by Simon Pegg
No one ever said, ‘George, if Luke Skywalker is the son of Anakin Skywalker (now Darth Vader) and the forces of good are attempting to conceal him from his father, why didn’t they give him a new name or hide him somewhere other than the family home of Darth Vader’s stepbrother?’22 Or, ‘Is a bit of bad luck and some mild teenage truculence enough to change a goofy kid into a murderous galactic tyrant?’ Or, ‘Do you think the big reveal that Senator Palpatine is in fact the evil Darth Sidious (soon to be Emperor) all that surprising, considering the same actor played a character called Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi?’ Or even, ‘Isn’t it a bit unseemly to establish sexual tension between Luke and Leia if they are eventually going to be revealed as brother and sister? Are they from Gloucester?’ It seems strange that such a grand and expensive endeavour appears so undercooked at times, almost as though the whole venture was being presided over by one person, refusing to accept any outside input, despite knowing deep down that he had bitten off more than he could chew.
As determined as I was to enjoy Revenge of the Sith, having decided that was going to be the case before I saw it, the film ultimately let itself down at key moments, not least the hilarious Darth Vader/Frankenstein debacle, which so undermined one of the most anticipated beats in the story. Anakin Skywalker, having been mutilated and left for dead by the peaceful, monk-like Obi-Wan Kenobi, is rescued by the Emperor and rebuilt as the ‘more machine now than man’ badass we remember from the original films. When he regains consciousness, he asks how his girlfriend is, in that recognisable voice made oddly whimsical by the vulnerability in his tone, and when informed that she is dead, shouts a big long ‘nooooooooooooo’ and breaks free of his bindings to stagger clumsily across the Emperor’s lab in a wave of snigger-inducing grief. This frustratingly blurs the moment that Anakin Skywalker ceases to be and his evil alter ego takes hold. It seems strange to see the iconic visage of cool, impassive evil attempting to emote. In Return of the Jedi, Vader’s true humanity is implied in a few moments of stillness, when we can almost see confusion in his static visage, then witnessed fully just before he dies, the majority of his sentiment delivered with the helmet off.
If I had worked for Lucasfilm at the time, I would have strapped explosives to my body, burst into George’s boardroom and demanded that he rewrite the scene so that the last vestiges of Anakin’s humanity are displayed before the helmet goes on. He lies on the operating table, all but rebuilt, the mask hovering above his face. He wakes, disorientated, looking around, flexing his new cybernetic limbs, scared and confused. He demands to be told what has happened and asks about his wife and even Obi-Wan, clearly not yet fully recalling the events that brought him to this end.
The Emperor then coldly begins to explain, even as the mask begins to lower inexorably towards Anakin’s face. Half concentrating on the Emperor’s words but distracted, terrified by the claustrophobic fate drawing towards him, he becomes still only at the news that his pregnant lover is dead by his hand. Then the weight of emotion vibrates through and the furious, grief-ridden denial escapes his lips as the mask closes over him, muffling his agony into a protracted silence, then we hear that famous breath as he inhales for the first time and Darth Vader is born. Not that I have thought about it that much.
Despite my irrevocably damaged feelings about Star Wars and having already seen Revenge of the Sith, I jumped at the chance to go to the premiere in London’s Leicester Square, because I had wanted to attend such an event since I was a child and no amount of recent disappointment could eclipse the dreams of the seven-year-old me still filed away in my brain. I wore my Rebel insignia T-shirt and got giddy at the sight of forty imperial storm troopers walking down the red carpet and, in spite of everything, felt a huge surge of affection towards George Lucas when he got up on to the stage and made a short introductory speech.
At the after-show party, I rubbed shoulders with various Star Wars alumni, including Peter Mayhew who played Chewbacca (who was in a bad mood – typical Wookiee) and the diminutive Kenny Baker (who made up for it and proved great company). At one point, a friend from Lucasfilm approached David Walliams and myself and asked if we wanted to meet George. Of course we accepted the invitation and followed our contact through the crowd for an audience with his exultedness.
Lucas was deep in conversation with director Ron Howard who, in his days as an actor, had taken the lead in Lucas’s American Graffiti before going on to Happy Days. Our friend drew Lucas’s attention and informed him of our presence, at which point he turned and looked at me with the weary acceptance of a man about to be gushed all over by another thirty-something fan whose life he had changed. He seemed tired and slightly exasperated and in that second I regretted accepting the offer to meet him, but then luckily something cool happened. Ron Howard grinned at me, shook my hand and said, ‘Oh man, my kids just love your movie!’ I spluttered a thank you, slightly taken aback, and as I chatted to Ron, I noticed George’s expression change from bored to slightly more attentive. Suddenly, I didn’t feel like just another fan; thanks to Ron, I had been elevated to the status of fellow film-maker and as such found myself welcomed into the conversation. George asked about Shaun of the Dead and we chatted about film-making, then he said the most interesting thing, something that shed a surprising light on the artist behind the billionaire businessman. He asked if I minded him giving me a piece of advice. He leaned in towards me and said, ‘Just don’t suddenly find yourself making the same film you made thirty years ago.’ In that instance, everything made some kind of sense to me. Here was a man whose only significant failing was the inability to trust anyone else. He had always been a maverick, since he was a young avant-garde film-maker and sought to operate beyond the grip of any conventional means of production. However, a victim of his own colossal success, he had become the very thing he used to rail against and yet, still possessed of a furious self-reliance, had continued to doggedly guard his own creative output even at the expense of the thing itself.
I fully admit that without Jessica, Edgar or producer Nira Park’s significant talent and input, Spaced would have been a pale and insubstantial version of what it actually became. As much as you trust yourself in creating a work of artistic entertainment, it is sometimes vital that you find coalition with like-minded people in order to achieve an all-important objectivity, which is impossible to find by yourself. If George had only trusted those around him to nurture and temper his ideas with objective input, he might not only be wealthy but also blissfully content.
Heroes
I
t’s a hell of a thing to meet your heroes, let alone find yourself working with them. I have been extremely lucky in this respect and, in true ESTB fashion, have found myself working for some of those directors that shaped my tastes as a child. In 2008, while out in LA shooting Star Trek for fellow film geek JJ Abrams, I drove down to Giant Studios in Santa Monica to meet Steven Spielberg. It was difficult attempting to summon the concentration required to negotiate the LA freeways while trying to comprehend the hugeness of my impending rendezvous. Steven had recently met with Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish (formerly one half of nineties media teddybearists Adam and Joe), about rewriting the script for his forthcoming film, Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn. Edgar had subsequently suggested Steven talk to me as well.
I parked up at the studios and made my way inside, where I was taken straight to Steven, who was operating the performance-capture camera on a small, elevated stage.23 He was exactly how I knew him from countless behind-the-scenes documentaries: bearded, baseball-capped and unfailingly charming. We chatted for a while about Tintin and other things. I told him about our new film, Paul, specifically my and Nick’s idea that our alien hero had acted as adviser to Steven over the years, giving him a few key moments and plot details for E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He found this hilarious and pitched in a few ideas of his own, one of which you will see in the finished film, although to divulge that now would be a spoiler.
The beauty of ‘performance capture’ is that although the computer captures your physicality and facial expressions, the details of both can be manipulated into any shape, a technique exemplified beautifully by the versatility of actor Andy Serkis, who was able to play an emaciated hobbit and a twenty-five-foot gorilla, wearing essentially the same costume, a skintight body-suit covered in reflective tracking markers.
A year later, Nick Frost and I stepped onto the set of Tintin wearing our hugely unflattering bodysuits (which somehow looked cool on Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig and Jamie Bell) to play the almost identical Thompson and Thomson for a man both Nick and myself had long admired. Between takes, Steven was happy to talk about his work and experiences, much to our utter glee. I couldn’t help but recall being ten years old and making that crucial choice between Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Gloucester Fair or, indeed, sitting alone in the ABC cinema two years later, crying inside my parka while watching E.T. I said as much to my mother when I left the studios after my first meeting with Steven in 2008, phoning her breathlessly from the car park at Giant Studios.
As if this wasn’t irony enough, I sent a picture of my daughter to Steven shortly after she was born, since he had only seen her grainy sonogram image while we were shooting, and received an email back declaring that he thought she resembled the star child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This made me so happy, not only because he had related her to a famous cinematic baby (as of course he would), but that I found myself in a position where one of my all-time favourite directors was looking at pictures of my baby girl. I can’t wait to tell her.
Working on Tintin was something of a double whammy professionally speaking, being directed not only by Spielberg but also Peter Jackson, who was co-directing via video link from New Zealand. Peter had been present for much of the run-up to the shoot but then returned home, handing over main duties to Steven. Peter was another director for whom I had had the utmost admiration as albeit a slightly older youngster. His movie Braindead (Dead Alive as it was know in the States) was a favourite of both mine and Edgar’s and was required viewing during our writing of Shaun of the Dead, since it was essentially a romzomcom (romantic zombie comedy), despite claims in other corners that ours was the first. I actually reviewed Braindead for a cable TV station while working as a stand-up comedian in Bristol on its release in 1992, never knowing I would one day find myself directed by its creator.
After Shaun of the Dead was released, we found another ally in Peter, who made very positive noises about the film and gave us a winning quote for our poster. When we came to shoot our ode to the police action film, Hot Fuzz, Peter happened to be on a location scout in the UK and agreed to come and perform a cameo as a psychotic Santa Claus who stabs me through the hand in the opening montage of the film.24
On the New Zealand leg of our Hot Fuzz press tour, Peter not only introduced the film at its Wellington premiere but also played generous host, inviting us to his house for several dinners, giving us an extensive and fascinating tour of Weta, his huge and impressive production facility, and generally showing us some good old Kiwi hospitality. While wandering around his private movie museum, he produced a frame containing one of my shirts from Shaun of the Dead and asked me to verify its authenticity. Studios will often make money on the side by selling props and costumes on to collectors and auction houses. A friend had purchased the item for Peter’s collection, and while I was there, he grabbed the opportunity to ensure the seller was on the up and up. I checked it over and recognised my own bloody handprints smeared across the front, proudly confirming it to be genuine.
We knelt down either side of it and posed for a picture and I once again experienced that wave of temporal irony joining the spatter of coincidental dots that had brought me to this point and, three years later, would lead to my participation in Tintin. I could even trace the irony back to early memories of my father reading me Lord of the Rings, as I inspected the models of Isengard and Minas Tirith in the Weta prop stores. What the hell? It’s a memoir, it’s supposed to be self-indulgent.
A Short History of the Future
‘H
ello, Simon, John Landis wants your details.’
In 2009, shortly before I flew to New Mexico to shoot Paul, I received an email from Edgar Wright just after I arrived for a four-month residency in the US, telling me that John Landis had asked to see me. I had met John a year before at a screening of Spaced at the ArcLight Cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Eight years after it had aired on British TV, the show had finally generated enough interest to warrant a US release and Edgar, Jessica and I embarked on a short press tour to give the occasion a little visibility.
The LA leg consisted of a signing at film-maker Kevin Smith’s Jay & Silent Bob’s Secret Stash section of the video store Laser Blazer, followed by a screening and Q&A at the ArcLight, moderated by Smith himself. Kevin’s support was ironic in itself to Edgar, Jess and myself, since it was his own 1994 movie Clerks that had in some ways inspired the three of us to create Spaced. It is because of Clerks’ brilliantly observed moral re-evaluation of the rebel attack on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi that I felt able to channel my love of Star Wars into writing the character of Tim Bisley in Spaced, since Smith had blazed a trail in culturally specific scriptwriting. Randal, Smith’s misanthropic video-shop philosopher asks if it was morally correct to destroy the second Death Star since it was incomplete and would no doubt have carried a population of independent contractors not necessarily politically affiliated to the Empire. After all, as Randall points out, what working-class tradesman is going to pass up a ‘juicy government contact with all sorts of benefits’?25 The whole piece is sharply funny and the argument so beautifully reasoned, it stands out as one of the highlights of the film for me. Unsurprisingly, we eventually made contact with Kevin after Shaun of the Dead and were able to tell him how much his work had inspired us. Edgar and I had even attended a screening of Chasing Amy in 1998, while Jess and I were writing the first series, and listened to him talk about film-making. Ten years later, we recorded a number of new commentaries for the American release of the show and invited Kevin along to take part, which he did with characteristically laconic profanity.
Kevin was not the only inspiration to feature on the new set of commentaries; along with comedian Patton Oswalt, South Park’s Matt Stone and Saturday Night Live alumnus and future star of Paul, Bill Hader. Also a certain video-shop philosopher turned celebrated movie maverick came along and lent his enthusiastic vocals to the mix.
I had been a fan of Quentin Tarantino since Reservoir Dogs and followed his work closely thereafter. The first time Nick Frost and I visited the cinema together was in 1994 to see Pulp Fiction, an event that in many respects formed an important part of our bonding process. I took him to see Pulp Fiction with Eggy Helen because I thought he would enjoy it. The moment I met him I noticed he had an acute natural wit and intelligence and the kind of mind that would doubtless respond to Tarantino’s playfulness as a director. The following Christmas, Nick bought me a long-sleeved Pulp Fiction T-shirt featuring the image of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson as Vincent and Jules holding their guns out, demonstrating the awesome power of their partnership. The shirt said a lot about the significance of the film to our friendship. It was an affectionate reminder of our first date. We were partners and we meant business. Ten years later, Quentin Tarantino would refer to Nick as the funniest man in the world.
After Shaun of the Dead was released, word got back to us that Quentin had screened the movie in his private cinema for a select group of friends. We subsequently contacted him and secured a quote f
or our US poster. We were, after all, a foreign film and needed all the endorsement we could get our hands on.
From the very beginning, our own effort was to be resolutely British and the inclusion of any marquee American names would have defeated the object. The very point of Shaun of the Dead was that it was happening in a small suburb of north London and not the traditional American context for such events. For this reason, we were already at a slight disadvantage in terms of marketing the film to an American audience, since the only touchstone we had was the genre itself. We felt this was enough, as did our producers, Working Title and Universal, albeit more tentatively. I will always be grateful to Working Title Films for plucking Shaun of the Dead from the choppy waters of turnaround. The film had been developed at FilmFour, but when the company downsized, it was (thankfully) cut loose and handed back to us.
The morning Clash frontman Joe Strummer died, Edgar and I sat in an Islington Starbucks with our producers, long-time friend Nira Park with whom we had created Spaced and Jim Wilson who we had retained from FilmFour, wondering what was to become of our little film. Fortunately, Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan and Natascha Wharton at Working Title 2 offered to take up the challenge, having expressed some interest before we chose to go with FilmFour. Thus the movie was made by a very British production house, albeit for Universal Pictures in the US, and as such remained resolutely British.
Both Edgar and I believe the decision not to contrive a way of appealing to the American audiences gave the film the precise appeal that secured its eventual success over there. It was a slice of familiar American culture viewed through a glass darkly, recognisable but at the same time fresh. We used the same approach for our next film, Hot Fuzz, despite a few early suggestions about visiting FBI agents played by the likes of Jack Black. Our intention was to be true to ourselves and hope that honesty paid off in providing foreign audiences with a different perspective on familiar cinematic ideas.
