God bless Simon Pegg. Today, he's suffering The Cold From Hell, but he hasn'trainchecked the long-promised interview. He's just finished a signing at Forbidden Planet - two hours of fan-chatting to publicise the box set re-release of spaced - and now we're meeting up at Dean street's hyper-trendy watering hole The Groucho Club and ordering a pot of warm lemon. "I'm sorry I've got this hideous cold", he apologises, sniffily. "But I love SFX," he gushes "I bought it for ages. Now let's find a quiet corner..."
Pegg has just returned from the States where he's been on an intensive cross-country promotion for Shaun of the Dead. It was always going to be a gamble giving back the Yanks a British take on one of their home-grown genres but they've lapped it up. The American one-sheet proudly shows off glowing quotes from Sam Raimi, Stephen King, Peter Jackson, and George Romero, and the film, despite opening in only 600 theatres in it's first weekend (about a fifth of the number of cinemas it's Top Ten rivals opened in), it made a whopping $3.28 million.
Did you have a good trip to America then?
"It was great! We went to 70 different cities and were only there for about 20minutes in each it seems. I'd done the majority of the press for Shaun of the Dead here in Britian and Nick (Frost) and Edgar (Wright) had kind of got away with not doing very much, so I was fucking bored of answering the same questions about the film, so was kind of plastering on this smile every morning."
The response on the internet has been amazing.
"Oh yeah! We just had the most amazing weekend! It went really, really well and then we got to like number seven or eight in the top 10."
You must have been nervous taking it over there, because in some ways it's such a British film, there's no guarantee American's would like it.
"I don't know...once we got George Romero's group, nothing else mattered you know? So yeah, I suppose, but it's all icing on the cake now. We've made the film we wanted to make and everything else is a bonus."
You showed it to Tarantino too...
"He went to see it again last night actually. He really liked it and we impressed quite a lot of people like him and Robert Roderiguez and Stephen King! Sam Raimi came and saw it and gave us a great quote! Edgar got this great thing in the post, it was this massive Italian Evil Dead 2 poster. We were looking at it for a whole minute before we saw at the bottom it said "Edgar, you are now the master of horror comedy. Can't wait to see what you do next. Sam Raimi" And you know, Evil Dead 2 was the reason he became a film maker so you know he's kind of hit his peak already!"
So who were you most starstruck by?
"Tarantino I think, but then you know he's just a really lovely big geek: there's nothing different about him to how you would percieve him. He's just a really enthusiastic, very sweet man. Rodriguez was lovely too. I havn't actually met Romero yet. We spoke to him on the phone a lot. It's shocking when you're talking to them or having our work recognised by them. It's amazing!"
Were many of them aware of Spaced?
"None of them, I think. I think Tarantino's got Spaced though, 'cause we sent him a copy. We were constantly saying to Peter Jackson to watch it because everyone at Weta loves Spaced."
What are the DVD sales of the series like in the States?
"It's not released over there because of an issue with the music clearance. It's so meticulously scored that the cost of clearing it in North America would be astronomical. They're showing it on TV over there on cable."
What's the situation on your Shaun follow-up? You've said you want to do "the British cop/action movie"?
"At the moment we're at the preliminary research stage. We're looking into police procedure and watching films so we've actually just watched about ten, 15 movies about the police and we've sent out a questionaire to loads of coppers asking for thier crazy stories of life on the beat. So that's as far as we've got. We don't even have a title yet. I think Edgar suggested Hot Fuzz or something. I don't know if that's going to be it. 'Cause Shaun was like a complete genre film, this is going to be an action film, set in rural England.
"That's the deal so far. But we've ended up promoting Shaun back-to-back since April. We had a period when we thought, 'Now we can settle down and do the new one.' But that's gone now and it's gone back to promo, promo, promo. Which is fun though."
Apart from Star Wars, what were your teenage genre passions?
"I guess when I was a teenager it started to be the likes of The Thing and American Warewolf In London. You know, the films that came outof that golden age of horror, '78-'82. Then I got into Woody Allen in my late teens, but as far as genre films are concerned, definately Carpenter's and Raimi's stuff. Because video was just sort of kicking of in the '80's suddenly you could see films that you'd never have been able to see."
What about telly stuff?
"I can't think of any one I used to watch religiously. There was a bit of a dearth of genre TV, not like now: I mean, what was about?"
It was mostly kind of disco sci-fi.
"I loved the Box of Delights, that was my favourite TV show: I know you've mentioned that in the magazine before. That was a great show-I love those children's dramas that sort of broke loads of boundaries in terms of special effects."
Did you have a gang of fellow fanboys?
"There were like four of us that used to go back to this guy's house every lunchtime and watch the same episode of the Young Ones and we were all mad into Star Wars, you know, around the time that Jedi came out. In our school holidays we used to go see it in the morning and then we'd just hang out at this Star Wars exhibition that was in one of the toy shops and we'd do that every day for, like, the whole week of half-term. I was really into comedy as well. You know, Comic Strip, The Young Ones, and everything that followed them there. That was really it in terms of TV, but I guess I got my genre jollies from the movies."
How did you meet Edgar Wright?
"I met him because he'd seen me on The Stand Up Show. Matt Lucas and David Walliams had seen Fistful of Fingers, which was his first feature, and they really liked his way of directing. So theygot him in to direct Mash and Peas, which was a special they did on the Paramount comedy channel. I was friends with Dave as he was the year below me at Bristol University and Edgar came up to me and said, "I saw you on The Stand Up Show," and just because we were all working with the same people we ended up making a show callen Asylum together, and with Jessica (Stevenson) as well, and that's how the three of us got together."
It's odd how many people involved in the new comedy mafia have science fiction fanboy leanings. There's a whole load of Doctor Who references in Little Britain, then there's the League of Gentlemen and even Black Books's Bill Bailey with his Lord of the Rings fixation...
"I think that comedy is also a very geeky thing. You find people are often very meticulous about detail, as are people who go into Sci-fi. The whole thing about being a fan of science fiction is that kind of joy of detail and about getting serious about something that isn't serious in any way, and being proud of it! So I think there are probably parallels between comedians and geeks. Having said that, Ricky Gervais is a big zombie film fan and he's the first person to take the piss out of me for liking Star Wars. And the League boys have always had a love of British genre stuff. They're big fans of Hammer and Amicus."
How did you get started on Spaced?
"Basically, we got taken to LWT for a meeting. All of us were quite ballsy in those days. They'd be like 'Do you want to do a TV show?' and we were like 'Yeah alright!' We found it halarious that anyone would want us to. Everyone just kept on saying yes to us! 'We'll write it.' 'Okay!' 'And we want to do seven episodes.' 'Okay!' 'And we want Edgar to direct it.' 'Okay!' 'And we want this guy who'd never fucking acted before to be in it...' but they just said yes all the way. There was one point in the shooting when Edgar nearly got sacked because he refused to send the rushes to the producer. Because the way he shoots is that he just covers everything - a lot of set-ups, a lot of angles, a lot of tapes - so that when he gets into the edit he just has everything he needs. He's got it pretty much mapped out in his head, but he likes to cover it. So he knew this executive producer would sit down and see this take after take of the same thing and complain about it. To his credit he said, 'No, you can see it when it's done!' And he nearly got the sack. We would have walked out as well if he'd got sacked."
Do you actually have any ambitions outside of movies now? I mean, would you and Edgar, for instance, be interested in writing an episode of the new Dr Who?
"Well, Oddly, Edgar was asked to direct Doctor Who but had to turn it down. I don't know. I always loved Dr Who as a kid but I don't have what I would call a Mark Gatiss-like understanding of it. Mark is a real Who fan and he's written novels and stuff. I always think about writing comics and think I have to write something completely original and new because even with Batman and Spiderman I don't have a completely encyclopaedic knowledge of their history and all the crazy things that have happened to them."
Is your future now completely in movies, then? I thought you were writing the series called La Triviata.
"Well, I've had to put that on hold because I havn't got time now because of the new film. Nick frost's taken over from me and I'm gonna be script editor on it. Yeah, I'd say it is but only because that's what I'm doing for the immediate future. I mean, if it kind of takes off in the States that'll mean we'll get a bit more backing over there. I want to stay here; I don't really want to go over there and work because I'd rather keep making British movies. It's more fun. I mean, it would be great to go over and be in whatever just for the hell of it.
"I realise the more I've done this the more I've realised that the trappings of it are so not the reason for doing it. When we were making Shaun of the Dead I walked onto set one morning when we were in the Winchester, and I had this thing strapped to my chestso I could have the gun underneath and I was thinking, 'This is my job, this is what I do, it's not anything else, it's this!' In an ideal world it would be really nice to just make films and just show them to a bunch of friends, 'cause it's terrifying when it comes to the point when people start writing reviews of it."
Have you watched it with an audience?
"Yeah, quite a few times."
Do they laugh at the moments you'd expect them to laugh?
"Well, the wierdest thing was the Americans laugh more loudly and are more vociferous in terms of their chanting and booing. We saw it in Austin, Texas at the cinema where Harry Knowles and the Ain't it Cool gang all hang out and they were whooping so loudly that they were missing bits of it. That's really nice,but then again they wouldn't laugh at bits like when Shaun asks Edgar what he wants from the shop and he says 'Cornetto', which, I think, tends to get a laugh over here but over there it was silence because they don't know what a Cornetto is."
Have you been approached for any stateside projects?
"Not really. I've got an agent over there now and we've certainly had a lot of interest from producers and stuff. Obviously there's a buzz around the film over there now so I'm expecting the offers to start rolling in! But we've already got this thing to do and we've got to do it. It'll probably be that whatever kind of buzz the film is carrying will have died down by the time I do anything in America. Although we are gonna be in Romero's Land of the Dead, that's gonna be good."
Oh yeah, tell us about that!
"When we were in LA we went and had our faces cast. I.m actually going to have Howard Sherman'soriginal Bub make-up which will be glimpsed in the background. It should be a great film."
What budget has Romero got on this one? The others had such a punk spirit because they weren't million dollar projects.
"Oh, it's not big. I know for a fact that in preliminary meetings there were some discussions to 'sex it up' a bit. You can imagine all these young besuited execs who've never seen the originals and all they've got is 28 days later and the Dawn remake saying, 'we want zombies who can sprint' Romero is like 'well that's not what we do'. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out. They don't want it to be an NC17, they want to make it an R movie so it gets seen. It's interesting. I got this very strange phone call from the film's FX guy Greg Nicotero asking if anything has been edited for the States, because obviously David's death in the filmis really graphic and the film was an R. He wanted to know how far they could push their film before it became an NC17. I thought, 'Wow this is the guy who's doing the special effects for the new Romero movie, asking me how far you can push it for the new film'."
Let's hope it avoids too much CGI.
"Oh yeah, absolutely. I saw a whole load of the make-up tests, and it looks great. Edgar really resisted CGI with Shaun, but if it's used very subtly it's very good for augmenting physical effects, rather than completely swamping everything, like George Lucas. Actually it was so wierd watching those documentaries on the Star Wars DVDs. It seems to me it was all it ever was with him: to paint a pretty picture."
What do you think of the prequels now? Do they still irritate you?
"Yeah. I think it distracts you with Star Wars carrotts in front of you, so you see all the lightsabers and the glimpse of the Death Star plans and you think 'Yeah!' But then you start to think 'No God that was awful.' I saw this film Garden State - which was done by that guy from Scrubs - and Natalie Portman is amazing and beguiling in it. Hayden Christensen similarly is brilliant in Shattered Glass and Ewan McGregor has always been a really good actor. In Star Wars they're rubbish because they're given nothing. They're great actors being forced to talk to tennis balls!"
When you watch Shaun do you get a sense of "I wish I could change that"?
"Yeah, occasionally. There are gags we didnt have time to shoot. It wouldn't have necessarily made the film any more enjoyable but it would have been nice for our complete vision to have got up there on the screen."
Is your girlfriend into any of your more fanboy obsessions?
"Yeah, she loves Buffy! I introduced her to it. I had that great thing of saying, 'What you've never seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer?' and then going back to episode one and watching the whole thing with her. We're about to do the same thing with Firefly because somebody gave me a copy of the DVD and I havn't seen any of it yet. So yeah, I still get to do that kind of thing and she quite likes it. She's not quite as mad about it as I am. But I must admit I didn't really love Buffy so much after the sixth series. I really didn't get on with the seventh series."
So what are you watching at the moment?
"I've been working so hard lately I havn't had a chance to watch much. I kind of got into Smallville but I've missed so many that I havn't really caught up with it. I got back into Northern Exposure; I got a really great box set which had loads of outtakes. The one who's really into most of this is my sister. She got me into Buffy and she's just got me Alias. She's really good at loaning stuff."
And Spaced series 3?
"We certainly want to do more of it, it's just a case of when. The current party line is we'll make a third one if Channel 4 repeat the first two. The second series of Spaced sold really well on DVD and Channel 4 has only shown it once! It doesn't feel as though they got behind it in any way. Watch this space...
Typed up by Beverley (WaitinforSimon). Thanks!