After the enormous success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, best mates SIMON PEGG and NICK FROST are back with a new movie: an alien road-trip adventure called PAUL.
Pegg and Frost chat about sci-fi cinema magic, life on other planets, and working with Sigourney Weaver.
**PAUL is in cinemas from 14 February.
What’s your favourite movie alien?
Pegg: I think In Starship Troopers, in the scene where they’re attacking the base, about five rows back on the left, one of those little guys. He’s giving it more than the others; do you know what I mean? He’s got something. I never saw him again weirdly.
Frost: I think E.T. or the lovely water aliens from The Abyss.
Frost: We had a few names we had to change. There was one Graham Willy and because of him, we had to change Simon’s name to be spelt Graeme. So it’s just kind of tiny, weird things like that. We couldn’t find that Graham Willy to say ‘do you mind if we use the name Graham?’
Pegg: Because he might have sued! But in terms of the script, obviously, when the cast comes on board, you want to play to everyone’s strengths. You want everyone to bring whatever they want to bring to it, and not feel too constricted. Probably, the most famous line is Sigourney’s, ‘Get away from her, you bitch, which Blythe [Danner] says, which I think I said to Sigourney [Weaver] on the night, ‘you know we’re going to use one of your most famous lines again you’, and she was like, ‘Bring it on!’
The script is very much a love letter, there’s nothing that anyone can take offence at who were involved in those movies that we reference, so we didn’t really feel the need to… I mean the Spielberg cameo was his idea; we didn’t even ask. He was like, ‘hey, why don’t I be in it?’
MMM: Do you think you’re going to get any flak from the Bible belt in America?
Frost: As I said to Simon earlier, it’s a road movie with an alien in it. If they’re going to get annoyed at that…
Pegg: Really, if you have faith then a film about a dope-smoking alien isn’t going to affect that. It’s just another way of seeing. We were really interested in the idea that someone could have their belief system shattered by a single moment, and that’s why Ruth, Kristen’s character, is a Creationist, is a very specific wing of Christianity, which you can’t have a film with an alien in and it not be counter to that idea.
Even Mac and Me is an anti-Creationist film because there’s an alien in it. We’re not being anti-religion; it’s just that’s the universe that the film takes place in. Paul at one point – I think the line was lost in the end – said, ‘Look, I don’t know. I’m just saying there probably isn’t.’ Certainly, that sort of dogma can’t exist if Paul exists, and we love the idea of Ruth suddenly just changing from being one thing to another in a second, and that was it. It wasn’t a crusade again organised religion.
There wasn’t a massive atheist protest when The Ten Commandments came out. There wasn’t a protest at my local school at the Nativity play this year. It’s just a film.
MMM: There are some great references to cinema magic, but I was wondering whether there were any that didn’t make the final cut?
Frost: I think there were lots of things that didn’t make it, but in the bigger picture, things that Simon and I thought will absolutely make the cut, or we’ll absolutely shoot it, you get to a point where you don’t need it. It’s about taking a piece of work and trimming it down until what you’ve got, essentially, is a very tight and very good 100 minutes that hopefully a lot of people will laugh at. We had to say to ourselves throughout the writing that even though this joke was very funny, the audience would never know that that joke didn’t make it. It was all about the finished script.
Pegg: We didn’t just do stuff for the sake of it either. The film is kind of referential because the idea is Paul has influenced every science fiction film ever, so it’s like we are retroactively ripping everything off by saying, it’s all Paul’s idea. It’s very clever when you think about it. But I don’t think there’s anything where we thought we could have got that in.
Joe Lo Truglio stood in for Seth Rogen on set as Paul
MMM: How important was it to have Joe Lo Truglio playing Paul when you were shooting without Seth Rogen on set?
Pegg: I was saying to Sigourney just a minute ago, you watch it and you think, was he there? I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we had someone who was able to fill in with enough life for us to bounce off. It’s very hard sometimes when you have to do lines with a script supervisor because the other actor wasn’t there. Script supervisors are brilliant script supervisors, but they’re not always brilliant actors, whereas we had someone to give us the right bounce-board to have the emotions that the scene required. So, Joe was sort of an unsung hero in that respect.
MMM: Do you think there’s life on other planets? And if you met an alien in real life, what would do?
Frost: Of course there’s life out there, but it doesn’t necessarily look like us, I’m sure. You know, it could just be germs or bacteria, and in that case, I couldn’t say anything to it because it wouldn’t understand me. I don’t know, I’d say, ‘Hello. You alright? Have you eaten?’ and then we’d sit down and have a lovely meal. I’d cook it, yeah, and that’s it.
MMM: There is a sense of peril in the movie. Was there pressure to leaven that in any way for certificate purposes?
Pegg: We wanted it to be perilous, you know, because there needed to be danger. The reason we kill Joe’s character first is because he’s so loveable and because O’Reilly’s the knockabout funny one. So as soon as he dies, you think, ‘well if he can die, anybody can die’. So the rest of the film is like, ‘who’s going to get it next?’ We used to joyously talk about blowing Joe Lo Truglio up on set.
You love O’Reilly because he’s funny and innocent. If he hadn’t done what he was doing, he would probably have been with Graeme and Clive [Nick Frost]. And then, of course, squashing Sigourney was something of a coup.
But you’ve got to have peril, otherwise there’s no danger, and it’s important that there’s some threat in the film and that there’s something’s at stake, you know. They are not just going to tickle Paul if they catch him, they’re going to cut his head off and scoop his brain out of his skull. Otherwise it’s sanitised and kind of bland. You need a bit of light and shade.
MMM: How similar are you to the characters you play in the film?
Frost: We look like them. I think if you took these two and then everyone we’ve played in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, as well, and if you were to combine them all, I think probably about 14% of what we are as people.
Pegg: We’re kind of nerdy like them, but we’re sort of higher functioning nerds. We’re married, for a start. We don’t live alone. Our skin’s fairly clear… Certainly, the relationship between them is, there’s a great love between them, and Nick and I are best friends before we’re colleagues, so we channelled a bit of our own romance into it, didn’t we?
Frost: Yeah. Yes, we did.
MMM: How important was Nira Park, producer of Paul, Spaced, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead?
Pegg: Nira’s our long-time collaborator and friend, and we work out of Big Talk [Productions], which is Nira’s company. Nira’s always been with us and is a very important mentor and creative collaborator. So it’s vital that she’s as much part of the unit as Nick or I, and she’s an extraordinary presence to have. She’s a great sort of mood leveller, isn’t she, and when things get really difficult, she takes it all, and shields us from it. So we love Nira, and will continue to work with her forever.
Jason Bateman as Special Agent Zoil
MMM: Tell me about casting Jason Bateman.
Pegg: When we cast Jason we were very adamant that Special Agent Zoil be played by someone who was a credible threat. We thought what if we get someone who’s not a comedic actor? But the studio was very keen that we get someone who could do funny, and I was very anti this. Then they said Jason’s name, and I kind of went, oh, ok. Jason is one of the few people who can do both, convincingly. You believe both sides of him, and I think if you look at a show like Arrested Development, in that show, Michael is essentially the straight man in that show, and yet he is one of the funniest characters, and it’s a rare gift.
I think it was exactly what we needed for Zoil, and without it, we couldn’t have had that extraordinary double take at the end when he realises that his name sounds like Lorenzo’s Oil, which the joke arrived a long time ago. On set that night we came up with the idea that he’d never realised before. So we go, ‘Lorenzo’s Oil’, and he’d go, ‘Eh?’ I could watch it over and over again. So I’m so happy that that decision was made. I think that he’s the only man for the job.
By Jan Gilbert
