‘Thanks for the help, FOX
Simon Pegg says Hot Fuzz script had to be changed to please giant studio
Forsberg

Last week I chatted with Simon Pegg, star and co-writer of Hot Fuzz, which opens April 20.

Pegg, co-star Nick Frost and director/co-writer Edgar Wright are the English writing, directing and acting team that created Shaun of the Dead in 2004.

Here’s how the conversation went:

Uptown: Hey, Simon. Tell me about how you and Edgar Wright got hooked into making films together?

Simon Pegg: Well, we first met on the set of the U.K. television comedy Spaced, where we began to formulate the idea for Shaun of the Dead. Edgar and I are just big geeks, just big fans of film, and the idea of actually being able to make a film was really attractive to us. Both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are the kinds of films that you don’t see made in the U.K. They’re the kinds of films we really wanted to see.

U: How would you characterize them? Comedic homage?

SP: They’re more like genre films. There used to be a great tradition of genre filmmaking in the U.K., but it doesn’t really exist anymore — a great tradition of horror in the U.K. that kind of faded in the face of contemporary American horror. But for Hot Fuzz there certainly isn’t a tradition of police movies in the U.K. because our police service is particularly uncinematic (mainly because they don’t carry guns). Instead, there’s been this sort of never-ending parade of gangster films coming out of the U.K. You know, this attempt to sort of match Tarantino or Scorsese and assert ourselves as having this kind of cool lawlessness to our culture. Edgar and I thought it would be much more interesting to take on the uncool end of things and try to popularize ‘the Bobby’ as action hero.

U: Does it bother you that, as ‘genre-filmmakers,’ you and Edgar are forever mired in a hell of references to other movies in the genre?

SP: In some respects, but not really, because that’s something that we’ve done purposefully. I mean, we’re using people’s knowledge of cinema to make cinema. A lot of spoofs are kind of piss-takes, but we’re not taking the piss at all. We’re operating within the genre as fans of the genre.

U: With all of the references in your films, do you have any horror stories about clearances or copyright?

SP: Yeah, clearances are a nightmare. We had to get Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Martin Lawrence and Will Smith’s permission to use those clips from Bad Boys 2 and Point Break. The actors themselves had no problem, but Fox wanted to read the script. They started to complain that we were disparaging Point Break — that Nick’s character was dismissing it as being unrealistic, saying, “We can’t have that.” We were like,”Well, it’s fucking Point Break!” I mean, it’s not a Ken Loach movie about the origins of the IRA — it’s just a film about a guy that goes skydiving with his boyfriend. So we had to temper the script a bit just to placate them. Fox responded, “Can’t you just have one more compliment about Point Break?” So we rewrote the script with Danny saying, “This film is fucking amazing.” Then they said, “OK, just lose the ‘fucking.’” You do have to jump through hoops a little bit. It’s ridiculous, but you can sometimes understand why people want to protect their intellectual property — and I use the word ‘intellectual’ loosely.

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At the moment, Pegg is preparing to star with Kirsten Dunst in the Robert B. Weide (Curb Your Enthusiasm) adaptation of Toby Young’s novel How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.