Nerd Do Well

by Simon Pegg

  So on a misty night, in an enormous rail depot just outside Toronto, Edgar and I met our hero in the flesh for the first time and were overjoyed to notice he was wearing a Shaun of the Dead badge on his jacket.21

  The next day, we reported to the make-up trailer to have our zombie make-up applied. Both Edgar and I had been head-cast at the KNB workshop in Van Nuys, California, a few months before so that Greg could prepare our latex facial appliances personally. Knowing how much of a fan of Day of the Dead’s Bub I was, Greg had found the original moulds for Howard Sherman’s make-up and modelled them on to my head cast so that the face he glued over mine was that of my all-time favourite zombie.

  If ever there was a moment for making use of the ESTB, it was now. To have stepped from the device into my living room made up as Bub, as I watched Day of the Dead at the tender age of sixteen would have been so much fun. Well, at least for the future me. The younger me would have probably fainted or else ruined a perfectly good pair of skin-tight black jeans.

  Working with Romero was an extraordinary pleasure and it was hard to not gush every time I sat next to him at the cluster of on-set monitors referred to quaintly as the video village. I wanted to tell him exactly how much his work had meant to me over the years and the effect it had had on me as a person let alone as an artist.

  When it came to shooting our scene, the enormity of the moment did not escape me or indeed Edgar. Rather than just be random faces in a shuffling zombie gang, George had given us our own specific moment. In a bustling shanty and allegorical township in the shadow of an exclusive fortified apartment complex called Fiddler’s Green, a busy marketplace offered various zombie-based entertainment for anaesthetised survivors looking for a thrill. One such attraction gave the chance to have your picture taken with a zombie. Edgar and I, in full KNB zombie make-up, complete with scleral contact lenses and fake teeth, dangled from chains, gnashing and moaning at grim fun seekers as they posed for photos. Internally, I couldn’t help but once again channel Howard Sherman’s Bub, even between takes when it felt somehow easier to remain in character. Masks are extremely powerful dramatic tools for actor and audience alike, since they completely alter the wearer both visually and, to whatever degree the actor permits, psychologically. Remaining in character was thus almost inevitable while literally wearing someone else’s face, albeit rubber and not an Ed Gein-style trophy.

  When George approached us after the first take with notes, I did, however, snap back into human mode, because I wanted to listen carefully as he explained a few beats he required us to hit for the shot and I didn’t want to look like a knob.

  As he walked back to the video village, I couldn’t help turning to Edgar and saying, ‘We just got directed by George Romero!’ It was a heck of a moment for both of us and its significance sent us into terrifying zombie grins of geekish joy. The same man who had instructed Bill Heinzman (the first and fastest of George’s zombie children) to stagger across Evan’s City Cemetery in 1968, inspiring Russell Streiner’s Johnny to utter the famous line ‘They’re coming to get you, Barbara’, had just instructed us. In geek terms, it doesn’t get much cooler than that.

  In terms of my childhood zombie love and my eventual participation in a zombie movie of my own, I could not have hoped for better closure on this particular chapter of my life than the world premiere of Land of the Dead in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 2005. The event was attended by a host of luminaries from George’s zombie anthology, all of whom I was thrilled to meet.

  Before the film began a speech was made in George’s honour and a poll was taken among the crowd to determine exactly how many people in the audience had participated in a George Romero film. Edgar and myself rose to our feet, along with the other alumni whose faces we knew so well, to receive a round of applause from the assembled zombie fans who had turned out. Quentin Tarantino, the man responsible for the film that played an important part in my bonding with Nick Frost, playfully insisted we ‘sit our punk asses down’ since our film was a rip-off of Romero, not a Romero original. After reminding our tormentor that we were in fact in the film we were about to watch, he shut up and we legitimately enjoyed a few moments as bona fide members of the Pittsburgh zombie massive.

  The next day, Greg took Edgar, Quentin and myself to the Evan City Cemetery where the opening sequence of Night of the Living Dead was filmed and where I enjoyed the bizarre and fun experience of playing zombies with one of my all-time favourite directors.

  After the cemetery, we moved on to the Monroeville Mall, the main location for Dawn of the Dead. Despite inevitable modernisations, much of the mall remained recognisable from the film, particularly the utility areas and the boiler room, which echoed with the exact same whine of machinery that underscored David Emge’s wordless battle with a dead janitor.

  On the roof of the building, we stood where Ken Foree had kicked his way to safety and taken off into uncertainty with Gaylen Ross and grinned from ear to ear at being given access to such an auspicious location. It may seem strange to some that two grown men could derive such enormous pleasure from standing on the roof of a shopping centre in suburban Pittsburgh, but Edgar and I, it’s fair to say, were standing on top of the world.

  Disappointing Interlude

  A

  s George Lucas said to his bank manager, ‘I’m going to return to Star Wars for a while,’ and address the dreaded prequels. After defacing the original films as a means of road-testing new effects technology, Lucas produced three ghastly prequels, which all but punched the love out of me. Signs were good at first – the trailer brought tears to my eyes when it premiered on MTV. I sat in front of the television and felt the emotion one feels when reunited with a much loved friend. It had been sixteen years since Return of the Jedi and here, unfolding before my eyes, was the confirmation that I would be going back to the universe that had so inspired me as a child.

  To add to the excitement, actor and friend Peter Serafinowicz had been cast as the voice of Darth Maul, the new villain, a scary-looking horned fellow with a red-and-black face and demonic contact lenses. A special trailer showcasing the character was released and a group of us piled round to Pete’s house to watch it, after it had taken an excruciating twelve hours to download. This was, after all, the era of 56K dial-up modems, nowhere near as speedy as today’s broadband fibre optics. Kids these days don’t know they’re born with their perpetual online status and nanosecond downloads, I remember when it took minutes for a web page to load and iPods were almost an inch thick – an inch! We gathered round Peter’s computer and clicked play, barely containing our wonder that one of our own was part of the Star Wars universe, that Pete was a Darth. It all seemed like a wonderful dream.

  However, it wasn’t long before the signs of impending disappointment started to appear, like the dust motes that fall from the rafters seconds before a major earthquake. Thanks to early reactions from critics and fans alike, a nagging doubt had already been poking away at me, but it had largely been kept at bay by my monumental levels of excitement. Of course, there was also the creeping realisation that the special editions were shit and the awful moments of ill-judged slapstick in the trailer didn’t help, nor did the slightly flat artificiality of the environments on display.

  Before the evidence laid itself out with sickening certainty, the small hints at the fate of my beloved franchise were easy to ignore, even as they became more pronounced. Pete called me after a screening in the States, and with one of the deepest sighs ever to cross the Atlantic, he said, in the rich tones of his lovely, deep, Liverpool accent, ‘It’s just not very good.’ I didn’t feel disappointment, I still felt armoured against it; such was my immunity against the failure of my beloved Star Wars, I was determined to see it for myself and as quickly as possible. With a small amount of disposable income in my pocket left over from the first series of Spaced, I purchased a ticket to New York with the express intention of seeing The Phantom Menace.

  I arrived in Manhattan one early evening
in August of 1999 and checked into the Paramount Hotel on West 46th Street. I dumped my bags and took off into the night to find a cinema that was playing the movie. It wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be and I eventually found a small movie theatre on East 34th Street, bought my popcorn and settled into a front-row seat to watch the film I had waited sixteen years to see.

  As the Lucasfilm logo rippled across the screen and the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare blared from the speakers, I bristled with excitement, emitting an involuntary whoop that was echoed by one or two of the other faithfuls in the audience. However, I soon became aware of an uneasy feeling of apprehension in the crowd, which was uncharacteristically quiet for an American audience. The film had been out for several weeks by this point and consequently the majority of the really avid Star Wars fans had been and gone and many had not come back. My excitement had already been dampened slightly by the inauspiciousness of the theatre, and this sense of miserable dread was only exacerbated by a problem with the projector that upset the alignment of the image, so that when that moment finally occurred and the Star Wars titles appeared on the screen, accompanied by John Williams’s iconic score, the bottom half of the lettering was at the top of the screen while the top half protruded from the bottom, fittingly like a row of gravestones. I had a bad feeling about this.

  From the opening scene it appeared something was not right. The first line was badly dubbed and, just as Pete had reported, the film simply wasn’t very good. In actual fact, Pete’s critique had proved somewhat generous. The film was a boring, turgid, confused mess of pretentions and ill-thought-out science-fiction conceits, masquerading as children’s entertainment and told with all the dexterity of a four-year-old recounting his summer holiday with a paintbrush.

  I left the cinema in a daze and wandered up 34th Street with a couple of fellow Brits who had stumbled out alongside me, obviously experiencing a similar sense of ennui. We hadn’t walked more than a block before we found ourselves admitting our disappointment. It was an odd feeling, which came something close to liberation in a strange way; like admitting to an addiction or confessing a terrible crime. I had spent much of my youth championing Star Wars, not just in the playground to those who claimed the most recent rip-off was somehow better, but intellectually to cineastes who dismissed it as artistically bankrupt. I would still disagree with the latter charges even now when discussing the first three films, but I always felt an odd defensiveness about my love of the movies, particularly as an adult, which occasionally felt like a burden. Now, I didn’t have to endure that burden again. Star Wars was undeniably rubbish and there was nothing I could do to change that.

  The next morning, I went to see it again, just to make sure. I had awoken as though the previous night had been a bad dream and blamed jet lag, the weight of anticipation and the dodgy projection at the cinema, and resolved to give it another chance. Predictably, it was shit again. Stumbling numbly out of the theatre once more, I realised I was alone in New York and completely bereft. I decided to go and see another film, just to take my mind off Star Wars, and noticed that a film called The Matrix was playing in the same theatre. Two hours later, I re-emerged into the street full of the excitement and satisfaction that The Phantom Menace had failed to inspire. The Matrix seemed fresh and cool and visually breathtaking; making wonderful, intelligent use of CGI to augment the on-screen action, striking a perfect balance of the real and the hyperreal. It was possibly the coolest film I had ever seen. Ironically, fraternal directing team the Wachowskis faltered quickly with their sequels, killing their baby in just three years. Credit to George Lucas, it took him twenty-five to murder his.

  Return/Revenge

  R

  eturning home to begin writing the second series of Spaced, I decided to channel my disappointment at The Phantom Menace into my character, Tim, and use him to express my feelings on the subject. We were even able to channel some of that dissatisfaction into the first series during the editing process, hastily adding the caption ‘Three good Star Wars films later’ as passage of time after the characters spend an evening watching the original trilogy.

  During the filming of the first series, we had approached Lucasfilm’s licensing department and asked permission to use various Star Wars merchandise for set dressing, as Tim Bisley, like me, was an inveterate fan. They said no to everything, presumably because they were gearing up for a whole new batch of products and didn’t want to generate any unnecessary nostalgia for the old stuff. I’m speculating there of course. The truth is, I think they were just being overcautious, in case we took the holy trilogy’s name in vain, which at that time seemed like an extremely unlikely event.

  By the time the second series went into production, the first series had aired and Lucasfilm’s licensing people, seeing that our intentions were honourable and affectionate, were more than happy for us to use anything we wanted. By this time, however, the damage had been done and we didn’t really want to. Besides, it would have been hard to justify, since you have to supply context for usage and ‘we’re going to burn it’ doesn’t present a convincingly positive proposal. As it was we settled for a number of cardboard boxes pointedly labelled ‘Star Wars stuff’, as we mounted our scene-for-scene re-enactment of Darth Vader’s funeral, substituting Star Wars itself as the corpse burning before the grieving son.

  Despite everything, I was still first in line for the second prequel, Attack of the Clones, even though the title, like its predecessor, sounded like an abdominal complaint. I don’t wish the following metaphor to come across as flippant, I must preface it by saying I am fully aware of the horror and hardships caused by domestic abuse in all its forms, but my relationship with Star Wars in later years is comparable, symbolically at least, to living with an abusive partner. No matter how let down and violently disappointed by it I felt, I would always return for more, as though nothing had ever happened, making excuses for previous transgressions and dismissing them as anomalous. So it was when I sat down to watch the film at the Odeon Leicester Square at a press screening I had somehow managed to blag tickets for. This film seemed to have the potential to abolish the memory of its predecessor. It promised more action and a more complex character in Anakin Skywalker, thankfully no longer a bowl-haircutted cutie saving the day by accident. There were lots of light sabres and a character that looked a bit liked Boba Fett. It claimed a darker feel, aligning it stylistically with The Empire Strikes Back, which could only be a good thing, right?

  Sure, as I left the cinema, I had some of that youthful spring in my step and didn’t feel that bomb-shocked sense of unease I had experienced in New York. By the time I reached the other side of Soho, however, I realised it had all been an illusion and Attack of the Clones had been no better than the first prequel, in fact in some respects it had been worse. Told with the same clodhopping ineptitude, it attempted to win favour by trying to invoke the spirit of the original instalment by making direct references to it, while simultaneously distracting us with lights and flashes to draw focus away from the awful truth.

  When Revenge of the Sith was released, I was ready to forgive it once more, despite the mountain of evidence to suggest the series was irredeemable. I had been present at the announcement of the title in San Diego on the day I met Carrie Fisher, and noted the slight desperation amid the fans who decided to see the sly reference to the original title of Return of the Jedi as a clever circular allusion rather than the desperate attempt to claw back credibility that it probably was.

  By this time I had actually become friends with a few people at Lucasfilm, having found my vocal disapproval of the prequels had won unlikely support from people within the organisation. When the original theatrical cuts of the first trilogy were re-released on DVD, free of any of the tampering inflicted upon them in the run-up to the prequels, I received a parcel in the post, containing the discs and an embossed Lucasfilm postcard. The message simply read: ‘We thought you might like these.’

  As a result of my new-found connect
ions, I was invited to one of the first screenings of Revenge of the Sith at the Twentieth Century Fox building in London’s Soho Square. This was undoubtedly the most enjoyable of the three. Still beset by the same problems of style over content and story incoherence, it nevertheless scored points for drawing closer to the original trilogy in both storyline and aesthetics and the promise of seeing the birth of Darth Vader himself.

  One scene even involves the action occurring in the corridor of Princess Leia’s blockade runner, glimpsed at the beginning of the first film. This moment is doubly powerful in that it is a physical set and not a digital environment, which even enhances the effect of the CGI Yoda, framing him in a realistic setting, making him seem more solid, more present. I actually cried a little bit when Emperor Palpatine initiated Order 66 and wiped out the Jedi, giving kudos to Lucas for his use of cross-cutting, in a sequence reminiscent of the final stages of The Godfather. This one was definitely the best of a bad bunch.

  Ultimately, though, the film served only to highlight a number of niggling inconsistencies that undermined the continuity of the saga and cast doubt on the credibility of Lucas’s grand narrative plan. It’s true that a larger, more complex story existed before Star Wars and that Lucas had lifted a manageable midsection to create the first film, but it seems hard to believe that the surrounding saga was anything more than a conceptual sketch or a very rough first draft. Oddly, despite the big-budget treatment, the prequels retained the feel of something being made up on the hoof without any regard for consistency and it would seem that nobody had had the scones to point it out.