Episode 445 - Edgar Wright
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what the fucksibles what the fuckadelics what the fuckaholics what the fucking avians what the fucksikins hello how are you i'm mark maron this is wtf thank you for joining me glad you all enjoyed the cm punk episode holy bejesus
Marc:That thing was popular.
Marc:Let me tell you.
Marc:Today's a big day.
Marc:Edgar Wright is here.
Marc:Coincidentally, The World's End, his most recent film with Simon Pegg, is now available on digital and Blu-ray DVD, if you're interested.
Marc:Had a lovely conversation with Mr. Wright.
Marc:I'm recovering from whatever I just walked through in my house, to be quite honest with you.
Marc:Look, I feed my cats roughly the same thing all the time.
Marc:And occasionally something will happen in that litter box that I don't know where the fuck it comes from.
Marc:I mean, I don't know.
Marc:How did that happen?
Marc:I walked into the house and was the entire house smelled like a Martian shit in it.
Marc:And you could only speculate what that would mean when an alien shits in your house.
Marc:What I'm saying, it was a smell that I'd never encountered before.
Marc:I almost had to do one of those things where I had to put a handkerchief over my face like guys do when they come upon corpses in movies, like cops.
Marc:Like one of them puts a handkerchief over his face while the other one vomits.
Marc:that was that was where i was at i don't know what it was i don't know what they ate i don't know what happened i haven't changed their diet at all something happened one of the cats is possessed by something horrifying horrible hey look there's a couple things i haven't covered with you first of all many of you have seen uh me i did a bob dylan thing if you go to bob dylan.com
Marc:OK, there is a video on there.
Marc:It is.
Marc:It's like a Rolling Stone.
Marc:It's the I believe the first video ever of of like a Rolling Stone.
Marc:I believe it is now officially the 50th.
Marc:anniversary of like a rolling stone and i was asked to do a segment in this video i had no idea what it was and i was like all right sounds cool it's for bob dylan.com i don't know what it is they're making a video and it was a very creative thing very creative angle go to bob dylan.com and look at the video you can flip through channels there's different channels on this video and all of us who were involved like drew carrie's in it the
Marc:The the brothers who do the renovation show, Property Brothers, some guys on Sports Network, some guys on Wall Street.
Marc:Now, wait, a lot of people.
Marc:What it is, it's based like a cable box.
Marc:We flip around the channels and everybody is at some point in the song like a Rolling Stone.
Marc:So we all had to lip sync the song.
Marc:Like a Rolling Stone.
Marc:Then there's some intercutting there with Dylan as well from an older performance of it.
Marc:It's a pretty cool thing.
Marc:And I was very happy to be involved with it, but I had no idea it would be as big a thing as it was.
Marc:I had no idea.
Marc:So it's me and Ryan Singer, my comedian friend, doing Like a Rolling Stone here in the garage.
Marc:It's the actual garage.
Marc:Go to BobDylan.com.
Marc:And do that.
Marc:What else can I tell you?
Marc:I've been getting a little flack from not flack.
Marc:You know, I talked about shooting a movie about a year or so ago, maybe more.
Marc:I can't remember.
Marc:The movie was called All Wifed Out.
Marc:I did two days on that film.
Marc:and uh and they gave me like you know second billing like they gave me like i'm i'm writing the main credits me and and uh shriek and uh a guy who calls himself the uh the fat jew so i've not seen the movie but they've been pestering me to watch it but i i am in that movie for a few scenes if that interests you
Marc:I don't know if that's really a good plug.
Marc:I think that's condescending.
Marc:I'm not even going to judge it.
Marc:I'm just telling you it's out there.
Marc:OK, but here's what I really wanted to get to is that I was in Boston.
Marc:I was in Boston and I received from the Boston Comedy Festival.
Marc:I received the Comedian of the Year Award.
Marc:And I flew out to Boston day of, got checked in to the Marriott down by MIT, felt a little intimidated knowing I was by MIT and knowing that it seemed to be filled with just power nerds, a lot of power nerds around, probably working on big things across the street, working on big projects.
Marc:I was there to receive my plaque.
Marc:This comic Kyle comes over and he hangs out with me.
Marc:And I only had a few hours.
Marc:I didn't know what I should do at this time before I had to be at the Somerville Theater to receive my award.
Marc:So I'm like, I'm going to walk through Boston.
Marc:Boston was important to me.
Marc:A lot of my memories come from Boston.
Marc:A lot of things went down, man.
Marc:Shit went down in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, all over the New England area.
Marc:Little parts of my heart are scattered throughout New England.
Marc:Little pieces of pain were...
Marc:were left like packages along the New England highway side, along the New England, along the Mass Pike, along 93, along the expressway.
Marc:Little parts of me and my life.
Marc:Little sadness thrown out of the window from a gig that didn't go so well.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Driving back.
Marc:from the Taunton Regency Hotel after a Saturday night, two shows in a tiered conference room.
Marc:Some tears were shed, some sniffles sniffled, some cigarettes angrily smoked and discarded of into the snow along the highway in New England.
Marc:So...
Marc:I get there.
Marc:I'm like, let's walk.
Marc:And we walked through parts of my past.
Marc:We chatted me and Kyle.
Marc:And then we, uh, went to fucking red bones.
Marc:It was in Davis square.
Marc:That's where the Somerville theater is.
Marc:That's where I'm to receive my award.
Marc:And I lived in an attic in Davis square, uh,
Marc:Three blocks away from the Somerville Theater back in maybe, what year was that, 88, 87?
Marc:It was a painted blue attic in a house where a bunch of people lived.
Marc:People come and go.
Marc:Maybe one guy's been there the longest, and he pays the landlord, who you don't know, the rent check.
Marc:Nobody knows whose food is who.
Marc:Whose food is that?
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It's been in there a long time.
Marc:Does anyone even cook in this kitchen?
Marc:Sometimes we try to, but it's kind of gross.
Marc:Where'd that couch come from?
Marc:Don't know.
Marc:It was here when I got here.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Does that TV work?
Marc:No.
Marc:You pretty much, if you want a TV, you should have it in your own room because it'll get fucked up.
Marc:Oh, which bathroom can I use?
Marc:Well, use the one on the second floor because the one on the first floor is broken.
Marc:That house.
Marc:And I lived there when I was scrambling to make a living doing comedy.
Marc:Scrambling.
Marc:But it was not a dark time.
Marc:It was just a hard time.
Marc:And that was two blocks away, three blocks away from the place where I received the Comedian of the Ward from the Boston Comedy Festival.
Marc:Red Bones, great barbecue, opened when I was living there.
Marc:I talked to Karen Whitney, who owns a joint.
Marc:She came down to see me.
Marc:We reminisced.
Marc:And I went there.
Marc:I went to the Somerville Theater to accept my award.
Marc:It was a contest.
Marc:There was like, I don't know, seven or eight comics who had been going through a contest.
Marc:And these were the finals.
Marc:It's been a long time since I've seen comics doing a hungry eight minutes.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:Saw Dick Dougherty.
Marc:Dick Dougherty from Dick Dougherty's Comedy Vault.
Marc:He's a comedian.
Marc:Had a couple places where he booked in Boston.
Marc:He was there.
Marc:He's one of the judges.
Marc:How are you, Mark?
Marc:I once did a road gig with Dick Doherty, and I was yammering, driving him to the gig, and he turned to me, goes, you know what your problem is?
Marc:You're insecure.
Marc:You're insecure, Mark.
Marc:And then we ran into Steven Tyler on the street, who he knew.
Marc:So for some reason, it was me receiving a Comedian of the Year Award, and they were also honoring Emanuel Lewis with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Marc:So Emanuel Lewis was there.
Marc:I really had a struggle not to make the joke when I went up after Emmanuel to say, I misunderstood.
Marc:I thought I was being given Emmanuel Lewis as an award.
Marc:I think that would have been funny, but I didn't do it because I think it was sort of a short guy joke, but also could have been misinterpreted as perhaps slightly racist if you want to take it all the way back.
Marc:So I made a choice against that, yet I told you that it went on in my head.
Marc:I told you what went on in my head.
Marc:So I got my plaque and it was moving to me because a lot of time I paid a lot of dues there.
Marc:I learned how to do comedy in New England and it did feel great to to be honored.
Marc:And I want to thank Jim McHugh and the Boston Comedy Festival for thinking of me.
Marc:And I'm glad I went out and it was great to see the people I saw.
Marc:So thank you for that.
Marc:Let's talk to Edgar Wright.
Marc:In order to talk to Simon, I sat down and watched Space.
Marc:I watched it straight through, like on a full-on, and I was glad I did it, but there was part of me that's like, how come I miss this?
Marc:How did I miss this?
Marc:Because they don't run it here.
Marc:I mean, I have to go find it.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, you know, that happens with a lot of British comedy films.
Marc:Well, what were your things that influenced you in British comedy so I can put them on a list of things that I have to see so I can become a big director?
Guest:Well, starting off, let's go in chronological order.
Marc:From when you were a child.
Marc:I want your earliest memories of the equivalent of a children's clown show on the BBC.
Guest:Oh, I know exactly.
Guest:Well, everybody knows Monty Python, obviously.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:Yeah, that one's easy.
Guest:But the show that is lesser known over here, and actually it was kind of fallen away, doesn't get repeated that much in the UK, which was almost like the kids' version of Monty Python, was a show called The Goodies.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was like a... It used to get... First, it was shown at nine o'clock at night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it was so popular with kids that they changed the slot to like 6.30 on a Saturday.
Guest:And what was the angle?
Guest:It was a show... It was actually with a lot of...
Guest:python's kind of like peers it was like this a bill oddy timbrook taylor and graham garden and the show was just that they were like they were like three guys who like that it was like we are the goodies and we will do anything it was like they're right i've heard of this show yeah they used to ride around on a trandom yeah like sort of uh and for kids that was just that was it well for me it was like it had like insane sight gags like always had massive props in it there would always be some enormous sight gag yeah
Guest:And in fact, you know, like John Cleese actually appears on The Goodies and like the running joke used to be John Cleese appeared on The Goodies as like a genie in a bottle and then right at the end, just before he disappeared, like he said, he goes, kids program.
Guest:Like he kind of denigrated them for being a kid show.
Guest:But when I was a kid, the goodies was the shit.
Guest:It's just like, I love the goodies.
Guest:It's my favorite show.
Guest:And just the, it just had, you know, sometimes when I'm the kind of person who gets excited by opening credits.
Guest:Do you?
Yeah.
Guest:like in American shows I sort of like I get more excited by the opening credits of like American shows than the shows themselves I happily watch the opening credits of like I don't know anything from like Hardcastle and McCormack to like sort of Magnum just because it's setting up the show we just think it's sort of like you got all of the cool shots in the opening of Magnum and then Magnum PI oh you mean the
Guest:The montage.
Marc:Yeah, the montage of the style.
Marc:Yeah, that sets up the thing.
Guest:Yeah, the Miami Vice opening credits are so good, you don't actually have to watch the show.
Guest:You get it.
Guest:You get it.
Marc:You're done.
Guest:I'm in.
Marc:Well, that's interesting, because I think that speaks to your style just a bit, that there's a sort of quickness to it, where everything is explained very quickly, and then the cuts jump.
Marc:Do you think that inspired you directorially?
Marc:It's like, how can I move?
Marc:Because you can tell a story, like you said, in the opening credits.
Marc:Yeah, you're done.
Marc:But there's a pace to it.
Marc:I think so.
Guest:I think there's something in that definitely that I don't know.
Guest:I definitely tend towards like quicker cuts in some of the stuff that I've done.
Guest:Maybe that's it.
Guest:I mean, I definitely like kind of shows that are really dense.
Guest:yeah which is why i used to go back to the comedy shows yeah i would say the ones that are big influences on me python yeah the goodies yeah the young ones yeah that played over here right it did was that was on mtv right yeah i remember it i remember it uh vaguely there was a long-haired guy who was sort of like a moron neil yeah i'm not trying to insult your friends it was just a character
Marc:Yeah, but I remember that show.
Guest:Neil, Rick, Vivian, and Mike.
Guest:And that show, I remember that show was like, there were only two series of seasons for the US listeners.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, it seems like everything in Britain is two seasons or three.
Guest:Three is a big run.
Guest:I know Simon was saying about this on his kind of podcast, but that's absolutely true, is that in a weird way, like, you know, over here, the whole thing is to get to the syndication 100.
Marc:100, but it's like 100.
Guest:But in the UK, it's the opposite where something like The Young Ones, like there's the sort of, something like The Young Ones, the fact that they only did two seasons and at the end of the second season, they all die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:the end of the second season like a bus goes over a cliff and like the bus explodes and then the credits go up with all in sort of against black and it's like they all died and always to me that was the sort of the ultimate like rock and roll ending is like you know live fast die young sure leave a good little corpse only do two series yeah
Guest:Get out of there.
Marc:And there's a good sort of kind of like almost a satiric punch to that.
Marc:It's like, you know, fuck you.
Marc:The show's over.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We're going to just go ahead and die.
Guest:Although, ironically, I always used to think that.
Guest:And ironically, Simon worked with Adrian Edmerson, who played Vivian on that show.
Guest:And he admitted, like Simon did something with him way later, maybe like 20 years later.
Guest:And Adrian said, we should have done a third series.
Guest:Did they have a choice?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, they were being rebellious.
Guest:It was exactly the attitude of like, fuck you, we're out.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It was literally like dropping the mic.
Marc:So they made the choice only to do two.
Guest:Yeah, I think that's pretty much just like that thing of like with UK shows, same with like the 40 Towers, same with like The Office, same with Spaced in a way, even though we had the chance to do a third one.
Guest:And we were so burned.
Guest:I mean, I can't really speak for Simon and Jessica because I didn't write the show, but I was a big part of it.
Guest:But I was burnt out after the second series of Spaced.
Guest:And I really felt like I put everything into that show.
Guest:And every job that I do, I exhaust myself to the point where I can't work for months afterwards.
Marc:But in America, that's unheard of.
Marc:We appreciate the offer of another season, but we're going to decline because we're tired.
Marc:We're a little tired.
Marc:We'd like to get a few months sleep.
Guest:I think the reason is over here, a comedy show is like a big industry.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, something like 30 Rock, you know, any big U.S.
Guest:comedy show has like showrunners, like a writing staff, like, you know, multiple producers, like a head writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Whereas Spaced was like Simon and Jessica writing, me script editing and directing and our producer Naira Park.
Guest:And that was kind of it.
Guest:And it's unusual for a director to direct every single episode of a show.
Guest:Yeah, absolutely.
Guest:I directed every single episode of Space.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So even just doing seven episodes of that show, which is pretty jam-packed.
Guest:I tried to make it as jam-packed as the opening credits of the goodies.
Marc:And I think you do.
Marc:I think it's interesting that you say that because in watching it, I just actually watched the...
Marc:The final episode last night.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And just figuring out how do you wrap it up with these characters?
Marc:How do you do it in a cute sort of emotional way?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In order to give people closure on the thing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the amount you get in there, you must have had an amazing art director.
Marc:You must have brought in people to make that look as good as it did.
Marc:Just from my own experience in making a show with a lot...
Marc:more people than you had you know art direction set and really kind of the conception and uh the the sort of things you were playing off of it was all very meticulous well the the important thing and the thing that i i always like try to prime myself on is being loyal is that those people who worked on spaced have worked on everything right up until the world's end like the same production designer who did spaced it's
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Did everything that I've done right up to the world's end.
Guest:Same editor on Spaced did the world's end and Scott Pilgrim.
Guest:So like I've cut it and same producer.
Guest:So there's lots of people who worked on that show that I've continued to work with even on the Hollywood one that I did.
Guest:So what's the Hollywood one?
Guest:Scott Pilgrim.
Guest:That was the one like US one.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Although I call it the Hollywood one, even though it was shot in Canada and edited in London.
Marc:Now, do you see these people?
Marc:Like, it must be sort of exciting in a way, because, I mean, when you did Spaced, what were you, in your late 20s?
Marc:No, mid-20s.
Marc:Right, so you were a kid.
Guest:Yeah, I think I was 24 when I shot the first series of Spaced.
Marc:So you're sort of some sort of weird, you know, prodigy, savant kind of guy.
Marc:Yeah, like Rain Man.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:You have more social graces so far.
Marc:You haven't started stuttering or having... I'm going to count on your toothpicks in a second.
Marc:Will you?
Marc:Will you do some tricks?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Some parlor tricks?
Marc:All right.
Marc:But that must be also exciting to see the people that you built that alliance with creatively because everyone's evolving.
Marc:yeah and that you can you know with the more equipment you have or the more uh money you have that the more you know chances you can take and everybody's sort of perfecting their craft to a point so that's interesting to me that because the like i talked to simon about this sort of um the i actually use the word oeuvre and i'm going to do it again god i like it the oeuvre you created through parody oeuvre is such a satisfying word to spell as well oh yeah oeuvre is like it's one of the best beautiful like words written down
Marc:And it's one of those words that if you're not careful and you use it just glibly in conversation, people will hate you.
Guest:Start dropping oeuvre.
Guest:But it's also one of those words you have to pronounce in a French accent.
Guest:Oeuvre.
Guest:Can you speak French?
Guest:Un peu.
Guest:Un peu.
Guest:There's only a couple of phrases I have that are not that useful.
Guest:I have one chat-up line.
Guest:I could say a chat-up line to a girl, but I wouldn't have any follow-up at all.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So my one line would be, je pense que tu es un visage très joli, which means I think you have a pretty face.
Guest:But if that were, I would have nothing else to back it out.
Guest:So if they responded to you in French, you'd just be like, duh.
Guest:My second line, my voiture est tombé en pan, means my car's breaking down, which is not going to help.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think I could actually get it.
Marc:Not at that point.
Marc:If you went right from the first one to that one, it would be tricky.
Marc:I don't think I could get a French girl into bed with just those two phrases.
Marc:With my card broken down?
Guest:My card's broken down.
Guest:I think you have a pretty face.
Guest:Oh, you're jumping to bed with me.
Guest:Oh, well, the other one, of course, is Lady Marmalade.
Guest:Everybody knows that one.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Sorry.
Marc:It's all right.
Marc:I enjoy it.
Marc:And I was sort of fascinated with this with Simon as well, where you guys set the standard and the sort of tone and the context of what you do when you were like 24 years old.
Marc:I mean, spaced is sort of a template for what you guys went on doing for the rest of your career up until today.
Guest:yeah i mean we were very lucky in the um i don't know whether it was a fluke or something but somehow and i know simon touched on this as well somehow we made that show at a budget level where nobody really interfered at all like it was basically that thing and in a strange way that has continued with most of the stuff that i've done is where they've said if you can keep on schedule and under budget you can do whatever you want
Guest:Forever.
Guest:I don't think that'll go on forever.
Guest:Those kind of things get tougher and tougher.
Guest:But definitely when we did Spaced, it was sort of low stakes, low budget.
Guest:And so we kind of went a bit crazy with it.
Guest:And it didn't really...
Guest:feel like making it in the nicest way and this goes for some of the films as well it felt like we're making something for us which then was going to be on tv and it was it was amazing like it was and it was very it was very odd making it because it was a film it was sorry it was a show made without a pilot there was no pilot we just made seven episodes which is unheard of and odd yeah and it was just on tv so i don't quite know i mean
Guest:it was i was i was um it was something where i it was the first thing i had done um where i really felt like um i was i i got my start like um doing tv and it were i i sort of got my break basically by doing um doing amateur films and making like this low budget no budget film when i was at 20.
Guest:What was that about?
Guest:That was a Western, believe it or not.
Guest:It was called A Fistful of Fingers, and I made it straight out of art college.
Guest:I'd made a whole bunch of... Basically, how I got my break was that as a teenager, I had made... My parents had bought me and my brother this beat-up Super 8 camera.
Guest:like a film camera yeah like a yeah like a super eight camera like um well because by the time you were i would imagine didn't they have video cameras by the time yes but we couldn't i this is this is absolutely true listeners my family couldn't afford one from a port from a i might have a posh name but i was definitely from like lower middle class yeah like um my parents were both like uh like teachers like at the state school our equivalent of state school which is comprehensives in the uk
Guest:What did they teach?
Guest:They were both art teachers.
Marc:Oh, that's spectacular.
Guest:You know what's funny though?
Guest:They did not want to be teachers.
Guest:They did that classic thing of like, God bless them, is that they were teachers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then they kind of dropped out of teaching to become like artists.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And then they had to go back to teaching.
Marc:Wait, let's talk about the art.
Marc:What's hanging in the house?
Marc:What's at the right house?
Guest:My mom and dad used to do screen printing.
Guest:So they're both really good artists.
Guest:Screen printing like Warhol-y kind of stuff?
Guest:They used to do prints on handmade paper or screen printing like scarves and stuff like that.
Guest:So my mom used to design these very sort of...
Guest:fancy designs with butterflies.
Guest:And she used to also do these kind of illustrations on handmade paper of like dragons.
Marc:Dragons, of course.
Marc:That's very British.
Guest:She's super new agey, my mum.
Guest:Oh, is she?
Guest:She is, yeah.
Marc:Is that a nice word for hippie?
Guest:I would say she's like a hippie without the drugs.
Guest:I don't quite know what that makes her.
Guest:She's like new agey without ever having had any drugs in her life at all.
Guest:A lot of candles, maybe some sage.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:Crystals.
Marc:Crystals lady.
Marc:A crystals lady.
Marc:Did you touch the crystals?
Marc:Did she say maybe, Edgar, you feel upset today?
Marc:Sometimes my mum would dress like Morticia Adams.
Marc:But she wasn't doing a character.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:My mum was definitely sort of like... My dad is completely straight.
Guest:My dad would dress completely straight.
Guest:My mum sometimes would dress up like she was Galadriel.
Guest:That would be a good day.
Guest:She'd be sort of purple or sometimes white.
Guest:She'd look like she was from Tolkien.
Guest:And then sometimes she'd be all in black like Morticia Adams.
Guest:So my mum always looked like she was doing cosplay or something.
Guest:She still does.
Guest:I love you, mum.
LAUGHTER
Marc:That's so sweet.
Marc:So your mother is what really was the portal to your interest in science fiction.
Guest:In a weird way, but you know what's funny?
Guest:What's really funny, and this is kind of where hot fuzz comes from, is that you know that kind of thing when you're a teenager, you automatically take a different stance from your parents?
Guest:Got to.
Guest:Yeah, you have to.
Guest:So in a strange way, I don't want to say I became more conservative or anything like that, but in a strange way, when my mom was so new agey and she would come up with things that were so like...
Guest:And again, without the aid of like sort of weed, she'd come up with things, conspiracy things about the town, some of which were kind of absolutely correct or, you know, at least kind of... Like what?
Guest:Like what?
Marc:Like stuff about Freemasons and stuff.
Marc:But that's a riff that she somehow, someone put that in her head.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:She's definitely a big conspiracy theorist.
Guest:And a lot of the stuff in Hot Fuzz about the neighborhood watch association comes from my mom, like sort of her conspiracy theorist about the Freemasons.
Guest:The Masonic things, that's a trippy rabbit hole to go into.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Guest:And it does exist.
Guest:I mean, there's something like that.
Guest:So that would be the more believable side of it, the less believable side of it.
Guest:When she'd say, like, oh, the Masons run our town.
Guest:That's why they wouldn't let us have that extension on the house.
Guest:It was the Masons.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And I was thinking, yeah, I could believe that.
Guest:Then the ones I wouldn't believe so much is when she said, oh, you know, so-and-so saw a unicorn on the Bassamutra thing.
Guest:Mom, that's bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I refuse to believe the unicorn one.
Guest:So it's like sort of like, you know, so, but I would, I would have a healthy amount.
Guest:I definitely like.
Guest:Unicorns and Freemasons.
Guest:Unicorns and Freemasons.
Guest:That sounds like sort of a great, like psychedelic prog rock album.
Guest:Yeah, probably.
Marc:By the Strawberry Lamb Clock.
Marc:Yeah, Unicorns and Freemasons by the Strawberry Island.
Marc:Or at least it should be like one of those songs that has several different parts.
Marc:Like you have the main song and then like, you know, interlude.
Marc:Yeah, it's like the second half of a... It's on Yes songs.
Marc:Yes is a Yes album.
Marc:It's a lost Yes album.
Marc:But as you're about to say, though, I mean, depending on when this started, the one thing conspiracy theory...
Marc:and I think science fiction have in common, is that they're actually a way to use your imagination.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:That is nonstop.
Marc:It can go on forever.
Marc:It's true.
Guest:And I think a big part of everything that I've done is because I grew up in a very small town, which was kind of boring.
Guest:And so escapism is literally that, is that I want to kind of escape into my imagination because my immediate surroundings are not that exciting.
Guest:They're very beautiful.
Guest:I grew up in a very rural town, which is actually the one that's in hot fuzz.
Marc:What's it called?
Guest:It's called Wells.
Guest:W-E-L-L-S.
Guest:The reason I say that is because whenever I say it, people say, oh, Wales?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wells.
Marc:It's amazing that this is a town that, of course, I don't know.
Marc:Probably people from Britain know it.
Marc:Sort of.
Guest:It's more famous for being, you have the Glastonbury Music Festival.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So my hometown is like 10 miles away from there.
Marc:But what I like about that, knowing that it's your hometown, is that it seems like every small town in the UK has a castle.
Marc:There's always a castle not far.
Guest:In this one, there's a palace.
Guest:There's the Bishop's Palace.
Marc:Is that where you shot that final scene in Hafez?
Marc:That's right.
Marc:It's just a little town, but there's a pretty old, beautiful castle there.
Guest:Well, what's funny about that?
Guest:Here's the funny thing.
Guest:I wrote that script.
Guest:Here's the funny thing.
Guest:Having rejected my mother's conspiracy theories as a teenager and gone, Mom, shut up.
Guest:There's no unicorns.
Marc:Maybe there's Freemasons.
Guest:Here's the funny thing.
Guest:When we got the idea for that movie, before I knew I was going to go back to my hometown and shoot it, I said to my mom, I said, you know all of those kind of like theories about corruption and Freemasons and murder and everything else that you had heard about our county?
Guest:Would you write them all down?
Guest:And she goes, oh, yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so she wrote this Word document that was about 50 pages long with the headline, this is the best thing, the title of the document was Spooky Doings.
Guest:And I gave, me and Simon read it and I said, this is amazing.
Guest:And it was just like her catalogue of every sort of like bit of kind of scurrilous rumour.
Guest:It was almost like Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Like this kind of like amazing like tome of like dark secrets.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we ended up like building this into the movie.
Guest:And then the huge irony was that I ended up shooting in my hometown, not by design.
Guest:It was always, it was like the model.
Guest:I would sort of say to the location manager, I said, I want to find somewhere like Wells.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then eventually it came down to what about using Wells?
Guest:I said, well, if they'd let us, you know, because, you know, they have the cathedral there and the Bishop's Palace.
Guest:And as it turned out, we were able to shoot there.
Guest:So when there's that scene towards the end, when they're all sitting around the table in their black robes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nobody in the town had read the script.
Guest:I thought, oh my God, somebody's going to hear us saying basically the whole town is full of killers and they're going to chuck us out on our ear.
Guest:So when we're shooting at the Bishop's Palace, the Bishop of Bath and Wells himself...
Guest:like comes down the dude with the hat exactly yeah the dude with the crazy hat yeah he comes he said they say the bishop wants to come down and watch like a couple of um takes and i was like okay and i just thought oh my god he's gonna like hear what the dialogue is and hear like billy whitelaw and timothy dalton talking about mass murder and he's gonna like they're gonna throw us out and then the bishop of bathenwell's comes down and he's in his like in his robes and everything
Guest:And then he watches a take and then he gets a fun camera out and starts winding it and clicking like the bishop just standing there with a fun camera.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In all his finery and then like snapping away on his fun camera.
Guest:It was amazing.
Marc:Well, the great thing about the church of any kind, especially one that's been around for centuries, is that they can absorb some hits.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:They're like, we get it.
Guest:And with recent revelations, hot fuzz is nothing.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But I mean, I think that if you really think back and you look at the satirists of long ago.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:I mean, the church was almost the target a lot.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:But that wasn't so much about a church conspiracy.
Marc:That was about just a town conspiracy.
Yeah.
Guest:One of the things, this is absolutely true, one of the things that inspired that movie is that when I used to be at school, and even when I went to college, my Saturday job is I used to work at this supermarket called Summerfields.
Guest:And it's actually in the movie.
Guest:The supermarket that they have a big fight in is where I used to work as a Saturday job.
Marc:You were getting closure with this film.
Guest:I get closure with everything.
Guest:I mean, all of my movies, like World's End as well, is me getting closure on certain things.
Marc:Yeah, the drinking.
Guest:Yeah, no, it's very therapeutic doing these movies.
Guest:When I went to like... So my old supermarket manager, the character that basically Timothy Dalton is playing, and sadly he's passed away, and he was always very supportive of me.
Guest:Like he used to let me have days off if like... Because I'd started to do with these amateur films, I'd started to kind of like...
Guest:He let me have days off like when it was like, oh, my film is playing at this festival or like my film is, you know, this is when I was like 17 or something.
Marc:Was this the Super 8 film?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The Western.
Guest:No, this is before that.
Guest:I had done this Super 8 film for like a competition and I got on TV and I won a competition and I won a video camera.
Guest:When you were like how old?
Guest:1991.
Guest:So I would have been like 17 or maybe I was 16 actually.
Guest:And what was that film?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was a film... I made it for Comic Relief, and it was about, like... It was a little animation about, like, having more wheelchair access at cinemas.
Guest:So I made this animation thing, and I got on TV.
Guest:Now, the thing is, I had to ask my supermarket manager to say, can I have the day off on Saturday because I'm going to be on TV in London?
Guest:And he was like, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
Guest:So he'd been, like, very supportive of letting me have days off at very short notice.
Guest:And what was very sweet about it is that he used to, like...
Guest:He was very supportive of letting me have days off or even letting me shoot in the store.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I, you know, I sort of had been on TV and so that had been in the local paper and stuff.
Guest:But I remember once he, you know, he was very supportive of doing the films.
Guest:He was even in one of my films as well, just playing a little part.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then there was one time when there was like some like sort of, and we literally mentioned this in Hot Fuzz, but there was like sort of like baby like sick.
Guest:There was like vomit all over the tills.
Guest:Like baby had thrown up all over the tills and I had to clean it up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and when i was like cleaning up this pink like sort of vomit yeah from the kind of that checkout the manager walked past and really loudly said he's not in hollywood yet is he so he's he's been waiting for some kind of like image of me like sort of like this 17 year old would-be whiz kid director like to wait until i was cleaning up some shit or some vomit and then he's been waiting for that moment
Guest:But the reason that he inspired Hot Fuzz is because he was a Freemason and he used to also supply drinks and cheese and stuff for the Freemasons meeting.
Guest:And yet he was the least secretive Freemason because he would sidle up to me in the shop on a Wednesday and he'd say, hey, got a knockoff early tonight because of the meeting.
Guest:Can't talk too much about it, the secret meeting.
Guest:And I go...
Guest:right okay and then i guess yes uh you know the old wednesday meeting at the star hotel can't talk too much about it so he'd keep like telling me about this thing and i'd say to my mother said i said what goes on at the star hotel on a wednesday and he goes oh that's where they have the freemasons meeting so i sort of built up like this image of like this is where the freemasons meet they meet in the conference room of the star hotel every wednesday yeah it must be like oh my god can you imagine they're all in their black robes yeah they're all chanting latin
Guest:And then when we were like location scouting for Hot Fuzz, I went to the conference room at the Star Hotel and it was like the shittiest conference room you've ever seen.
Guest:I'm just some guys.
Guest:Yeah, just some, I never saw the meeting itself, but I saw the conference room and it was like anything that you'd get like a, you know, a conference room at a Ramada Inn or something like that.
Guest:And I just thought, do they really sit around in the robes and chant in this room?
Marc:But that was your imagination because that level of Freemasonry is no different than the Elks Lodge, really.
Marc:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Same thing.
Marc:It's about, you know, they're civic leaders sometimes.
Marc:They're just workers.
Marc:And even as you go up the level, I mean, you can go as deep as you want.
Marc:But I like that the idea was that your imagination, probably because you had seen films.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Something like The Devil Rides Out or The Wicker Man.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:So that stuff, it played in perfectly.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Because this recurring theme, certainly in that film and in the new one, about not just conspiracy, but about authority, about who's in control.
Marc:about the human spirit versus either fascistic forces or alien forces or forces of control.
Marc:I mean, that is a classic theme of satire, of we're the people, who's in charge of our lives, what are we fighting against?
Marc:But that came up twice very distinctly in Hot Fuzz and the new movie.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Now, do you have do you find, you know, outside of imagination that do you know that you're when you guys set out to do parody, which is what can be a very sophisticated form of satire or a very base one?
Marc:Do you know do you and Simon know like, you know, we're going to get deep with this?
Guest:I think we do.
Guest:I mean, I think in a way, like with the films, what you end up doing with characters is the two things is you either like try and put like a better version of yourself on screen.
Guest:Like there are choices that the characters make that you haven't done in your real life.
Guest:Like say Shaun of the Dead, I always thought was like, I describe it as being a long apology to my ex-girlfriend for being a lazy boyfriend.
Guest:Like, you know, like sort of like you're like a complacent, lazy boyfriend and somebody walks away and you go, oh, I fucked up.
Guest:And so like then Shaun of the Dead was almost like a sort of a long apology to that ex saying, hey, I know I fucked up.
Guest:And in this movie, I hope this character does better, you know.
Guest:And in the new one, like sort of it's almost like there's two things.
Guest:It's like sort of like the you either dealing with kind of like, you know, the darkest kind of like sort of recesses of your character and like sort of almost creating this kind of like
Guest:I think the Gary King character in The World's End is definitely based on people that me and Simon know and have had in our lives.
Guest:And I think everybody has that person in their life.
Guest:Yeah, Simon's character.
Marc:I've been that guy.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, I think I've been that guy at times as well.
Marc:You shouldn't have a little more together than to have spent too long being that guy.
Guest:Well, I definitely had a period in my sort of teens and 20s, which I think a lot of people go through, where you think, hey, I'm really funny when I'm drunk.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I'm going to get drunk every night.
Guest:For the rest of my life.
Guest:And then somebody, like, sort of, I was lucky in that somebody said to me early on that shocked me, like, sort of said, hey, Edgar, do you think you have a problem?
Guest:Right.
Guest:know and this was maybe in like my mid to late 20s that but i definitely used to contrive to get drunk because i thought i was funny and sure and there's a romanticization of of the drunk wizard or the drunk you know uh like that guy's free man yeah well that's exactly but unfortunately simon's character in in the world's end has carried that on until his life got away 40. yeah
Guest:So there's elements of that.
Guest:And then I think also on the flip side, so there's elements of when you're getting deep is that you kind of project like, what's the worst version of myself become flesh?
Guest:Like Gary King is like the sort of the monster inside me.
Guest:And then on the flip side, there's something where you want to be the rebel that he is that you can never necessarily be.
Guest:Sure, you want to live through him a little bit.
Guest:Yeah, so there's that kind of vicarious thing in terms of there are elements where I don't really want to be a rebel and go off the grid.
Guest:But sometimes, you know, I wake up and look at my Apple Mac and thinking, I don't like the iCloud.
Guest:Where the fuck is my music?
Guest:Fuck this.
Guest:I don't like not having my stuff.
Guest:Yeah, who's watching me right now?
Guest:What have iTunes done to my record collection?
Guest:i went i fucking it's like somebody burgled your house yeah do you know i mean and you let them i let them i said i fucking i just rolled over for apple and you came in and fucked my record collection right in the name of convenience i know yeah i said where's all my stuff yeah it's literally like i kept mine clearly well i know i you know i i honestly and then i feel like sort of such a fucking like sort of like potentially going off the grid thinking i have some maybe physical media like yeah
Guest:I don't want a lot of files.
Guest:I feel about a lot of things where I feel like we've... So there's an element of Gary King.
Marc:It's like the difference between an empire of clutter and an empire of information.
Marc:They're both unmanageable.
Marc:And you never reference any of them.
Marc:The physical stuff is comforting until it takes over and you have a problem with that.
Guest:No, totally.
Guest:I get that with the idea of archiving photos.
Guest:I have thousands of digital photos.
Guest:For what?
Guest:I don't want to delete any of them.
Marc:No, you can't.
Guest:These are all my memories and stuff.
Guest:But at the same time, it's like my computer cannot handle hundreds of thousands of photos.
Marc:Well, the great thing about techno hoarding versus actual hoarding is that no one has to see that.
That's true.
Marc:You can be a hoarder on your hard drive and get away with it.
Marc:But after a certain point with this kind of thing, people are like, dude, you got to get rid of some shit.
Guest:Well, I just think I've got, like most people, I mean, there's that thing.
Guest:I really envy some people.
Guest:I think Nick Frost actually is very forward thinking and doesn't get nostalgic.
Guest:Unlike me, he doesn't get nostalgic at all.
Guest:Really?
Guest:He's that kind of person who would say, if you haven't used it in the last five years, throw it out.
Guest:I try to say that.
Guest:but I have so much stuff in my, I have like a room in my house downstairs where it's just, it's just boxes.
Guest:I haven't even, unlike you, I haven't even got it out.
Guest:It's just like, I have it there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I've got a storage space.
Guest:I can never like get, I have a storage space.
Marc:It's just part of it here.
Marc:I'm a hoarder too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's interesting because I envy those guys.
Marc:You ever go to someone's house and you're like, where's your shit?
Marc:And they're like, what shit?
Marc:I'm like, how do you live without investing meaning and emotion into stuff that you've had for 20 years?
Marc:I mean, how do you get through your day without knowing that book that you don't look at isn't there?
Guest:No, I mean, you know, sometimes when I've sort of lived on the road or I've like sort of, you know, there's times when I've been to LA and just had my suitcase with me that you realize how little you actually need.
Marc:And how great it is.
Marc:Or that day before you actually leave the house you moved out of when all the shit is out of the flat or wherever.
Marc:Like you've moved out, but you have one more night there.
Marc:You're like, oh my God, why didn't I just do this?
Marc:Why didn't I live like this?
Marc:This is perfect.
Marc:It's just a mattress and my...
Guest:I know why some people I mean there's so I guess in the back of my mind yeah that's the thing is sort of like whereas there's parts of the characters like I don't want to be that guy and then on the flip side is like you know the whole idea with the the Gary King character in the world's end is like you know like wouldn't it be great to like sort of like still be able to like flip the bird and like sort of say fuck you guys I'm gonna live in the woods
Marc:Right.
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:But I think that's what you're speaking to, which I think is a real key to what you do, is that combination of real human emotion and real empathy for people.
Marc:Because that's really what happens with the Simon characters and the Nick characters and a lot of your stuff, is that no matter how over the top it may be, these guys are people up against something very real.
Marc:And the fact that in your mind, Shaun of the Dead was sort of an answer to your behavior and an emotional relationship.
Marc:Absolutely, yeah.
Marc:That you have this really kind of elaborate parody going on of zombie movies, but at the heart of it is a very human sort of predicament.
Guest:Yeah, and the new one is no different in terms of it's all of those feelings about like, you know, like...
Guest:when you go back to your hometown and it's changed without you, there's this sort of feeling of, like, guilt in a way of, like, that, oh, you know, I wasn't here and it changed and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Guest:But it's so many, like, the film, the new one, The World's End, really came about from exactly what happens in the movies.
Guest:I moved to, like, London to sort of try and kind of, like, sort of start my career and stuff.
Guest:And I would, you know, at first, like...
Guest:That summer of like kind of I was last with my sort of friends at school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When you kind of like you're in the I'm in the pub every night with the same five friends and you think you're going to be as thick as these forever.
Guest:And then everybody goes to different cities.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then when you come back, like sort of like you reconnect.
Guest:And then with each passing year, there's less and less people that come back.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I think maybe the first year I went away to London, I come back like three times a year every holiday.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And now it was like, oh, you know, I'll just come back at Christmas to see my folks.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I'm using all the American terms for you guys.
Guest:My mom and dad.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was just saying folks and holidays for you there.
Guest:But really, I was going to say Christmas because I know you don't have like a half term.
Guest:You call it spring break over here and stuff.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Thank you for translating.
Marc:I know, I know.
Marc:We say half term.
Guest:I don't need to provide a glossary.
Guest:I just suddenly caught myself that I thought any English listeners to your podcast, of which they may be saying Edgar Wright has gone so lucky in America.
Guest:But what I was going to say was that I used to go back every like, I used to go back every like.
Guest:Your parents are still there.
Guest:No, that's the other sad thing about it.
Guest:My parents have now moved.
Guest:So my, and I have no family in my hometown.
Marc:That makes a big difference.
Guest:So I feel like the anchor has been completely cut.
Marc:No reason.
Guest:I feel sad.
Guest:The only reason, the only connection I have now to that town, apart from the fact I grew up there, is that I shot Hot Fuzz there.
Guest:But I don't have any reason to go back, which makes me sad in a way.
Guest:But when I would go back...
Guest:There used to be I go back quite frequently and I remember like so it wasn't so much that I'd never left.
Guest:You start horrible feeling that like you would never been there.
Guest:You had zero impact on your hometown.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So when you go back and think and literally the stuff that's in the movie.
Guest:And this is something that this this is harking back to my days when I was like sort of like in inverted commas a funny drunk.
Guest:Hey, I'm hilarious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Everyone knows me.
Guest:Everybody knows me.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you go back and the publican doesn't recognize you.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Doesn't remember your name.
Guest:And it's the same guy.
Guest:It's the same guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's Paul in the Rose and Crown.
Guest:Now he knows me through Hot Fuzz.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a period where he'd forgotten who I was completely.
Guest:Um, and then like, or like people from that you were at school with don't really recognize you.
Guest:And then crucially, like a scene that's in the movie, I had this instance where like somebody who had, uh, I'd had a run in like a school bully.
Guest:I want to say he bullied me for years or something.
Guest:I lit, but I had one violent run in with him, like where he'd like roughed me up.
Guest:so and I can't like and once I'm he saw me and I saw him and it was like I think in and he just completely blanked me and I thought did he not recognize me or does he not care either way you were hurt I'm so pissed off I'm pissed off by that I pissed off by the lack of recognition
Guest:I don't want to get into another like fracar with him.
Guest:I don't want to get like sort of roughed up again.
Marc:The fact that you had, that he terrorized you and clearly had no effect on his life at all.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:That's horrible.
Guest:So that is in the movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I remember saying to my, I remember saying to a friend of mine, like in 1990, it must've been mid nineties.
Guest:I remember saying to my friend, I said, it's kind of weird going back to Wells, isn't it?
Guest:Cause like,
Guest:I said, every time I go back, it just feels like body snatches.
Guest:It feels like somebody came and replaced everybody with replicants.
Guest:And that basically is the movie that we made this year.
Marc:You know what's great about it though?
Marc:And in the same way, now that you frame it as a personal experience is that, you know, the one crazy dude that, you know, that everyone knew growing up, like there's that thing when I go back to Albuquerque where it's like, there used to be that kind of street wizard guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The guy that you looked up to as a kid, because he seemed to be off the grid, is that you sort of utilize that as well, that there are these beacons, these people, like maybe he remembers you, maybe he doesn't, but the fact that that old weirdo is still around, you're like, ah, see?
Marc:Yeah, it's not all gone.
Marc:No, no, totally.
Marc:And he's the key to the whole movie, really.
Guest:Yeah, well, that guy that plays, David Bradley, who plays Basil, that was based on a guy who's also now dead, who was basically like the town drunk.
Guest:There was this guy that used to come into, when I used to work in the supermarket, he used to come in every day, and every day he used to ask me,
Guest:This is what was really sad about Lee, because he was properly alcoholic.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He was like a car mechanic who was like a proper drunk.
Guest:But the weird thing was, is that all he used to buy was like a big three-liter bottle of cider.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was his shopping every day.
Guest:Right, yeah, that was his thing.
Guest:But every day he used to come up to me and ask where the cider was, which I thought was very strange, thinking, you know where it is, you just want somebody to talk to.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he used to have a really thick West Country accent, and he was always like sozzled, like always drunk, but he used to come up to me and go...
Guest:Hey, excuse me, do you know where the cider is?
Guest:And I'd be like, oh, it's just down there, like two aisles over opposite the pet food, sir.
Guest:And he goes, I thank you very much.
Guest:I thank you so much.
Guest:And he's got really wet eyes.
Guest:So I used to kind of like, I'd see him every day when I used to work in the supermarket.
Guest:And then I remember one night, this is why this guy had an effect on me.
Guest:And this was when I was in my, inverted commas, funny drunk stage as a teenager.
Guest:he was in, like, the pub.
Guest:And I was with some, like, friends and, like, a group of, like, teenage girls.
Guest:And, like, this guy saw me and I saw him.
Guest:And I said, Basil!
Guest:Like, exactly what they do in the film.
Guest:His name was Basil.
Guest:I said, Basil!
Guest:And he saw me and he came over and joined us.
Guest:And he started telling, like, sort of, like, these wild stories to these girls.
Guest:But there was one thing that I remember vividly.
Guest:There's this guy who's maybe, like, a 60-year-old drunk.
Guest:Like, he pointed at these teenage girls and he said...
Guest:In my day, I'd have had all of you.
Guest:Right to their face.
Guest:Right to their faces.
Marc:And I'm thinking, wow, that has stayed with me.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But also what that implies, and this is one of those things that you do when you're younger and you see guys like that, is like, you know, what did he live?
Marc:You know, what is his secret life?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, what wisdom does that guy have?
Marc:You know, you make these assumptions about drifters and drunks and lunatics that they are clearly different than everybody else.
Marc:So they must have some secret.
Marc:And sadly, as you get older, you realize, like, well, whatever it was, it might have been a small period of time a long time ago, and life has sort of beaten him.
Marc:But you do see them as revolutionary when you're younger.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Guest:And it's almost like that Basil, more like the real guy, more than the character that David plays in the movie, is more like what Gary King could become, what Simon's character could become if he doesn't kind of let go.
Marc:That's right, yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's funny.
Guest:I just showed at the New Beverly.
Guest:I curate kind of like seasons down there.
Guest:I did a whole season to lead up to the World's End.
Guest:And one of the double bills I showed that was like films that sort of not inspired, but like definitely inspired the opening of the movie in terms of I wanted the opening of the movie to feel like.
Guest:you know like that perfect summer night like sort of like this is the night that he craves and so as a double bill i put on american graffiti and dazed and confused right because both of those movies like do a really good job of like sort of um showing like the encapsulation of that summer night one is in like 62 and one is like 1976 but it's both teenage
Guest:Teenage, exactly.
Guest:So it's kind of like the inspiration for the first five minutes of the movie is that I tried to kind of imagine my like 1990 summer night out in those terms.
Guest:But what's interesting in both of those movies is they both have that guy.
Guest:In American Graffiti, it's Paul Lematt's character, John Milner.
Guest:And then in Days of Confuse, it's Matthew McConaughey playing Wooderson.
Guest:Now, but what's interesting about that is that then American Graffiti kind of like... And those are both sad guys.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:But what I find fascinating is then American Graffiti inspires Happy Days.
Guest:And the character in Happy Days, the Fonz, who is basically John Milner, he goes from what should be the sad guy to becoming the hero of that show.
Guest:And it's almost like Happy Days kind of completely gets it wrong in terms of they make that guy, they make the Gary King, the Fonz, who should be the sad guy who's like,
Guest:yeah, it's cool to be like that when you're 20, but not when you're 40.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He becomes the hero of the fucking show.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He even gets his own spin-off cartoon in the 80s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like Fonz with his time-traveling dog.
Guest:It's like, so I always thought that was fascinating.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But it's... Fonz and the Happy Days gang.
Guest:I had completely forgotten about that show until the AV Club did an article about silly cartoon spinoffs.
Guest:And they had a clip... The cartoon of the Fonz?
Guest:Yeah, I'd completely... I don't remember that at all.
Guest:You know what?
Guest:But it was a horrible kind of sense memory of like...
Guest:like oh shit i remember watching that in the mid 80s well but that's interesting because like even the jump from milner to uh to winkler yeah they kind of gutted that character a little bit that's another great name for a folk album from milner to winkler that's a jethro tall prog rock album it's like the whole and then the whole of side two is just one suite it's like a 25 minute track right and it's just called 1962.
Guest:1962 to 1974.
Marc:The 1962 Overture.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:That's funny.
Marc:Milner to Winkler.
Marc:But they kind of gutted that character and clowned him up a little bit.
Marc:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Marc:It was a sympathetic character, the Fonz, once you saw his other side.
Marc:He had this kind of, you know, Winkler played him beautifully.
Marc:But the Milner character was a sad warning.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:It's like, don't be this guy.
Marc:But I think it's interesting that the analogy is that on some level, Happy Days is a spinoff of American Graffiti, but it's not a parody.
Marc:It took a lot of the emotional weight.
Marc:It kind of leveled it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Once you start to get into Mork appearing...
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, yeah, sure.
Guest:Even before they jumped over the shark, more could already appear in the show.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:But the point is that, well, that's not completely out of line with the new movie.
Marc:I mean, aliens, they're not endearing or improvisational aliens.
Marc:But the thing is, is that when you do parody, that you somehow manage to not make the characters so broad that they have no heart.
Marc:And I'm not saying Henry Winkler didn't have a heart, but there was no menace to Happy Days, really.
Guest:You know what's funny?
Guest:The one thing about Happy Days is when I was a little kid, that was probably one of the first TV shows I remember watching.
Guest:And when I was a little kid, I had no, I didn't, that was one of the few American shows that I would watch.
Guest:But I wasn't aware when I was a little kid that it was set in the past.
Guest:I thought that was... That's what America?
Guest:Yeah, that's what I thought America was.
Guest:And in fact, you know, it's not a million miles away.
Guest:You still have Mel's Diner and everything.
Guest:There's still that kind of, there's still that kind of like sort of 50s design classic thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I would watch, and also I was confused because Scott Baio had a 70s haircut.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the point is that you thought that that's how America was.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I knew you were a little kid then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I was like, yeah, I was born in 74.
Guest:So like that was one of the first TV shows that I saw.
Marc:Well, you know, I think that what I want to get back to is that, you know, in defining this sort of the world of of nerd culture, you know, that you seem to be, you know, kind of a leader in.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:A nerd leader.
Marc:Yeah, that you have the fortitude and you're grounded enough.
Marc:I really like this whole idea of having this mother that sort of promoted involuntarily the use of your imagination into all these different areas.
Marc:and then you're able to contextualize it but you're able to sort of you know feed emotion into it uh that you know is very human that it seems like there's a real effort in all the movies to to ground it in the humanity of frost and and and peg and their dynamic now now i know that they have from talking to simon that that there's a very long and very i don't know if it's complicated but it's a deep emotional relationship between two dudes
Marc:Now, how did you come into that?
Marc:I mean, like, because they, they exist in, and you obviously use them well, but were you part of, are you a triangle?
Marc:Are you, did you find them together?
Marc:How did that work?
Guest:You know, I think sort of, um, you, you know, you just made me think about something.
Guest:My parents remember to come back, we'll come back, loop back to that.
Guest:But with Simon, I had met Simon first.
Guest:I had like made, um,
Guest:like i basically got my i'd done these like super eight films i'd like sort of like gone to college i made this like silly movie when i was 20 moved to london and even though the movie wasn't i was as good as i hoped it would be i had got me my break in terms of like some other comedians saw it there's those guys matt lucas and david walliams yeah they saw my movie and they asked me to do their first sketch show this was when i was 21 and
Guest:Now, funnily enough, I went to see a stand-up show that Matt Lucas and David Walliams were doing.
Guest:And in the bar afterwards, Simon Pegg was there.
Guest:And I knew him because I'd seen him doing stand-up on TV.
Guest:And he did stand-up about our region.
Guest:We're both from the west of England, which is kind of like...
Guest:The West of England is kind of like making kind of rube jokes, basically, almost like doing he whore jokes.
Marc:Right, the South.
Guest:Yeah, the South.
Guest:It's like sort of that it's you would speak in a thick accent.
Marc:Like if a headliner, like if American hack headliner went to England, like, where do the idiots live?
Marc:Or where are the, you know, the simple people?
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:You could do like the sort of blue collar comedy tour kind of thing.
Guest:So I'd seen Simon, so I went up to him and said, hey, I saw your stand-up on the stand-up show.
Guest:He goes, I come from the West Country too.
Guest:And he went, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he sort of like, in a very polite way, kind of goes, yeah, kid, whatever.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he said, thank you, but it was like, who's this kid talking to me?
Marc:And what is he, 10 years younger than you?
Marc:What is he, older than you?
Marc:How old are you now?
Yeah.
Guest:I'm 39.
Guest:So he's four years older than me.
Marc:How?
Marc:Four?
Marc:He's four years older.
Marc:Oh, that's not that much older.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So he must have been, you know, I was like, so he was only like 24, 25 when he was like starting.
Marc:He was a comic.
Marc:He was hard.
Marc:He was at the club.
Guest:You're just like, who's this newbie?
Guest:So then like a cut to a year later, I end up directing him in this show.
Guest:I do this show with Matt and Dave called Mash and Peas.
Guest:And then I do this other show called Asylum and Simon is in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he remembers me and it's like, oh, you're that, you're that kid.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And, you know, I remember vividly that like he was actually sort of doing he did the show and he was actually shooting something else at the same time.
Guest:And he was so great in it.
Guest:And this was the thing where I found a real connection with him is that we bonded over a couple of movies.
Guest:Like we bonded over the first thing that we really bonded over, you know, very kind of symbolically was George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
Guest:And I never really met anybody else that loved that movie as much as I did.
Guest:My brother didn't love Dawn of the Dead that much, but Simon was like, I love Dawn of the Dead.
Marc:Was that the first one or no?
Marc:The second one, the 1978 one.
Marc:The shopping mall.
Marc:Well, that's it because I think a lot of people don't realize, well, of course they do, but that was a very conscious satire.
Guest:absolutely it's the satire on consumerism right yeah okay and like the me decade and everything and just like i mean to me that's like that film is still like oh i also think that film is like a desert island film yeah it's like robinson crusoe sure they're in they're on that mall and they can't get off right and it's like they have all this fruit and stuff but you know how long is that how long is there's no hope yeah there's no hope yeah
Guest:So I did this show with Simon, and because he was doing another show at the same time, he was really good in the show, but I could see that he wasn't that invested in it at the time, but mainly because he was exhausted.
Guest:He was doing this other show.
Guest:He was coming down to do our show on weekends.
Guest:He was also doing stand-up gigs at night.
Guest:And I remember like one time he, he just like anytime he wasn't filming, he was like sleeping, but he was still really great in the show.
Guest:And we'd started to sort of circle around each other in terms of like, but I remember vividly that we had like a wrap party for the show.
Guest:And I think some of the episodes have been out.
Guest:And I remember vividly that Simon came straight up to me at the wrap party and said, you were a genius.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Which was so sweet.
Guest:Because it was like he'd actually watched the show back and said, oh, shit.
Guest:This is really good.
Guest:It was just the nicest thing he could have said.
Marc:He got you.
Marc:He saw that what you brought to it was beyond what he was experiencing.
Guest:It was very sweet.
Guest:And it was sort of the start of something in terms of... Even before he said that, I had been watching him act and I thought, this man is my ideal leading man.
Guest:And even before I knew what anything was going to be, I was thinking, I want to make a film with him in it.
Guest:Because the movie that I'd made when I was 20, this Western, was starring all of my school friends and college friends, hardly any of which wanted to be actors.
Guest:It was all just like...
Marc:Was it a riff on the Spaghetti Western?
Guest:Oh, yeah, totally.
Guest:It was like a Spaghetti Western shot in the leafy English countryside.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is it in the world?
Marc:Can people watch it?
Guest:You know, it's on VHS.
Guest:Occasionally it crops up on YouTube.
Guest:I keep taking it down because I intend to release it on DVD, probably in time for its 20th anniversary.
Marc:But it's something people know of.
Marc:Did you shoot that on 16 or what?
Guest:16 mil, yeah.
Guest:It was actually released.
Guest:I don't want to say it was released in cinema.
Guest:It was released in cinema.
Guest:It was in one screen in London.
Marc:Later, once you became known, you showed it or when you made it?
Guest:No, when I made it, it was released at one cinema.
Guest:It was kind of how I got my break.
Guest:Strangely, a distributor picked it up and they showed it at this cinema called The Prince Charles, which used to only charge at the time, the ticket prices were like two pounds.
Marc:So let's get back to this idea that, you know, what was it in Simon?
Marc:Oh, Simon.
Marc:Because I can see, like even in watching Spaced and everything, that he's a guy that fares well in a world that's against him.
Guest:He's like a great everyman.
Guest:I sort of thought immediately, I kind of thought of people like, he's like, you know, and I know this is a lofty comparison, but I think he's that good.
Guest:I think Simon's like a Jack Lemmon type.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I mean, he's like somebody who can be really funny and really dramatic, but you totally, he's totally-
Guest:Yes, absolutely.
Guest:Vulnerable and also relatable.
Guest:You're just thinking, I know that guy.
Guest:So I knew that I wanted to do something with him.
Guest:And then weirdly, then how I met Nick was that Simon was so good in Asylum with Jessica that somebody suggested they do a show.
Guest:They started writing it.
Guest:So then...
Guest:like over the next like three years whilst they were writing and i went off to do other like comedy shows with actually which is interesting because i did comedy shows with much older comedians was that bailey i did well bill bailey's a little bit older i did bill bailey i also did a series with alexi sale an entire series his final do you know him at all no alexi sale in the uk is basically the kind of like the the guy who started the alternate alternative comedy okay
Guest:So he's like, he really is the groundbreaker.
Guest:And he was like sort of, and still is very famous, like sort of, he's kind of, he's actually just made a return to stand up after like 15 years.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:But he was, he's in The Young Ones, in fact.
Guest:He plays the landlord in The Young Ones.
Guest:But in the UK, he's forever famous for being basically the first alternative comedian.
Guest:So he's got this godlike status.
Guest:And I did a series with him.
Guest:But, you know, at the time I was like 23 and Alexei was like 53.
Guest:So that was.
Guest:And then I also did like one episode of French and Saunders.
Guest:Do you know that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I sort of worked with some older comedians.
Guest:They'd seen other stuff they'd done.
Guest:Said, oh, you know, this kid's doing some interesting stuff on cable.
Guest:Let's get him to do these big BBC shows.
Guest:And it was an interesting experience because I did start to feel like I can totally direct these shows, but I feel like I'm too young to be doing these shows in a weird way.
Marc:Well, they probably had limitations in that they weren't servicing your ideas.
Marc:yeah but also in a strange way with some of those especially with french and saunders like it seems it seems silly to impose your style on that show because it's already well right so you had that realization early on that's like wow i could go on as a director and just service pre-existing yes uh formats forever yeah because i'm efficient at what i do but if i want to do what i want to do i this is not the life for me
Guest:Well, strangely enough, just before space happened, there was like an incident that happened on French disorders, which like, like some people around me were saying, this is, this is a terrible mistake, Edgar, is that I didn't really want to do French disorders.
Guest:They wanted me to do the Christmas special.
Guest:And I really, I was so exhausted from having done other shows.
Guest:I really wanted to go on holiday.
Marc:i just wanted to go away with you guys with your vacations and turning opportunities down is so not american i know i just it's beautiful i respect it it's like yeah i'd like to have a big opportunity but you know i'm a little tired i kind of had a plan to get away for a while well only because i'd just done this other show i like i was like i like it i think it's great i think it's a reasonable way for humans to live well you know what it was it was like i was going out with an australian at the time and she was going back to like see her folks and stuff so it was like
Guest:Do I go to Australia with my girlfriend or do I do the French and Saunders Christmas special?
Guest:I probably, you know, it was fine.
Guest:I'm not with her anymore, so I probably should have done French and Saunders.
Guest:No, you shouldn't.
Guest:But we're still really good friends, actually.
Marc:If you had done that, who knows, you might be doing their Christmas special this year.
Guest:Hey, listen, though.
Guest:I'm so incredibly loyal that my ex-girlfriend continued working on everything we did, even like years after we split up.
Marc:Loyal and apparently emotionally detached.
Guest:So I did this French and Saunders thing and they wanted me to do the film bits, but they also want me to do the live TV bits.
Guest:Now, I am not a live TV director and I did it once on Bill Bailey.
Guest:And I have to say that doing live TV direction in the studio is an art form of which I am not a master.
Guest:And I realized having done it once and seeing other people do it, I said, that is an art form in itself.
Guest:Doing live TV direction is something else.
Guest:So I sort of said, oh, I want to do it, but I don't really want to do the live TV bit.
Guest:And the producer said, you know, it's fine.
Guest:If you feel like you don't want to do it, we can get another director in to do the live bit.
Guest:So I did all the film bits with French and Saunders.
Guest:And then as it came to it, like leading up to like, this is like the week before Christmas.
Guest:I was like, so like, I was trying to finish off all the film bits.
Guest:And I was like thinking, I really don't want to do the live studio bit.
Guest:So I said to the producer, oh, do you think you can get another director to do the live bit?
Guest:Because I really don't want to do it.
Guest:I'm just like burnt out.
Guest:And I want to like focus on the film bits.
Guest:And you get somebody else to do the live studio bits.
Guest:And I have no ego about it.
Guest:I'd happily let somebody else do that half of the show.
Guest:And suddenly this producer sort of turned on me.
Guest:He'd never offered me that lifeline and said, oh, you're going to walk out on French Storm?
Guest:I said, no, no, no, I thought you said.
Guest:He goes, well, you know, Dawn and Jennifer are going to be very upset.
Guest:And suddenly the word got round.
Guest:Literally somebody else, this is when I was at the BBC.
Guest:They played you is what they did.
Guest:And then later that day, I had like both my agent and also another producer saying, hey, I hear you walked out on French and Saunders.
Guest:I said, no, no, no, no, I'm still here.
Guest:I was trying to finish the film.
Marc:And then the same dude that you had the conversation with was doing this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The same dude you said, you know, it's okay.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:So then he like made out and the word got around that I, this 24 year old kid was walking out on French and Saunders.
Guest:he set you up that he thought that he was going to just be able to bully you in the last minute no he did he totally did and i felt i completely fell for it so then the thing was is i i finished doing the film and somebody else did the the studio but it was that thing where even my agent was said are you sure you want to do i said
Guest:I said, they said that somebody else could do it.
Guest:Welcome to show business.
Guest:Here's the funny thing, though.
Guest:It's literally of this experience where as the end of my period of working with older comedians was this kind of controversial thing of Edgar Wright walked out of French Saunders.
Guest:literally and so I was thinking oh man have I got have I got a bad reputation all of a sudden but that January after Christmas I started working on Spaced so that was like and then just suddenly working on like Spaced with Simon and Jess was like
Guest:Oh, not only is this like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, but this is a show that's about the age group that I am.
Guest:Like this is a show about people in their mid-twenties and I'm in my mid-twenties.
Guest:This is what I should be doing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So ever since then, I kind of like, it was a lesson in terms of like, I've got to like sort of just be myself on screen.
Guest:Do you know what I mean?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:how i met nick though i met nick through that show like simon and nick had been friends for like sort of they've been friends for 20 years nick had never acted before yeah and he was like a waiter right right simon you know plucked from you know yeah from chiquitos in staples corner and when i first met nick he said nothing like he was so shy
Guest:And I met him in this bar with Simon and Nick just is at first a very shy person.
Guest:And I will admit, and I've always said this to Nick that I was wrong, but I did say to Simon, I said, hey, do you think Nick can pull this off?
Guest:Because I met him and he didn't say anything to me.
Guest:And that to me doesn't scream comedy performer.
Guest:And I was very happy to be proved wrong.
Guest:But I always like, no, I don't regret it at all.
Guest:But I'll always admit to not being convinced at first.
Guest:So that's when Nick came into it.
Guest:And like, you know, so it was during space.
Guest:I don't know if Simon told the story on the podcast, but Simon essentially lied to get him the part.
Guest:Our version of SAG is like equity.
Guest:That's our union.
Guest:And you know that thing where you have to kind of like, I guess you have to change your name if there's somebody else in the union.
Guest:There was another Nick Frost in Spotlight.
Guest:And to get Nick the part, Nick who was previously just a waiter from Chiquitos, Simon said that the Nick Frost that we were hiring for Space was the Nick Frost that was in Spotlight.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:so this poor guy apologies to the other nick frost out there but basically like sort of the other nick frost came in and used your name like this other guy had been in like soaps and drama series and stuff like the bill or like sort of like you know i wonder if he's bitter somewhere i don't know i don't really want to find out
Guest:But I apologize.
Guest:Well, I don't feel guilty.
Guest:It wasn't my trick.
Guest:But, like, apologies to the other Nick Frost.
Guest:Mate, you know what we should do?
Guest:We should cast the other Nick Frost in the next one.
Guest:I think if that happens because of this podcast, that would be great.
Marc:It's the least we can do.
Marc:Right, and give him a scene with your Nick Frost.
Guest:Yeah, it could be like that mirror scene in Duck Soup.
Marc:Oh, my God, you're referencing Marx Brothers movies.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:You're a...
Marc:You're a... That's the thing about... See, I don't know what... A couple of things, let's get back to before.
Marc:Do you have to be somewhere?
Marc:No, I'm okay.
Marc:You said you wanted to come back to your parents and your imagination.
Guest:I think... One thing that I think sort of in a roundabout way inspired me is that my parents are like always...
Guest:I love them dearly and stuff.
Guest:They always had a tough time financially and it always felt like they were penalised for being artists.
Guest:Like they would like, they were teachers and then they didn't want to be teachers, they wanted to be artists.
Guest:They sort of dropped out of teaching to be artists and then the business went kind of like quickly south so they went back to teaching again and then they dropped out, then they hated teaching and stuff and at one point my mum, this is the worst, like,
Guest:I don't know how this can happen.
Guest:It seems impossible.
Guest:But my mom and my dad both taught me at my school at the age of 13.
Guest:Can you imagine how embarrassing that is?
Marc:I've heard this from a lot of kids who have parents or teachers.
Marc:How does that happen, though?
Marc:It's a small town.
Guest:Where else are you going to go to school?
Guest:Well, the thing was that in my school, there were two streams.
Guest:You'd have the A stream and the B stream.
Guest:And so I actually went to the headmistress and said...
Guest:And said, can I be in the other stream and not be taught by my parents?
Guest:And they said, oh, no, sorry.
Guest:It's already set up.
Guest:It's been predestined by the Masons.
Guest:Oh, God.
Guest:It was the fucking Masons again.
Guest:Yeah, it was.
Guest:They laugh at me even in death.
Guest:Well, that's interesting.
Guest:So there's one thing that my mom did that's the worst, is that she called me by a pet name in front of the class.
Marc:Oh, God.
Guest:She called me by the name.
Guest:She said, all right, Pickle.
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:In front of, like, girls.
Guest:Pickle.
Guest:The other thing is that when I went home, my mom- Did it stick?
Guest:It's actually in Shaun of the Dead.
Guest:We use Pickle.
Guest:The other thing that was funny is my mum used to then have an opinion of all of the girls in the class.
Guest:And there was somebody that I had a crush on and she would sort of say, I don't know why you find Ishtar Notman so attractive.
Guest:I think she's miserable.
Guest:I think Vanessa Burton is much more attractive.
Guest:Why don't you go out with Vanessa Burton?
Guest:She's really pretty.
Guest:You know, she only lives around the corner.
Guest:I just think Vanessa Burton is much prettier than Ishtar Notman.
Guest:Isn't that a great name?
Guest:Ishtar Notman.
Marc:Yeah, it's a great name.
Guest:I don't know what happened to her, but I did get off with her once.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What does get off mean?
Marc:How far is that?
Marc:Made out.
Marc:Oh, just made out.
Guest:Like first base.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Because get off here has a very different meaning.
Guest:No, getting off means like, you know, like first base.
Guest:Then like second and third would be tops and fingers.
Marc:tops and fingers yes there's another record tops and fingers that's another prog rock album tops and fingers tops and fingers is by vanilla fudge right a little more rocky there's a little more rocky maybe the faces tops and fingers is a faces album yeah that's right right Ronnie Wood is amazing on tops and fingers yeah he's great on it yeah everything he does is tops and Ronnie Wood is fingers yeah
Marc:Well, that's interesting.
Marc:So from your parents, you learned not only do artists get a sort of shame for being artists and that they had to sort of make compromises in order to do what they do, but they were also very encouraging.
Marc:I mean, it must have been a very creative environment and you had probably no second thoughts about pursuing it.
Guest:No.
Guest:I mean, in a way, that's the thing.
Guest:To watch my parents struggle and kind of be semi-bankrupt frequently did not dissuade me or my brother from pursuing an artistic career.
Guest:What's your brother do?
Guest:Like an animator, an illustrator.
Guest:He does a lot of stuff in the movies, actually.
Guest:He actually sort of designed the blanks in The World's End.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:But he actually does the storyboards with me as well.
Guest:He's amazing.
Guest:He's older and he's just a great artist.
Guest:He even designed the credits in The World's End.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Guest:And your father was what kind of artist?
Guest:He would do, like, you know, he's an illustrator.
Guest:He's a really great artist and stuff.
Guest:But, like, you know, and actually now they're retired and stuff.
Guest:They've sort of gone back to, like, you know, kind of, like, drawing again and stuff.
Guest:Without the pressure.
Guest:Without the pressure.
Guest:Are they enjoying it?
Guest:Yeah, you know, I've had to bail them out on many occasions, but that's exactly what you have to do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're giving back to the arts.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:They supported me for long enough, so I have to support that now.
Guest:They earned it.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Okay, so when you say art college.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because it seems to me that you're very sophisticated around the language of film, around the history of film, around the depth of what a film can mean, both culturally, historically, and aesthetically.
Marc:When did that start for you?
Marc:What was the moment that did that?
Guest:what i think is a because my parents used to kind of like actively encourage like us to see movies and in fact they used to do like craft shows as artists and because they couldn't afford a babysitter they used to dump me and my brother at the cinema and just leave us there all day oh okay yeah so that's like when you know in the summers of like sort of the late 70s early 80s we would see every summer movie because it was cheaper than a babysitter but they would just leave us at the cinema right and using my dad would mistime it so like halfway through the second half of a double bill dad would come back and say oh gotta go and i go no
Guest:I want to see the rest of the Incredible Hulk.
Guest:The Hulk hasn't even changed yet.
Guest:Sorry.
Guest:For fuck's sake.
Guest:I wouldn't say for fuck's sake when I was six.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But then I didn't, you know, again, this is my sob story.
Guest:Get rid of the violins.
Guest:My family could not afford a VCR.
Guest:So most of my education was watching what was on network TV.
Guest:I would watch all the films that were on network TV.
Guest:Because we didn't have a VCR, me and my brother would, if there was a horror movie on at four o'clock in the morning and we had school the next day, we would stay up until 5.30 to watch that movie and then go into school with like three hours sleep.
Guest:And a head full of gore.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:If Piranha was on at four o'clock in the morning on ITV, I was going to stay up and watch it because I had no VCR to record it.
Guest:Then when I went to art college, I think sort of, I went to this art college, a place called Bournemouth, it's by the seaside.
Guest:And it's an interesting kind of college because when it gets hot, like everybody fucks off and the campus is deserted.
Guest:And as you can see from my tan, I'm not a sun person.
Guest:So I would use that period just to kind of, they had a library there where they had lots of like films.
Guest:So I would just like watch absolutely everything.
Guest:So it wasn't actually even part of my course.
Guest:I would just like try and like watch.
Guest:I would sort of try and do a thing at college where I would try and watch like three movies a day every day.
Marc:And is that about that?
Marc:Were you starting to sort of realize the depth of the intellectual conversation around movies?
Marc:Because.
Guest:I think just the history is sort of like, obviously growing up, I gravitated more towards like genre films, whether it was like sci-fi or like Western through Sergio Leone or like usually like through like sort of genre films.
Guest:But then like at college, I started trying to watch kind of like something of everything, like to try and like.
Marc:But did you go through the Bicycle Thief and Kane and Rome Open City?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:The sort of weird standards of the auteur movement and that kind of thing, guitar and that stuff.
Guest:Yeah, although I remember vividly, we had this great kind of like teacher at kind of like art college called Pete Stringfield, who like, he, he would, we used to be there used to be this lecture hall, which was I had no air conditioning.
Guest:And I remember vividly them showing like Tokyo Story, which is one of those kind of like sort of like art house classics or, you know, not an art house, like a world cinema classic.
Guest:And because there's no air conditioning, I swear to God, like everybody would be asleep within 10 minutes.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:So there's this very sort of strange thing of like projected on the screen is this kind of like classic of world cinema with like a room full of snoring students.
Yeah.
Guest:And mainly because there was no, we don't have air con in the UK.
Guest:It doesn't seem to exist at all.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's just like, it's fucking hot in that lecture theater.
Guest:And also that classic thing where people come, especially film students is like, oh, I can sleep during that film.
Marc:Well, it's hard to get through some of that shit, man.
Guest:No, no, it is.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:But especially when people have been fucking drinking all night, they think like, oh, Tokyo story is the perfect snooze.
Guest:I'm going to go in and that's my, my attendance is noted.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm going to sleep through the whole thing.
Guest:But I'll tell you a story about art college that's absolutely true.
Guest:So I wanted to go on to this film course.
Guest:I knew I wanted to be a film director when I was a teenager.
Guest:And the real epiphany for me was hearing about Sam Raimi making Evil Dead when he was 18.
Guest:I was like, oh, my God.
Guest:I thought that to be a director, you had to be born in Hollywood.
Guest:I mistakenly thought that somebody like Spielberg had been dropped off by a stalk at Universal Studios and just...
Guest:Becomes a director.
Guest:Of course, everybody has a story of how they start, but it was Sam Raimi's story that I heard and thought, I want to do that.
Guest:And so I had applied to this art college to do this.
Guest:He made it seem possible to you.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Because he's a kid from Michigan.
Guest:He's not from Hollywood.
Guest:He's not from Los Angeles.
Guest:He's a kid in Michigan who raises the money for his first feature selling air conditioners, ironically.
Yeah.
Guest:And he just makes a movie.
Guest:You don't have where you live.
Guest:In fact, I wish, Sam, I wish you'd come around to our house playing with your air conditioners.
Guest:So I had applied to this course in Bournemouth, this film and TV course.
Guest:And I'd applied.
Guest:And they said, oh, you're too young to be a director.
Guest:So I was 18 at the time.
Guest:So you're too young.
Guest:Why don't you do this foundation course?
Guest:So that was like an audiovisual design course.
Guest:It was kind of like a lower degree.
Guest:It was like kind of doing like a city college thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I did that for two years and I was down in Bournemouth for two years.
Guest:And that was a great period of like, everybody else fucks off to the beach.
Guest:I'm going to learn how to edit.
Guest:Whilst the edit suite is completely empty.
Guest:Everybody is suntanning.
Guest:I am going to learn how to edit.
Marc:So you used the education for what you were supposed to use.
Guest:Yeah, but I was doing kind of on my own.
Guest:I would go to the library and I would sit in the library and watch movies.
Guest:They used to have those kind of little viewing booths.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I would just go and watch VHS's in there.
Guest:And I remember vividly that some kid on my course had all of the kind of what was the video nasties or the horror films that had been banned in the 80s in the UK.
Guest:And he had them all.
Guest:So I used to borrow them and watch them.
Guest:And some of them like things like I Spit on Your Grave, which is a horrific rape revenge film.
Guest:I remember watching it in the viewing booth in the library and I tried to angle the TV away because there was like a window in the door.
Guest:And I thought if particularly a female student or any student came up and saw that I was watching this movie, I'd be so mortified.
Guest:So I'd try and angle the TV away so they couldn't see what I was watching.
Guest:But here's the funny thing.
Guest:So I was there for two years.
Guest:i reapplied for the higher course the one i went to do in the first place now i was 20 and they said you're too young to be a director come back in five years but then you know five years later i was doing space yeah but here's the here's the other like twist of that tale is that in their brochure for that university for that college they have managed to include me in the alumni for the course that i never did yeah
Guest:Even though I was rejected from that course twice, they've worded it in such a way.
Guest:And I only knew about this because on Twitter and stuff, people say to me, hey, I'm doing the film and TV course only because you did it.
Guest:And you didn't.
Guest:And I would email back and say, I never did that course.
Guest:They said, oh, well, the brochure makes it seem like you did.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And I looked at the brochure and they did.
Guest:And I've thought about complaining and getting them to take it down.
Guest:But then I thought I'd rather have the smug satisfaction that they had to put me on there.
Marc:Ah.
Marc:You win.
Marc:I win.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So what is it about gore that's so... Because there's that moment in Hot Fuzz where the top of that steeple comes down.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And it's very clear that that was at least two days of shooting that you needed to do.
Marc:And there was a lot involved in some of the gore elements that you're very sort of meticulous about making it just slightly over the top and respectful as a homage to that type of film.
Marc:But you love that shit.
Marc:You know what's funny?
Guest:I don't know whether... There's probably some deeper reasons for this, but I'll say one thing, just in terms of the addiction of response, is that I remember when I used to make films when I was a teenager, and I used to show them at school.
Guest:So I used to make these kind of like... Once I'd won this video camera on this competition, that thing where I did about the wheelchair access, I'd won a video camera.
Guest:So once I had the camera that I couldn't afford, I was just going to go crazy and make shitloads of films with my school friends.
Guest:And some of the ones I used to make used to be really silly and lots of gags, but they used to be quite gory because, I don't know, I liked horror films and stuff.
Guest:And showing them to an audience, I used to invite people to come and watch it in school of an evening and charge a pound of admittance.
Guest:And getting laughs was cool, but when there was gory bits, people went,
Guest:hearing that audible like oh yeah yeah is just addictive do you know what I mean it's just like punching them in the brain I just say something about it and I think sort of it's because in the comedies a lot of the comedies that I grew up with that would be like sort of
Guest:Funny and scary, like the key ones would be, I mean, not just Evil Dead, well, Evil Dead 2 specifically, but one of my favourite films of all time, just because it is so prickly, it's funny and fucking terrifying and violent at the same time, is An American Wealth in London.
Guest:oh yeah now when I saw that as a kid I just I just couldn't comprehend like how and what how you would have all of those tones in one movie that it's like really funny and the the leads are really sweet like Griffin done and they're really sweet and then one of them fucking dies like really like horrifically yeah and then it gets funny again and then there's another really violent instant and then it gets sexy yeah and then it gets violent again and then it gets funny again I was just thinking I
Guest:I love this movie.
Guest:It's just a ride.
Guest:Right, because you could do everything in it.
Guest:You do everything in it.
Guest:So that was your key.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:I think there's also just a thing of like, it's just an element of mischief and having grown up in a small town, which is kind of boring.
Guest:You both love it, but you want to rip it to shreds at the same time.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So there's a feeling with all of the three British movies that I've done, like Sean, Fuzz, and World's End, they're all in places that I've lived.
Guest:And so there is this kind of, I think, mischievous desire to cause absolute havoc.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also sort of like creating a secret life to these innocuous, seemingly innocuous environments.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:It's one of my proud... I mean, having done this press tour for, like, seven weeks, one of my ongoing, like, proudest things is being in another city in the world, like, being in Chicago.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Watching my neighborhood on screen from home, like, be torn apart.
Guest:It's like, I just saw something, like, amazing about it.
Guest:Or just watching, like... I think me and Simon, when we did the Shaun of the Dead press tour and first started, like, showing that film around the States...
Guest:like being in detroit and watching north london on screen is such a trip for us i can't even describe it yeah and it's almost like the thing like sort of it's like um you know it's almost like with the kind of like the you know the movies that the british ones over here like they they they're never like destined to be like a hundred million dollar hits but that's kind of not the point it's just the fact that we got them out there do you know i mean it's like
Guest:I can't believe that fucking North London is playing all over.
Guest:The Crouch End in North London is all over.
Guest:And this weekend, when The World's End comes out, it's like these towns like Letchworth and Wellingarten City, the towns that we shot in the movie.
Marc:They're going to be international now.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:They're going to be playing at the AMC in Cupertino.
Guest:That's pretty cool.
Marc:That is cool.
Marc:So, all right, before we finish, what is your experience with Scott Pilgrim and how you make movies?
Marc:And I know you did the animated film with Spielberg, but what's your experience in sort of the next step for that?
Marc:I mean, you're obviously on the radar and you're obviously going to have to reckon with Hollywood and you have.
Marc:I mean, how is it working with this industry?
Guest:You know, like, it was, you know, like, Scott Pilgrim was a film that didn't do as well as everybody hoped.
Guest:But, like, I'm really proud of the movie.
Guest:And all I could do, like, with that movie is just, like, work really, really hard on it.
Guest:And, like, I feel like sort of the actual... I couldn't have, like... I mean, I couldn't... You know, there's a thing with those movies is, like...
Guest:you know if you work as hard as you can on them and you promote them as hard as you can on you've done all that you can do and after that it's in the lap of the gods about how it does commercially and how it's marketed and stuff and so there's only so much you can do really so you know it was a good experience like making the movie and uh i mean it's a good experience all around in terms of that even though it didn't do as well as everybody hoped you didn't feel tempered creatively i
Guest:No, you know what?
Guest:There were some things in the test screening process and just kind of actually trying to market it was the more challenging aspect than actually making it.
Guest:If I look back at that movie, I honestly look back and I'm thinking, I cannot believe they let me make this movie.
Guest:It's fucking insane.
Guest:And that I'm really proud.
Guest:And in a way, what's really nice about it is it very quickly became a midnight movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know.
Guest:And you can appreciate that.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It's almost like it was a prophecy foretold, you know.
Guest:Like, sometimes, like, I would watch, like, old movies that I love, that were cult movies, like, something like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or Phantom of the Paradise.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:They're crazy movies, but the craziest thing about them is they have a studio logo at the front.
Guest:You see the 20th Century Fox logo at the start of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and you think, I cannot believe a studio made this movie.
Guest:And then I realized Scott Pilgrim is one of those movies.
Guest:but listen the movie has been re-released on blu-ray like four times so it's obviously doing okay sure and what about uh spielberg meeting spielberg and working with him that was amazing and he's continued to be like sort of like um in a very nice way i think he sort of i i feel sometimes like his nephew like he was incredibly sweet to me on on cin cin is that he'd he'd always be at pains there was a really sweet moment that was so funny was
Guest:we were doing this conference call like um and uh you know they were showing the animation for tinting which was in no way finished it was like a rough of the animation which of course i knew how that all worked and i was spielberg said sit next to me like on this conference call and i was sitting next to him and in like sort of whilst they're playing on this animation he leant over and whispered in my ear for the benefit of me and nobody else said
Guest:Edgar, of course, none of this is finished animation.
Guest:I said, I know, but the fact that you wanted to tell me that is sweet.
Guest:Like my hero, he's been great.
Guest:And in fact, he sent me the sweetest email about The World's End the other day, which I just, it was something where I just thought, oh, I can just like retire tomorrow.
Guest:He actually sort of...
Guest:He sent me this really, really nice email about how much he loved the movie and said, please tell Simon and Nick they're amazing in it.
Guest:And then it was like, lovely, lovely email.
Guest:And at the end he put, P.S.
Guest:He goes, I loved everywhere you put the camera.
Guest:He goes, like, good choices on composition.
Guest:He goes, you have an excellent sense of montage.
Guest:S. And I was thinking, fucking hell.
Guest:I'm just thinking, well, I may as well just quit.
Marc:It's like a diploma of some kind.
Marc:You've passed the biggest test possible as a filmmaker.
Guest:What I'm going to do is I'm going to print out that email.
Guest:I'm going to send it back to the Bournemouth and Paul College of Art and Design and say, hey guys, now do you want to take me on to the fucking... Now will you take me on?
Guest:20 years later, now I'm going to do the course.
Guest:Maybe I should do that.
Guest:Maybe I should go back and do that course now.
Guest:yeah yeah tell them like a mature student no no because if they're already using your name they'll have you teaching yeah yeah maybe this well you know what they have this is the funny thing and i've got to do it and now i've said on the podcast i i will have to do it they have asked me back that college has asked me to come back and do a talk which is amazing and i'm gonna do it because i think it'd be so funny when they say what's your advice i say well number one don't do this course yeah yeah you'll still get if you succeed they'll put your name on it anyways
Guest:as alumni as that even if you get rejected guys and you do well you could still be one of the alumni so don't worry you're all good I'd say just go down the beach and get sun tanning but but yeah you can do that but the weird thing about your story is that you know you definitely knew the difference you know between taking advantage of
Marc:And honoring your vision and doing whatever you had to do to service it as opposed to just think it was going to happen by osmosis.
Marc:Oh, no.
Guest:Oh, totally.
Guest:You just think sort of like you've got to put in the hours and you've got to struggle and stuff.
Guest:And even after Spaced, when we'd done the show, which was not a massive ratings hit, but was very critically well regarded.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Actually getting Shaun of the Dead made was then like a three-year like waiting, like holding pattern of like, will it happen?
Guest:It might not happen.
Guest:I was just at the point where it was finally greenlit.
Guest:I actually said to my landlord, I said, hey, I got to move out.
Guest:And he said, he goes, oh, you know, is there anything I can do?
Guest:And I said, yeah, I can't afford the rent anymore.
Guest:I got to go somewhere smaller.
Guest:And my landlord actually said, he goes, what if I froze the rent?
Guest:Would that help?
Guest:And I said, yeah, it'd help for a little bit.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:like so i was just about to like downsize to like a way smaller apartment having done like tv having directed the french installment christmas special yeah now i was broke i still owe simon peg here's the thing is i it got so you know bad that like because the thing is is that if you're trying to get a film off the ground like taking like a tv job or taking like even a commercial and stuff is to kind of say that movie's now going back another six months
Guest:So I basically went through a period where I did a couple of music videos, but I didn't do any TV work because I was thinking, I'm holding out for this movie.
Guest:Like Simon could do acting jobs, but I couldn't really take on a TV job without bumping like my own film.
Marc:Because you never knew when it was going to go.
Marc:When it was going to go.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And in fact, I turned down this TV job.
Guest:I turned down this TV job for a drama.
Guest:And I was very flattered to be asked.
Guest:And I emailed the producer and I said, hey, I'm really flattered to be asked.
Guest:I'd love to do this show, but I'm really holding out for my debut feature.
Guest:I'm holding out for my film to get made, and she emailed me back and said, if I had a pound for every time I've heard a director say that, which is like, ouch.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:I know, like, it's cold.
Marc:But again, she was working you, man.
Marc:No, I know, I know.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But here's the thing is that sort of, like, during that period, I had to borrow money off my agent, off Naira Park, my producer, and I had to borrow money off Simon.
Guest:Now, here's the thing is I still owe Simon Pegg £600.
Guest:And when I offered to pay it back, he said, I'm not going to let you pay it back because I always want to have that over you.
Guest:Awesome.
Guest:Well, thanks for talking to me, Edgar.
Guest:Oh, it was a pleasure.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It's great to be on.
Guest:It's lovely to be here.
Guest:And listeners out there, I'd say that Mark's Den is everything you wanted it to be.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Well, I appreciate that.
Marc:What a lovely chap.
Marc:Am I right?
Marc:Is that wrong to say?
Marc:Is that somehow condescending or racist in any way or ethnically improper for me to go?
Marc:What a what a pleasant bloke that was to speak to that that Edgar Wright fella.
Marc:As I said, the movie is available on Blu-ray, digital DVD, all that stuff.
Marc:You know, the way we get things now.
Marc:It was an enjoyable film.
Marc:What else have I got to tell you?
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
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Marc:We're waiting for some of them fancy Brian Jones mugs so you can drink your JustCoffee.coop out of those babies.
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Marc:Enjoy it.
Marc:I did it for you.
Marc:I did it for you.
Marc:I'm afraid to go into my fucking house.
Marc:The smell was bad, man.
Marc:Boomer lives!
you