{"id":1790,"date":"2013-10-01T13:47:13","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T12:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/up\/wordpress\/2013\/10\/01\/world-s-end-a-trio-of-wit-warmth-and-weirdness\/"},"modified":"2022-10-29T17:03:17","modified_gmt":"2022-10-29T16:03:17","slug":"world-s-end-a-trio-of-wit-warmth-and-weirdness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.egeve.com\/en\/world-s-end-a-trio-of-wit-warmth-and-weirdness\/","title":{"rendered":"World\u2019s End: A Trio Of Wit, Warmth And Weirdness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There\u2019s a pub in North London called the World\u2019s End that sits across from the Camden Town tube station. Luminaries, including Charles Dickens, figure among its famous patrons, but it\u2019s also important in the annals of British comedy as the place where Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright would meet up in the early years of their creative partnership, grabbing a pint after seeing movies like X-Men at a nearby cinema.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So when it came time for the pair to write the screenplay for their film about a 40-ish man in a state of arrested development who inadvertently stumbles onto an intergalactic conspiracy during a small-town pub crawl, the title was a given: The World\u2019s End. The place even held a special significance for Nick Frost, Pegg\u2019s longtime onscreen comic foil and offscreen best friend.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cMe and Simon used to meet there to go to the movies because there was an Odeon cinema,\u201d Wright explained. \u201cSimon went on his first date with his wife there, and Nick Frost fell off the wagon after two years of not drinking at the World\u2019s End. He broke up with a girl and went straight to the World\u2019s End and got hammered.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Perhaps not surprisingly, plenty of alcohol is consumed in the new apocalyptic comedy from Wright, Pegg and Frost, which sees Pegg cast as the clueless, obnoxious Gary King, a former punk rock rebel who coerces, guilt trips and lies to his high school pals to lure them back to their hometown to attempt a famous pub crawl known as the Golden Mile.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Drinking their way through 12 pubs in the quaint hamlet of Newton Haven, the old friends \u2014 played by an impressive roster of English actors including Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan and Frost \u2014 find tension running high as past rivalries and wounds re-emerge.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And that\u2019s before they run afoul of invading alien robots who bleed blue ink and have sinister designs on the human race.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Over the course of three films together, Wright, Pegg and Frost have garnered a following for their preternatural ability to blend the silly and the serious into a frothy, satisfying, decidedly English brew. The World\u2019s End, which reaches US theatres on Friday, moves with the same oddball, kinetic rhythms as their previous movies, 2004\u2019s zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead and 2007\u2019s action movie send-up Hot Fuzz.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The new movie, though just as enjoyably offbeat and remarkably quick-witted as the first two, also offers the most overt exploration of the more sophisticated concerns that have always underpinned the trio\u2019s genre-centric comedy.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAll of those genres that we\u2019ve taken on, the reason for them… is that they are Trojan Horses which we can smuggle in more human stories,\u201d said Pegg, seated between his filmmaking comrades at Hollywood\u2019s own English pub, the Cat and the Fiddle. \u201cShaun of the Dead is about growing up, and Hot Fuzz is about friendship and about having to dumb down a little bit sometimes if you want to get something done. The World\u2019s End is about male friendship and letting go and nostalgia and addiction.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMost American comedies are like Hershey bars, and we like to be like those gourmet dark chocolates with bits of sea salt in them,\u201d Wright added. \u201cIt\u2019s chocolate-y and then you go, \u2018Oh!\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cult sensation<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pegg and Wright met in 1995. Wright had moved to London a year earlier after directing his first independent feature, A Fistful of Fingers. He found himself backstage at a comedy gig, where he ran into Pegg, whom he\u2019d seen doing stand-up on television. In particular, he remembered a routine about England\u2019s West Country, where both men grew up.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Roughly one year after that, Wright was directing Pegg in the six-episode TV show Asylum, and their friendship was sealed. \u201cWe bonded over having similar favourite films,\u201d Wright said. \u201cThe two films we bonded over would be Dawn of the Dead, not surprisingly \u2014 it must be stressed George Romero\u2019s Dawn of the Dead \u2014 and Raising Arizona, which is our favourite film.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It was the BBC series Spaced, about unmoored twentysomethings and their quirky neighbours, that properly launched their careers, however. Pegg starred in and co-wrote the series with Jessica Hynes, with Frost appearing as Pegg\u2019s gun-obsessed best friend. With its barrage of pop culture references and nimble humour, the show won a fan base fluent in the language of Star Wars and video games, the same audience that helped make Shaun of the Dead a cult sensation in Britain that landed equally well with genre fans stateside.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Critics, perhaps not the most likely group to embrace a movie comedy about a slacker who becomes a more mature, attentive boyfriend in the wake of the zombie apocalypse, also were won over by Shaun \u2014 the New Yorker\u2019s Anthony Lane, for example, described the film as a \u201csmart, cultish, semi-disgusting homage to the fine British art of not bothering.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cornetto trilogy<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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With their follow-up, the trio sent up the action genre in a film pairing Pegg and Frost as lawmen who uncover a secret conspiracy in a small British town (no aliens are involved). While promoting that movie, Wright and Pegg hit on the idea for The World\u2019s End \u2014 and fell in love with the idea of creating a third film that could function as the culmination of a thematically connected trilogy.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHot Fuzz became a sort of thematic sequel to Shaun in the sense that it had actors that recurred and some running gags and some themes, but the idea of doing a third one and the name for the trilogy didn\u2019t come up until we were doing press for Hot Fuzz,\u201d Wright said. (The movies have come to be known as the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, named for a British ice cream novelty that has unlikely screen time in each film.)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The World\u2019s End was inspired in part by a screenplay Wright wrote at 21, Crawl, about a night of teenage carousing, but the narrative was also informed by his experiences shooting Hot Fuzz in Wright\u2019s hometown of Wells, Somerset, when the filmmaker began to notice how different the place was from what he remembered.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019ve all had the bittersweet experience of going back to a small town and feeling alienated, pun very much intended,\u201d said Wright, 39. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t like we wrote a script about people on a pub crawl and then picked a genre out of a hat. The sci-fi paranoia element is us, as people with overactive imaginations, expressing our bittersweet feelings about the town, almost blaming it on otherworldly forces because the truth of it is too much to bear.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wright penned the script with Pegg \u2014 they also wrote Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz together. The concept allowed Wright to pay homage to the \u201call-in-one-night\u201d movies he enjoys (such as Martin Scorsese\u2019s After Hours), with the action involving Gary and his chums (a group that also includes actress Rosamund Pike) transpiring almost exclusively in one bizarre evening.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The pair also invested the movie with plenty of comedic moments inspired from their own lives. Gary\u2019s costume, for starters, was taken from Pegg\u2019s past.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was my favourite character to play, not least because I got to dress like I did when I was 18,\u201d he said. \u201cI loved it. I got to dye my hair black, which I never did when I was a Goth. I crimped it and I put feathers in it, but I never pushed it that far, I think I was a bit too scared. This was wish fulfillment for me.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Significantly, with Gary serving as the story\u2019s loony catalyst and Frost playing Andy, a serious corporate lawyer, the off-screen best friends upend their traditional movie rapport. Frost, a chummy teddy bear of a man, said the change was welcome \u2014 he\u2019s often felt tagged by his Shaun of the Dead character, a \u201cstoned idiot\u201d named Ed.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt was nice to act,\u201d Frost offered.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAndy, you\u2019re similar to,\u201d said Pegg. \u201cYou\u2019re a responsible man in his early 40s.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWith an atom bomb inside of me,\u201d Frost added.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe thought we\u2019d mix it up a little bit and have Gary be this sort of mercurial force of irritation and chaos,\u201d Pegg explained.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pegg and Frost\u2019s bromance dates to 1993, when the drama school grad met Frost, then a waiter at a Mexican restaurant. After bonding over Star Wars, they became fast friends and were roommates for some years, even sharing a bed at one point. Now, they\u2019re both married fathers of young children \u2014 Pegg, 42, lives outside of London with his wife and daughter; Frost, 41, lives on the other side of London with his wife and son. (Wright divides his time between Britain and LA)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Their easy, genuine rapport often leads people to ask them how much of their dialogue on screen is improvised, but the answer, as it happens, is little. The World\u2019s End was shot on a budget of just more than $20 million (Dh73.4 million) in only 12 weeks, leaving no time for casual riffing, Wright said.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe always write these films that are too ambitious for the money we\u2019ve got and the time we\u2019ve got, so the only way to get through them is to come to work absolutely prepped,\u201d Wright said, before turning to his colleagues to offer kind words. \u201cWhat is the most extraordinary thing about Simon and Nick \u2014 cover your ears, I\u2019m going to compliment you \u2014 is they make it look so naturalistic.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pegg, ears covered, shouted, \u201cSpeak up!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Although the new film marks the end of an important chapter in their careers, Wright, Pegg and Frost aren\u2019t quite ready to cry into their pint glasses just yet, yearning for days gone by. The trio say they will work together again, though each has found success in his own right.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pegg has starred in J.J. Abrams\u2019 two Star Trek films as Scotty, and he appeared opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible \u2014 Ghost Protocol; he and Frost worked with Steven Spielberg on the performance capture film The Adventures of Tintin.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Frost, solo, has kept busy with other roles in television and films, including the English indie Attack the Block, last summer\u2019s big-budget adventure Snow White and the Huntsman and the animated movie Ice Age: Continental Drift.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Together, they wrote and starred in the 2011 road-trip comedy Paul based on an actual drive across the US the pair completed in their 20s; they did not, however, encounter a pot-smoking alien. That part was fictionalised.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wright, meanwhile, made Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a 2010 adaptation of the Bryan Lee O\u2019Malley graphic novel starring Michael Cera, which flopped during its original run but has since become a cult favourite. (The film is screened regularly at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, where Wright sometimes curates special events, including a series he assembled that showcases some of his \u201cWorld\u2019s End\u201d influences.)<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wright\u2019s next project will see him graduate to superhero filmmaking ranks with Marvel\u2019s Ant-Man, due out in 2015. Although the movie has yet to be cast, Frost insists he will star.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to announce this so many times over the last couple of weeks,\u201d Pegg said, mock frustration tugging at the corners of his smile.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cCostume hasn\u2019t phoned me, though, which is odd,\u201d Frost joked. \u201cThere will be the thorax, the mandibles.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cEdgar, how are we doing the mandibles?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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