irector Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg are famous in the United Kingdom for their cult science-fiction TV series, Spaced, which ran for two seasons. Wright, 30, made his feature film debut 10 years ago. Pegg is considered one of Britain's top comedy performers, but has also appeared in Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers.
Together, Wright and Pegg have co-written a "zombie romantic comedy" called Shaun of the Dead (scheduled for release in the United States on Sept. 24), directed by Wright and starring Pegg as Shaun. It's the story of an average working man who decides to fix the problems in his life, romantic and otherwise, on the same day the dead happen to rise.
Last year, Wright and Pegg were in the third week of filming Shaun of the Dead when they spoke with Science Fiction Weekly. On location in London, they dish on zombies, comedy and the fine art of balancing the two genres.
How did Shaun of the Dead come about?
Pegg: We did a scene in our TV show, Spaced, where I was fighting zombies. And we decided that we'd make a film because we had so much fun. We wanted to write a cross-genre film that was like a romantic comedy and a horror film and scary in the same vein as American Werewolf, which is our main paradigm. So we wanted to treat the zombie genre with utter respect. We're big fans of the Romero trilogy. His zombies were a mix of voodoo and vampirism and werewolves, and they sort of mashed them all together. We wanted to keep that very real and serious, but on top of that, transplant some comedy and some romance.
Wright: Almost imagine that if this was happening in Pittsburgh, this is happening here in London at the same time, so imagine it's part of the same universe, in a way. We had a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern idea of rather than follow the SWAT team or the Army or the scientists trying to crack this epidemic, it's like, "What about those two guys?"
How does Shaun of the Dead compare to other zombie movies?
Wright: We wanted to be reasonably faithful, because there's a tendency with a lot of horror films, post-Scream, to make it very flash as a way to disguise the genre, as if horror is a dirty word. Ours is a lot more faithful to the source. 28 Days Later, which I liked, I was a bit put off by in the press they kept saying, "Oh, it's not a zombie film. It's much more serious with that." There was a fear of using the "zed" word, which we completely go the other way.
Our absolute landmark film is American Werewolf in London, in terms of managing to balance having characters that you sympathize about and the laughs and the shocks. The Sam Raimi and the Peter Jackson ones are great, but they're much more like gory cartoons. We really like that you actually sympathize with the characters, like when Griffin Dunne gets killed in American Werewolf, you think, "He's been making me laugh for the last 10 minutes."
[Peter Jackson's] Brain Dead is amazing. It's very much like a gory Tom and Jerry kind of thing, which is brilliant. We deliberately thought, let's do something different, and so none of the zombies do anything funny. All of the comedy comes from the characters. The zombies are like a gory backdrop to it all. In terms of the gore, we wanted to make that aspect realistic. We didn't want to make the zombies too campy.
Pegg: There's been some pretty gross things on set. There are body parts lying in the street.
Wright: I had to teach some kids how to eat a body.
Pegg: We had this great vignette of when they're driving through London and they're seeing what's happening, they drive past an ice cream truck with the ice cream man on the floor and a bunch of kids eating his guts.
28 Days Later was released before you started shooting Shaun of the Dead. Were you concerned to see another zombie movie released when you were already committed to making yours?
Wright: When I first heard about it, I thought, it's almost like doing a zombie upgrade: They can go faster. When I actually saw the film, I thought, but when they go faster, you can't tell who are the protagonists and who are the zombies, because suddenly everyone's running.
Pegg: I think they kind of miss the point of what makes zombies so cool and weird: They are very shambolic, weak, ineffective as monsters. And they're not monsters, they're just human beings. But if you get it wrong and you get a bit cocky, then they get on top of you, and you're dead. There's something wonderful about doing it like today, in a scene where we stood and there were hundreds of them around us, just gradually coming in, but you've got time to stop and think, "I'm going to go over here now." And that's quite a weird thing, in a way, that you can actually be in quite close proximity.
How did you feel when you saw 28 Days Later?
Wright: It was a weird mix of emotions, because I wanted it to be good, because I knew if it was a hit we'd stand a better chance of ours getting made. But I didn't want it to be that good, but it's totally different. In a way, it's really good for us as well, because with that and Resident Evil and the Dawn of the Dead remake, people who don't know the original films so well, everybody now has a versing in the genre. I think a lot of teenagers know zombies from the Resident Evil games more than the old films. And, literally, the crew have never seen a zombie film. I put together a reference tape, an hour and 20 minutes long: Everything you wanted to know about zombies but were afraid to ask, with clips from 17 films. It was quite tough work, because when you cut together the endings of 17 different films, it becomes quite numbing after awhile.
How did you approach combining a romantic comedy with a zombie movie?
Pegg: We just always thought, "Let's try to keep the humor in the situation rather than have comedy zombies—let's try to balance the two genres" and come up with something that was concurrently funny and scary.
The first thing we did was, we watched all of our favorite horror films again. We watched American Werewolf. We watched really great structured films like Gremlins and Back to the Future, which have a very poetic structure. The script is very lyrical. Raising Arizona is a really favorite film of mine. The way that film's structured is great.
Wright: The way people perform is very dry and naturalistic. So it's not massively broad. In the last five years, peaking with The Office, it's been like a trend toward very naturalistic comedy. Simon, particularly, is such a great reactive actor. He's essentially the straight man. He doesn't have gags, as such. He's funny being straight, being the Everyman. We didn't want it to be too broad and knock-about. We're always embarrassed by some of our comedy exports, like Benny Hill and Mister Bean. Please don't judge us on that.
The casting as well has been great. Some of the Office people are in it. There's this gag in the film, where Jessica Stevenson, who's Daisy in Spaced, plays Shaun's old friend. At one point, they bump into her and her friends. The other friends are like a facsimile cast, mirroring ours. It's almost like they've bumped into another film. And every part is played by an equivalent actor. Martin Freeman and Simon always have this friendly rivalry because they're always up for the same roles. We asked, "Will you be the other Simon?" Between me and Simon, we know everybody in the comedy community, because it's not that big. There was one actor who was up for another role. One of the guys is playing the other version of the part he didn't get. And at first, I thought, "We can't ask him. It's too rude." But I thought, if I don't ask him, he'll say, "They didn't even give me that!" So I rang him up, I said, "This is going to sound really strange. You know that part you didn't get? Would you like to play the other bit?" And so he's in it now, which is good.
What was your greatest challenge in making this movie?
Pegg: Today I did 166 killer blows with a cricket bat. We did 27 takes of those two action scenes, and that was really tiring. I counted all the zombies I hit in the head, and I counted all the takes we did, and it was 166 blows.
Wright: We're deliberately shooting on locations that are tricky in terms of they've got a lot of color to them—they're very busy roads. There's two Steadicam shots in the film. One where Shaun gets up on a Saturday morning and goes out of his house to a local shop and buys a Coke and comes out. And he does exactly the same thing on a Sunday when the zombies are rising, and he's hung over and doesn't notice. They're two-and-a-half-minute takes. I showed it to my girlfriend, and she said, "That's great!" I said, "It's even more great knowing that out of every corner of the frame there's 20 people who can't get to the shop. And you just have to be so patient, because you have no right to tell people they can't go into their house.
We did this thing the other day that was a Woody Allen type of shot. It's more fun to throw other things into the bag rather than just build the horror references, because it's almost too easy to do John Carpenter shots or George Romero shots. Because it's comedy as well, it's been getting into other ensemble things.
How does Shaun of the Dead compare to your TV series, Spaced?
Wright: We spent 18 months writing Shaun of the Dead. We did 40 episodes of Spaced. We were the same age as the characters, and it feels like we've said all there is to say about the PlayStation generation. This film is taking the age of the characters a little bit older. I absolutely adored doing Spaced, and it's been so good for us in terms of the people who respond to it. If we did it now, we'd be doing it under false pretenses. What's nice is, everybody from Spaced is in this, and the tone is very similar.
On Spaced, I directed it and I script-edited it, but I didn't officially write it. This is the first thing we've co-written. It was like using a zombie film to actually do essentially a 20-something comedy. We did a scene in Spaced—it was one episode that revolved around the running gag that there were zombies in the flat. We did a John Carpenter sequence in the flat, and we thought, this is just too much fun. It was one of those days where you think, I can't believe I'm getting paid for this.
Spaced was very referential, with lots of pop-culture references, and in doing a feature film the one thing we decided not to do is have any references. There are pop culture in terms of music and other films, but there are no other horror film references at all. We decided to take them out completely. I think, post-Scream, it's all been done now.
Spaced was all single camera. It wasn't shot in front of an audience. So it was kind of shot like a feature film in terms of the blocking and the camera work. But this has been funny in terms of, on one hand I find myself thinking, I've got to think about the horror aspect, and I've got to think about the comedy as well. I'm always thinking about three different things at one time. So I'm thinking about the visuals and the performances and the horror element, but I suppose it's getting used to not being able to do 100 takes a day, which is what we used to do with Spaced.
The style of camera work is very similar, because it was aping a lot of films. For a sitcom, it was reasonably cinematic. It was pastiching a lot of things. You find that you don't have to do as many closeups, because you can play comedy bits and two-shots and still make it look striking. You can constantly do John Carpenter style of shots, where zombies are in frame, over the shoulder and things like that, all the time. I find it a challenge because I always want to get more shots. I never end a day satisfied.
I was talking to somebody at a studio, and he said, "Yeah, but the horror and the comedy—that's going to be difficult to pull off." And I said, "That's why it's going to be good. That's why we're doing it."
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Also in this issue:
John Clute
and
the cast and crew of Smallville
