
It’s admirably brave for a Brit-flick being made now to be so proudly British. There are no American stars in Shaun Of The Dead, and few of the cast – at the time of casting anyway – were even known to them, you know, over there. Since then, Lucy Davis has stood on the Golden Globes stage on behalf of The Office, and Bill Nighy’s probably having meetings as you read this. Even the pub that’s the location for the big snooker cue fight is a real pub pub, with all the pork scratchings and clingfilmed rolls that brings to mind. And all of this in a film being made by Working Title, the company that almost created the 51st State genre in Four Weddings. In fact, Pegg claims there were only two moments in the making of the film in which they changed something for the potential Yanks in the popcorn queue. One was when he says about a zombie, “God, she’s so pissed!” which they changed to “drunk” (“’cos ‘pissed’ means angry over there,” says Pegg) and the other was when they changed “biro” to “pen”. Nothing really substantial then.
“The central premise is that it’s a British take on it,” says Wright. “If it was Americanised there wouldn’t be much to distinguish it from the American zombie films. I remember having shown Spaced to some Americans and the things they liked about it were that it was quite charming and it was kind of like our take on their genre. I think to do an Americanised version would be a big mistake. I think for every case where you have an American lead that works in a British film there are about 16 that don’t.”
It might be easy to see Shaun Of The Dead as in the lineage of George Romero’s unassailably-classic trilogy of zombie flicks, but Shaun is being cleverly marketed as a comedy horror, not the other way around. It was always difficult to care about the protagonists in Romero’s films, because they were sketched only partially better than their undead co-stars. In Shaun, zombies don’t appear until half an hour in, and even then, they’re almost invisible in terms of changing London’s rigid routine.
“People just don’t notice them, which is a kind of thing about apathy in the big city: you walk around with your eyes closed, so there’s a lot of time to get to know them,” says Pegg. “We’re kind of trying to do a similar thing to From Dusk Till Dawn, where you set up a very real situation and then you apply something totally unreal on top of it.”
Though most zombie movies aren’t exactly strong on subtext, the mighty Romero did at least try to elevate the genre by using zombies as some kind of shambling metaphor for society’s ills. In Night Of The Living Dead, it’s not hard to see race relations as it’s primary social influence, and consumerism is pretty blatantly targeted in the skin-thin allegory that is Dawn Of The Dead.
“Our one represents laziness,” Wright says. “The idea is that the characters are couch potatoes and have kind of zombified themselves. That’s the idea, that it represents the couch potato generation.
“The first thing we thought of was the idea of waking up on a Sunday morning and finding that there are zombies everywhere and tying it in with this strange hangover vibe,” he continues. “That was the initial idea, and then we asked what if this film is set over one long weekend? It’s the ‘what if?’ factor. What would you do if you looked out your window and they were outside? How would you defend yourself? You haven’t got any guns; what are you going to do? It was taking that aspect of it. But the course of his weekend doesn’t really change – he still manages to get round to his mum’s, he still manages to see his girlfriend, he still manages to get to the pub. So even though the world is ending, nothing much really changes.”
Pegg and Wright have been watching this stuff for as long as they can remember and can riff on the subject till sunset and beyond. An American Werewolf In London is the movie that keeps being referenced in terms of its balance between horror and comedy (though Wright maintains their film is a lot less graphic: “The gore is very fleeting,” he says). Talk about a film like Return Of The Living Dead and it’s difficult to get them off the topic. Wright in particular has strong views about 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle’s post-Millennial zombie – oops, sorry, horror movie.
“I didn’t like his sniffy attitude towards zombie movies,” he says, balancing a vegetables-in-gravy dinner on his knees. “To all the press he really went out of his way to say, ‘It’s not like those old films! Those old film are stupid.’ I mean, had he watched what he was ripping off?! But I think if it hadn’t been a hit I’m not sure we’d be sitting here today.”
Though Shaun Of The Dead offers up a cast made up of many of the new comedy mafia’s hippest names, the film really belongs to Simon Pegg. Wright tells us there isn’t a single scene without Pegg in it, so for someone who has only ever propped up movies in spit-and-cough cameos (24 Hour Party People, The Parole Officer, Guest House Paradiso), this is a major undertaking for the bleached 33-year-old. (Psst: he wrote himself as 29 in this, one of the fringe benefits of writing your own movie script.)
“Spaced was fairly energetic, but this is like times ten,” he says. “I got a busted shoulder, which I needed painkilling injections for, to go on. We filmed me getting an injection up the bum for the DVD. I got a brick in the scrotum. I’ve lost some skin, I’ve got bumps and bruises…”
Wherever Pegg goes, it’s not hard to find Nick Frost lumbering somewhere behind. They’ve known each other for years, initially through Pegg’s then-girlfriend. They’ve shared a flat together, and Pegg wrote a role in Spaced specifically for his old mate, who’d never acted before. They’ve even written a new sitcom called La Triviata, which started filming in February. And here he is again, playing second fiddle in a movie that could conceivably be the biggest Brit-flick since, erm, 28 Days Later.
“We’d often talk about what we’d do in the event of a zombie invasion,” says Frost, plonking himself down next to Pegg between takes.
“In real life, you’d be more proactive than Ed,” says Pegg. “You’d probably want to get in there a bit more.”
“I’d want to help. My selection of weapons would be very specific.”
“You’d have more of a plan where to go. We do have a plan, should it ever happen. We did, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, a couple of years ago, go to Wembley Stadium,” says Frost. “Somewhere with a big enough plot of grass where you could grow crops so you wouldn’t die of hunger.
“And first we’d go to the gun shop on Archway Road. We were going to go there – it’s called ‘Pax Guns’ – get there, then head down to Highbury. It’s all planned, if you want in.”
If we discount 28 Days Later (that’s not official, right, ‘cos Boyle’s so bloody obstinate), Shaun Of The Dead will be the first real, properly-budgeted British zombie flick in yonks. And it’s coming out at a time when the horror genre is undergoing a resurgence at the box office, with movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and The Ring doing far better than even their directors’ mums had hoped.
Shaun’s budget was £4.1 million, not a whopper in Hollywood terms but, for two people raised in the thrifty world of television comedy, it’s a freakin’ fortune.
“There was a scene where a plane crashed into the street which we had to leave out,” opines Pegg. “You know, you chance your arm. If anything, it was the whole thing; it was like I’ve always wanted to be up on screen fighting zombies, you know. And there’s a great scene which we saw yesterday where we’re just walking across the courtyard of my girlfriend’s flat and I’ve got a cricket bat, just wasing through all these zombies with a cricket bat. Brilliant.”
“You’re so unfeasibly casual when you’re under attack,” says Frost, smiling.
Should Shaun Of The Dead do what its creators are hoping, it’ll be a big hit in Europe and America. That recent scarefests have been denting the movie top tens with some force should hearten them. Then Pegg and Wright will finally be members of the elite movie club they’ve been such devotees of for so long. Even before Shaun, Wright was being sent horror scripts by people who’d obviously picked up on the fact that he was a director with a beating fanboy heart. He says now he’d be interested in taking on a different genre, and there’s every likelihood he’ll soon be being courted by the Evian crowd in swish LA eateries. As for Pegg, he has La Triviata coming up, and then, who knows? But it’s unlikely he’ll up sticks to la-la land, and if there’s any possibility he will, then we’ll have words.
“Bought Coffee, Called Mom, Dodged Zombies”. Brilliant, just brilliant. Only in Britain…SFX
Spaced Out?
Do we get a third series?
So, what’s up with Spaced? The series that catapulted Simon Pegg and Jessica Stephenson to cultdom and became perhaps the hippest show on television before bowing out 3 years ago? Pegg, it’s over to you:
“The official line is this,” he says. “Myself, Jess and Edgar are keen to complete the story arcs we started with the first and second series of Spaced, and although a third series looks unlikely at this time due to time and other commitments, we would like to produce one or two specials to bring it all to a close. The unofficial line is pretty much the same The props and sets cannot remain in storage indefinitely, and a decision will be made soon either way. Everyone is keen, though, and I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Tim, Daisy, et al.”
Typed up by Kelly (Wife of Rolex)