Law and disorder

>> Hot Fuzz creators Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright on bringing American-style action mayhem to the sleepy British countryside

by MARK SLUTSKY

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost never thought they would end up as action stars. Well, not seriously. “I think we might have imagined it, but we never really thought it’d actually happen,” Pegg says. “It’s one of those weird things where you suddenly find yourself in a position you’d never dreamt you’d be.”

Brits Pegg and Frost, along with director Edgar Wright, are lounging around in the sunny front room of a Toronto pub, part of a whirlwind, globe-trotting, months-long publicity tour to promote their new film, Hot Fuzz. The three friends first teamed up to produce the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, and they’d shortly after go on to make the 2004 slacker zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead, which propelled them to worldwide fame and their unlikely status as action heroes.

“In some respects, that’s kind of the joke of making the films,” says Pegg. “You know, we’re simply making the movies that we’d like to be in. The idea of us going over to America and being the stars of this kind of film there is so unlikely that we went, ‘What the hell, we’ll have our cake and eat it, and make a film that’s both action and comedy.’”

Like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz is a comic riff on genre cinema. What Shaun was to the zombie movies pioneered by George Romero and his ilk, Hot Fuzz is to an even more mainstream kind of movie, the buddy cop flick, and crossbreeds it with the British tradition of light country comedy.

“It’s the idea of taking a very British ideal, the village,” Pegg says, “the sort of chocolate-box setting you see in a lot of British movies—in Bridget Jones, Calendar Girls and films like that—and then literally blowing it up.”

Intentional incongruity

In Hot Fuzz, Pegg (who co-wrote the script with Wright) plays super-cop Nicholas Angel, a London officer so good at his job he makes the rest of the force look bad. Accordingly, his superiors transfer him to the sleepy village of Sandford where his big-city ways seem a little out of place. Frost plays bumbling local cop Danny Butterman, an easy-going and dubiously competent fellow who’s nonetheless obsessed with American action movies, and when he’s partnered with the new arrival, he hopes to inject a little Lethal Weapon into their day-to-day police work. As a series of suspicious deaths pile up, his fantasies start to look more and more reasonable.

Part of the hook of Hot Fuzz is the definite incongruity of mapping the American cop ideal—the explosive set pieces, the gunplay—onto a British setting. “There isn’t a role for the British cop in pop culture,” Pegg says. “I suppose there is, televisually—there’s a lot of police dramas, procedural stuff, but not as an action hero.”

“They’re always detectives—they’re never the copper, never the bobby,” Frost chimes in.

“It was because of that that we made the film,” Pegg says. “There’s no tradition of it in the U.K., so suddenly we went, ‘Wow, there’s a hell of a gap in the market.’”

“Uniformed police in British television dramas will either get shot in the beginning, and that will be the jumping-off point for the rest of the show,” Frost says, “or they’ll lift up the tape that says ‘Police—Do Not Cross,’ and the detectives will walk through.”

BRIT BUDDIES: Frost, Wright and Pegg

Romance and dick flicks

Pegg’s character is almost the inverse of his roles in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, where he’d played (in the latter, especially) an underachiever who reluctantly learns some responsibility. “A few people said, ‘All you do is play slackers,’” he says. “So I said, ‘Alright, I’m going to play a character who’s the absolute antithesis of slack.’ The ultimate anti-slacker. And part of the film is him learning how to let responsibility go. The idea is that Danny and Angel are like two sides of the same coin. They meet and they sort of complete each other so that, by the end of the film, they slot in together and they become Hot Fuzz. One is too responsible and the other is not responsible enough. And they click together.” (To illustrate this, Pegg makes a robotic sound that can’t quite be reproduced phonetically but resembles something like a Transformer changing shape.)

In fact, there’s no female lead in Hot Fuzz, and the movie plays out almost as a romance between the two buddy heroes. “Action movies are kind of like romantic comedies regardless—” Pegg says.

“Dick flicks,” Frost suggests.

“A dick flick, right,” Pegg says. “It’s the same kind of dramatic beats, or comedic beats, that you get in a romantic comedy. You’ll see it in 48 Hours, Tango & Cash, Point Break, Bad Boys. It’s always these people who meet and they don’t get on at first, and then they start to learn to like each other—and by the end they can’t live without each other. Instead of a big kiss, there’s explosions. The physical tension is sublimated by violence.”

“There’s the thing about becoming partners, on more than just the employment level. Partners—all the way through, you know?” Frost says.

“When you look at the dramatic beats and strip them down to their bare essentials, it’s the same as a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn film!” Pegg says. “Or Nick’s character is kind of like a puppy, and it’s like a film where a cop gets lumped in with a police dog he doesn’t like...”

Frost: “‘Aww, I can’t look after a dog!’”

“Half an hour later, he’s like, ‘Oh come here,’ and he’s crying over his furry little body.”

Pop cultural precision

Whether it’s video games or movies, the trio’s work always seems to exist in the “real” world of pop culture, like the scene where Pegg and Frost bicker over which Prince albums to throw at approaching zombies in Shaun of the Dead, or the overt Bad Boys 2 and Point Break allusions in Hot Fuzz.

“You know, it’s important to ground it in real culture,” Pegg says. “We wanted to specifically reference films and especially Bad Boys 2 and Point Break, even though we had to do a lot of letter-writing and stuff. Fox weren’t keen on us using Point Break because my character was basically saying this wasn’t very realistic—there’s a scene where my character says ‘This is a bit far-fetched.’ And Fox was like ‘No, you’re talking about the film in a negative light.’ And I was like, ‘For fuck’s sake, have you seen Point Break?’ And then they said, ‘You can only do it if Danny’s a bit more positive about it. So we started the scene by going ‘This film is fucking amazing!’ And then they didn’t want the ‘fucking’ in there so now we go, ‘This film is... amazing.’”

Naturally, part of the film’s preparation involved watching movies. A lot of movies. “138 was the total,” Pegg says.

“Not all cop films,” Wright adds, “but all of our favourite mystery films, conspiracy films, fish-out-of-water comedies. It was kind of a mini-immersion in all the films that we wanted to have thematic similarities with.”

“They’re all in there,” Pegg says. “When you watch the film, there are elements of virtually every incarnation of the cop film. You have that fish-out-of-water stuff, you’ve got the detective story, the Agatha Christie-style deduction element, you’ve got a serial killer thriller, you’ve got a kind of post-Halloween cop horror thing going on. It’s because we sort of watched the entire spectrum of those films and went into writing Hot Fuzz with them all buzzing around in our heads.”

As with Shaun, it was also important to get the action elements right. “It was a real gift to be doing genre,” Wright says. “Because I’ve always been into making comedies that are like, really stylish and visual and dense, and because it was within this genre it allowed me to go for it. I really enjoyed doing this one—not just the shooting but the editing and the sound, really going completely all-out with it.”

“You don’t have to skimp on that stuff,” Pegg says. “Just because comedy is non-serious doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it seriously. Or it can somehow get off on being facile. We’re big fans of detail; we’re big geeks in a way. We love the experience of seeing films that don’t underestimate you. I think you feel complimented when you go see a film where you have to do a bit of the work—you’re like ‘The person who made this respects me!’ We value that feeling.”

Hot Fuzz opens this Friday, April 20

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