Back in December, IGN visited the set of The World’s End, the third and final installment in Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s ‘Three Flavours Cornetto’ trilogy.
Following in the footsteps of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the film is a high-concept comedy, this time revolving around five friends endeavouring to complete the epic pub crawl that they failed as teenagers.
As with the previous two films, there’s a twist however, with The World’s End turning scary and sci-fi tinged in its second half. We won’t reveal the exact nature of the threat that the boys face here, but we will tell you 13 things we learned while speaking to Edgar, Simon and Nick on set…
Edgar: I had written a script when I was 21 that was called ‘Crawl’ that was about teenagers on a pub crawl in Somerset. I never did anything with it, but it had always been in the back of my mind. In 2007 I remember reading about Superbad and reading the good reviews of that, and thinking ‘I wish I’d done that Crawl idea sometime.’ Then I remember sitting on a plane – I think I was on a plane from Wellington to Sydney. We’d just been to do the press for Hot Fuzz. And I remember suggesting to Simon that that would be just a prologue, and it would be about those characters as adults trying to do the same thing. So it started off as that thing of trying to do a pub crawl that you did as a teenager, which I tried to do in my home-town and failed miserably. So I had that experience. I think Wells – which is where we shot Hot Fuzz – has something like 13 pubs, and then maybe after seven I completely blacked out. I had a really bad, crazy night. So it’s sort of inspired by that.
Simon: We had the idea for the longest time. And it was called The World’s Wnd from the very beginning. The final pub in the crawl is called The World’s End, which is a popular pub name in the UK.
Simon: I don’t drink any more. Eddie [Marsan] doesn’t drink. Martin [Freeman] doesn’t really drink. Paddy [Considine] doesn’t drink that much. Nick [Frost] will have the odd one if he’s allowed, and I don’t drink at all. So what looks like a film that’s all about drinking, it’s actually pretty anti-drinking.
Edgar: It turns from a pub crawl into a pub run at some point, and only Simon’s character is really taking part any more. He’s the only one still drinking at a certain point. The other guys have gone off the idea of drinking but Simon’s character continues to tick the names off the map.
Nick: It’s what happens if strong relationships you had as a teenager don’t evolve.
Edgar: The film is essentially about a guy who was the cool kid at school trying to recapture his former glory in increasingly dire circumstances.
Nick: It is about friendship, but it’s also potentially about the end of friendships. And what happens when a group of five men leave one another to get married, or move away, or have kids. And suddenly when you’re hanging out for five, six days a week, that becomes once every six months potentially. And it’s about how everyone left, except Gary King.
Edgar: Shaun was based on ourselves. Hot Fuzz was based on the place we grew up in. But this is going back to shadows of ourselves. The darker sides. It’s darker and sillier at the same time. It’s darker in terms of where the characters have been, but some of the dialogue is extremely silly.
Simon: I think this film is the silliest we’ve done. It’s got the silliest jokes. I feel like it’s the funniest – when the five of us have been together it’s been uproarious. But it also has the darkest, most grown-up subtext of them all. It’s about addiction and about obsession and loss.
Edgar: We wanted something that had a slightly different tone to the other two. I think when people see them they’ll hopefully feel like a piece – all three films. But they’ve all got slightly different tonal qualities.
Simon: We kind of became known as the guys who do the movies of the movies. That was never anything we really wanted to do. We’re not spoofers. We’re not interested in making fun of anything. Shaun of the Dead is a zombie film that just happens to be a comedy. Just because it’s a comedy, doesn’t make it a spoof. Hot Fuzz is about a guy who has to learn to become an action hero. The big thrust of Nick’s character in that film is that he loves action movies, so naturally it has self-referential and exterior references to other films. With this film we didn’t want to make any references to any other films, including our own. There are little tiny things in there.
Edgar: There’s not too many in-jokes. And there are some running gags that don’t appear in this one because we thought we’d done those in Hot Fuzz, and you don’t want to seem like you are doing a victory lap. So we haven’t done too many of the runners. There’s a couple of them, but not many. We sort of tried to shy away from that. There aren’t too many film references either. It’s in a genre but it isn’t nodding to too many things. The genre aspect to it is almost a back-drop. The characters take over, so it’s a bit more like Shaun in that respect.
Simon: You won’t find a reference in this film. I think we mention one film – Aliens – but that’s in a conversation that has nothing to do with anything. There are no shots recreated from anything. If anything, what we’ve been inspired by in terms of our source material is literary fiction like British social science fiction like John Wyndham or Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury or Aldous Huxley.
Edgar: Simon’s character Gary King is very different in this one, because he’s much more the wild card. He’s sort of like the Tasmanian Devil in the middle of it, whereas in Shaun and Hot Fuzz he’s more like the Jack Lemmon-ish straight man. In this he’s a force of nature. He’s almost like the hero and the villain at the same time.
Simon: We didn’t want to have that thing again where my character was the serious one around which Nick’s character does a comedy dance. And I think just in terms of challenging ourselves we wanted to mix it up a bit. Danny and Ed are to some degree both emotionally dependent on Shaun and Nick. Whereas Andy Knightley is not like that at all with Gary. It’s the other way round really.
Nick: I play Andy Knightley who’s a big-wig in the world of corporate law. I’ve left these guys behind. I’m really successful. My name is above the door of my firm, and I think I’ve largely forgotten about Simon’s character until he pops up out of the blue after 20 odd years. It shakes my foundations and forces me to go back and hang out with the guys.
Simon: Edgar and I have this idea that this film is like The Big Chill if the corpse was there as well. Gary doesn’t change. He’s wearing the same clothes. All the guys are older, they’ve let themselves go grey naturally, but Gary’s like this throwback to their past.
Simon: Gary is like a frozen caveman. He vanished. He was the guy that everyone thought was going to be a big success. He was going to be a rock star. He was the coolest guy at school. The most loved. And things just went terribly wrong for him. The last time that Andy saw him they were in their 20s and something terrible happened and they never saw him again. Then he just cropped up. They probably assumed he was dead.
Nick: He’s endlessly positive. He’s still as enthusiastic as he was when he was 17… He doesn’t deny the fact that there’s potential your life could change in a second.
Nick: I’m playing a very angry man. He’s fucking angry from front to back. I think I described my character as ‘The Pink Hulk’ because of my shirt. It’s great; I’ve had a blast. I spent the first eight months of the year dancing in Cuban Fury and now I’ve spent the last four months punching the fuck out of people. Which is great.
Simon: Anybody that has been in the two films is in this. Even like Rafe Spall who has always had a major part, has a part in this one, albeit a smaller one. We even got back Nicola Cunningham, who played Mary the zombie in Shaun of the Dead. And Mark Donovan, so the first two zombies from Shaun of the Dead are in this. The twins are in it.
Simon: We have a major actor too, who appears in one key scene, who we haven’t said anything about yet. But in Hot Fuzz we had Peter Jackson and Cate Blanchett knocking around, but there’s nothing like that in this.
Simon: Shaun if the Dead cost about £6m, hot Fuzz cost about £17m, and this has cost £30m.
Nick: It’s not a small film. It’s small compared to Battleship in terms of budget. But for a British science-fiction comedy it’s a lot.
Simon: But I think what we do with very little is directly proportionate to what they do with a lot.
Edgar: I guess this is bigger than Hot Fuzz. I’ve always got eyes bigger than my stomach. So whatever the budget is, my ideas are slightly too big – whatever the scale. It never, ever feels easy.
Edgar: Simon and I love films like Raising Arizona, where you have to track certain themes and certain things are set up and paid off, and sometimes things are paid off before they are set up, so you don’t get it until you watch it a second time. And there’s a lot of that, not least the names of the pubs, which are a map of the plot of the film. When you’ve seen the film you’ll see why each pub is called what it’s called. The whole film is also mapped out in the first 10 minutes.
Simon: What we’re facing on the ground aren’t aliens, but the threat is an intergalactic one.
Simon: I do feel like finally we’ve completed something. We never made the third series of Spaced, which is something we kind of wanted to do but time and circumstances were against us. But we have completed a cycle now so whatever we do next will be the beginning of a new cycle, or a one-off.
Nick: It’s also a marker as to who we are as people and where we are. That part of our life is now finished in terms for being 30-somethings, stoned, high and pissed all the time. That’s gone. That’s over now.
Simon: But I feel like I’ll work with Edgar and Nick until I stop makings films.
Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK. You can find him on both Twitter and MyIGN, and if you fancy taking a trip down memory lane his Shaun of the Dead set visit can be found here while his Hot Fuzz piece is over at Time Out.
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