Most stateside moviegoers were introduced to the team of Nick Frost (actor), Simon Pegg (actor-writer), and Edgar Wright (writer-director) with the 2004 film Shaun Of The Dead, a funny, affectionate, slick send-up of zombie movies. But Frost, Pegg, and Wright have been working together since Spaced, a fondly remembered 1999-2001 UK series about a pair of slackers (Pegg and his series co-creator Jessica Stevenson) possibly destined to fall in love. The show, which can occasionally be seen in the U.S. on BBC America, relied on warmly conceived characters and a savvy command of pop culture, elements the team exported wholesale into Shaun and the new Hot Fuzz. Breaking with his tradition of playing slackers, Pegg plays a hardnosed London cop whose record puts his fellow cops to shame, leading to a forcible transfer to the country village of Sandford (actually Wright's hometown, Wells). There, he reluctantly begins a partnership with small-town cop Frost, whose knowledge of big-city police work is limited to the American action films that Hot Fuzz subsequently apes, and occasionally gleefully outdoes. The A.V. Club recently sat down with Pegg, Frost, and Wright for a conversation about Hot Fuzz's inspirations, people's assumptions about those inspirations, and what pop culture is doing to the latest generation of filmmakers.
The A.V. Club: Shaun Of The Dead had a direct source of inspiration—zombie movies in general, and George Romero in particular—and you obviously have a lot of affection for them. Do you have the same affection for the action films you're working with here?
Edgar Wright: Absolutely, even the ones that are seemingly derided. In the film, Nick's character's two favorite films are Point Break and Bad Boys 2. I wouldn't say they're the best cop films of all time, 'cause they're not, but they represent a particular strand of dumb, switch-your-brain-off, popcorn entertainment. They're what I call popcorn films. I'm a big fan; I like all sorts of genres. I do like an occasion to just switch my brain off and enjoy some mindless carnage. So this is definitely as affectionate toward the cop action genre as Shaun was toward zombies.
Simon Pegg: It's tough to approach something in this way if you don't really like it. You have to know it very well to… We don't parody it, particularly, but we know our stuff. You don't have that knowledge unless you're a fan of something. We come at it as fans, and as such, we have a really thorough working knowledge of the genre and know all its exponents. Even though we did actually do a 138-film research period. It was fun to do that. It was great to think about how we've got to watch Sudden Impact and Hero And The Terror today.
EW: Actually, Hero And The Terror was more of a chore.
SP: One of the less enjoyable ones.
EW: That was probably the low point of the 138 films. Well, The New York Ripper was the low point.
SP: I remember just sitting, thinking, "Why are we watching this?" It was so depressing.
EW: 'Cause it has a killer that makes Donald Duck noises as he snatches women. You can't go wrong with that.
Nick Frost: It's quite original, isn't it?
EW: It is original.
AVC: You need a gimmick if you're going to be a serial killer.
EW: I know, and a very odd gimmick.
NF: What would yours be?
EW: I think I'd make Donald Duck noises.
AVC: Was there any actor or director whose work was particularly helpful or inspirational for Hot Fuzz?
EW: I think we really wanted to cover all areas of the cop film. Within the two-hour running time, we pretty much cover the corruption cop genre, the fish-out-of-water cop genre, the serial-killer thriller cop genre, the buddy-action film. There's a lot of ground that we cover. I suppose people like Tony Scott, Michael Mann, John Woo, there's a lot of those elements, certainly in terms of the action and the overcaffeinated, ADD aspect of it. Obviously there's the classic '70s directors like Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Don Siegel, so we definitely tried to cover a lot of ground. It's a very kind of immersive tribute to the cop genre.
SP: The actor that influenced me most was Robert Patrick in Terminator 2. He's the cop that I base Nicholas Angel on, the unstoppable, transforming man.
AVC: You kind of run like him as well.
SP: Exactly, that's exactly what I did. That was entirely a rip from him. But I did like his sort of bemused seriousness, and I wanted Angel to be something of an automaton before he meets Danny, and Danny helps him become human.
NF: He's a bit like Spock, isn't he?
SP: Everything's in his eyebrows, he's confused by mirth, and he meets Danny.
NF: You'd like to arrest mirth.
SP: I'd like to throw mirth in prison, until I meet Danny. You know, actually seriously, I did kind of think of Angel as being something of a Terminator-style machine, and brought that to the role, I think. It was hard as well, because he's not funny. He's a sort of humorless character, and coming from comedy, having to put down your comedy weapons is quite scary to do, to play dead straight. But it works, because Angel has to be the sort of bemused center to the movie for a while, and leave the funny stuff to this guy.
NF: I think Danny's an entirely original character. I think if I based Danny on any actor, it would either be a Labrador that acts, or Dunston from Dunston Checks In.
AVC: You can't get away from the ape impressions.
NF: No. But Danny's like a big Labrador, really. He's just happy to be there. Once he meets Simon, the thing that he's always wanted and guessed that life could be like, Simon introduces him to that. So as characters, they're half-people.
SP: You complete me.
EW: Wouldn't it be great with Dunston Checks In, if in China the film was called My Butler, The Monkey?
NF: It really is. You knew that, right?
EW: Yes.
AVC: [To Pegg.] So this is the first time, working with these guys at least, you haven't played a listless slacker type. Did you really want to get away from that with this film?
SP: Absolutely. I've only played two sort-of slackers, in Spaced and in Shaun Of The Dead. They're different people, but they have the same kind of everyman quality, particularly as a twentysomething. In Nicholas Angel, I just wanted to play a character that wasn't anything like me and had nothing to do with me. Both Shaun and Tim have emotional similarities, whereas Nicholas Angel is nothing like me. I don't know that man. And that's why we went out and we met cops and interviewed cops thoroughly, so we could try to learn and try to tell the story with some truth. That's always important to us, is being truthful. Not guessing, not making any assumptions. Just coming at it with knowledge.
NF: If you know what you're talking about, the comedy's all the more funnier.
AVC: [To Frost.] Meanwhile, you seem to be playing someone dumber than you've played before.
NF: Yeah.
EW: He's less cynical.
NF: He is less cynical, absolutely. He's a very honest guy. Ed from Shaun Of The Dead, he was a cynical, slightly lazy, self-centered, mean character, but still fairly loveable. I guess if you weren't Shaun, you'd find him quite difficult to get on with. I think Danny is a much nicer… I think they're very different characters, that was fun. I don't want people to think I'm just…
EW: Danny's more of an innocent, really, and that kind of endears him to Nicholas Angel. His naïveté about the job and what he does, and what he thinks it should be, based on his knowledge of action films, it's quite charming, actually.
SP: Considering the amount of time he puts into the action buddy-movie genre, he's pretty blind as to what's going on around him. I think his unassailable positivity kind of wears Angel down in a way. No matter how many times Angel gives him a withering look, he still comes back, like a little dog. Eventually, Angel kind of… I don't smile in the film for 43 minutes, I think it is, and when I do, it's because Danny made me laugh. It's like at that point, Angel gives into Danny, like he's a force of nature and it's impossible to resist him.
AVC: A lot of comedy is very flat, stylistically. The weight isn't on the technical aspects of the film. But from Spaced on, you've developed a style of comedy that's very much in the filmmaking. How did that style develop?
EW: I think when I was getting into directing, or wanting to be a director, when I was a teenager, the two films that really inspired me were Raising Arizona and Evil Dead II. And in the case of the former, I thought, "Wow. Why don't all comedies look like this?" And then as I started doing comedy, particularly when I started doing it on TV, you'd see BBC producers saying, "It's not about the camera work, it's all about the performers. Don't make it over-tricksy. Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that's it. That's all we need to do." And I was thinking, "Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?" I think that's kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together, really. The script and the performances and the style all clicked. Shaun was, in a way, a little bit more laid-back than Spaced. Spaced was really incredibly dense and fast, because of the number of flashbacks and inserts and things. Shaun was a little bit more laid-back because of the genre, because it was a zombie film with a creeping sense of doom, so that kind of fed into doing the long Steadicam shots and shooting it like a John Carpenter film and it all being 2:35 wide-angle. This film, because it's in the cop action genre, particularly riffing on the more recent ADD aspect of cinema was just a chance to go completely over the top. Which I thoroughly enjoyed, for the record.
By the end of the principal photography, we had done 1,700 shots. Shaun Of The Dead, we did 800. So we did over double. That's not including, sometimes we were shooting with three cameras. The film has six and a half thousand edits in it. Which is crazy.
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