Zombie fans in America - and they are legion - have been gnawing their own flesh in anticipation of the surprise British zombie comedy hit (or, as the creators like to say, rom-zom-com) Shaun of the Dead, the brain(dead)child of writer/star Simon Pegg and writer/director Edgar Wright, the team behind Spaced, the British sitcom about twentysomething slackers in North London. In fact, the inspiration for the film can be traced back to an episode of Spaced, where Pegg's character gets trapped in the video game Resident Evil 2 and blasts away at attacking hordes of zombies.
But Shaun of the Dead is no spin-off. It exists in its own, unique, undead universe, which just happens to be located in the familiar North London neighborhoods that Pegg and Wright know so well. That is likely part of the reason the film has become such a break-out hit in Britain, where (according to Variety) it outdrew 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, two of the films spoofed in Shaun.
Focus Films has high hopes for Shaun's success in the US, and they brought its creators stateside to get word out with appearances at promotional screenings and interviews. I met Pegg and Wright the morning after a rousing screening in the University District of Seattle. I consider it pure kismet that it just happened to be Friday the 13th. If only we had met in a pub, it would have been perfection. As it was, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle managed just fine.
Simon Pegg, who stars as the wide-eyed but oblivious Shaun, still looks like his character - short red hair and trim beard - but his focus and seriousness in person couldn't be more different from the fictional slacker. Where he's straight-backed and trimly dressed, director Edgar Wright looks more like the slacker, a little scruffy and unkempt (probably the result of a hectic barnstorming press tour) and so full of enthusiasm he practically bounces out of his seat. Where Pegg sounds quiet and considered, pondering his answers before he speaks, Wright is jokey and conversational, constantly following references into side topics and getting lost in movie talk. But once the interview gets underway, their chemistry emerges and they answer in ping-ponging volleys back in forth, at times even answering in unison. We had thirty minutes to discuss their film, their inspirations, and the serious business of creating comedy out of apocalyptic horror.
Spoiler alert: Toward the end of the interview, that is, not on this page, but the next, Pegg and Wright discuss key moments of the film best discovered while watching it. Read this page now, see the film, and then, come back and read the second page.
Sean Axmaker: My now-overworked line about the film has been: "They've finally got my life story on film and they misspelled my name!"
Edgar Wright: In your article, since you're S-E-A-N, you could just have a typo and just kind of like pretend that that's the title of the film.
SA: Yeah, but you know, I have a column in the IMDb, so it's kind of hard to pull off a mistake like that.
EW: There was one interview we did yesterday where somebody was asking us about some of the stuff on the IMDb about the film. There's that whole thing about references and goofs and things, and some of them are spot on and some of them are just not true at all. And they say, "Now I hear there's a big A Clockwork Orange sequence in the film," and I'm, "Hmm...?" "Oh, it's on IMDb," and I said, "Yeah, but that doesn't necessarily mean it?s true."
SA: I spotted a quite a few references in the film myself. I love the line, "We?re coming to get you, Barbara." I imagine that last night's audience really picked up on that.
Simon Pegg: Yeah, that was our own little tribute to Night of the Living Dead.
EW: It's always funny when you see it with an audience, with some of the references, because there's a couple of gags where it's almost like you hear the Simpsons kids. There always a couple of gags where one person laughs really loud. Like the 28 Days Later joke, only about 20 percent of the audience gets that. Or there's this part with the Stone Roses second album where you kind of hear one person go, "Ha!"
SA: You lost me on the pop music stuff, but I think I got all the movie references. In Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are drawn to the malls out of habit, which is Romero's satire. For you guys, they come to the pub.
SP: Yeah. Romero is obviously satirizing the nature of consumerism and the instinct of purchase, but for us it was drinking. Again, what they did in life mirrors what they do after. For Shaun, the pub is his Graceland. It's where he thinks he's going to be safest, and where he always goes, so inevitably, the zombies follow.
SA: Shouldn't this interview be done in a pub?
SP: I wouldn't mind. I know it's only 11 o'clock right now, the sun's over the yardarm.
SA: So you did the tribute to Night Of The Living Dead, you got little bits of 28 Days Later and that whole pub thing seems to be from Dawn Of The Dead. What other zombies movies did you go back to for reference?
EW: We didn't, really, when we were writing the script. Certainly with the Romero trilogy and Return Of The Living Dead films or The Evil Dead or Peter Jackson stuff, we didn't really watch them again because we were quite familiar with them. We watched more siege films, really, things like Straw Dogs and Assault On Precinct 13 and The Birds, siege structure films. Also films that inspired us as teenagers that had a lot of great set up, things as diverse as Back To The Future, Gremlins, even things like Die Hard. Films that have a really good first act, which is all set up and set up and set up. There were a couple of ones that maybe we watched because either one of us hadn't seen it. One I found quite amusing, which I hadn't seen until recently, was The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue [Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti, also known as Let Sleeping Corpses Lie]. It's a really odd film. We liked the fact that it was shot in the Lake District. The other film that was very influential on the script and on the visual style was the Philip Kaufman remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, the 70s one, which I think is fantastic. We loved the paranoid feel and a lot of creepy things going on in the background. So that was another influential film.
SA: Who came up with the genre tag "rom-zom-com" and will anyone else make another film to turn it into a genre?
EW: It was in our first pitch, actually. Even before we had the title Shaun Of The Dead, the "rom-zom-com" was there - when we originally had the title Tea Time Of The Dead, which is probably the first idea that we dismissed. There have been a couple others. Peter Jackson's Dead Alive has romantic comedy elements as well as zombies and Return Of The Living Dead 3 has a sort of romance element to it. Obviously, the difference here is that genuinely, for the first half an hour at least, it really is a romantic comedy. I think there's an Irish one being made called Boy Eats Girl or something, which they said is the next rom-zom-com, so maybe we have started something.
SA: How did you find the balance between the gore - like another Dead tribute moment when David gets yanked out the window and they just tear him apart and pull his organs out - and the comedy, and still keeping it light so people can laugh at it? It's got to be a really hard balance to keep. Did you find that you had to change the tone or the gags between the writing stage, the shooting, and the editing process?
SP: Definitely.
EW: Yeah, absolutely. It's a constantly evolving organic process. There were things in the writing where we were constantly juggling the tone, and then, on the shoot, the same kind of thing. Then in the editing - there's some jokes that, when you write them in the script, you think, "Oh, that's a killer line, that's going to go down really well," and even if you show a scene out of context to somebody and say, "Hey, check this bit out," and they say,
"Oh, that's funny," and they laugh or something - then, when we started to put it together, we did actually take some jokes out. Without giving too much away in the interview, there's one scene where one of the lead characters goes [dies], and it seems kind of flippant to make too many jokes straight afterwards. So is it an interesting thing, kind of like plate-spinning. We wanted it to become slightly more serious in the last third because we thought you've invested so much time in these characters that to have their demises as throwaway or joke-y would be to do the entire film a disservice. There's definitely a turn for the darker in the last 15 minutes, which is something we always really wanted to do.
SP: And at that time, flippancy seemed to undermine what we set out to do. We wanted those moments to be very dramatic and to have resonance. And they work in that way because they do shock and they aren't expected. So to go and undermine them would be self-defeating. We wrote the script, read the script through, and then, you start to see things like, "Okay, let's try and funny it up here, or make it less funny here." Then of course, no more is that most obvious than in the edit when you've actually got the film down and you're seeing the scenes at work and you can tell when it's right to have a joke and when it's not.
EW: It's funny because then you can it work out. With audiences as well, you can say, "Okay, a lot of people have died. When is it okay to laugh again?? Alan Alda has that line in Crimes And Misdemeanors where he says, "Comedy is tragedy plus time." And you almost think, "Okay, so tragedy plus time is five minutes. Five minutes after somebody gets it we can have another laugh."
SA: There's another definition I like: "Comedy is what happens to other people."
EW/SP (together): Yeah, that's true.
SA: And I was thinking about that watching this movie. The zombie film already is on the edge of being a comedy. The very idea of it is like a horrible black joke that God has played on someone. It's already so close to the edge that pushing it into comedy seems natural, but also really hard to do. How much did you have to push to get it over the edge?
SP: In some respects, it only requires a very subtle nudge. The situation is absurd anyway. Zombies themselves are by turns sympathetic and slightly humorous, but they are also terrifying because they are the very embodiment of death. Good comedy, anyway, is only a breath away from the truth. You don't have to be just absurd to make something funny. It can be just slightly skewed. This is what we did with Shaun. We had a guy who has to fight to sort his life out. It just so happens that the thing that gets in his way is an army of dead people. It could have been a thunderstorm or a flood that made it difficult for him to get back to his girlfriend or whoever, but it just so happens that what stops him is the very embodiment of his own sort of fear and his own destiny, which is to become like a zombie.
EW: I don't think that Dawn Of The Dead gets the credit for being satirical and allegorical, but I think in the 70s the genre was almost like one step up from pornography. When 28 Days Later came out and a lot of critics were saying, "This is a very intelligent take on the genre," I was thinking, you know, Dawn Of The Dead is pretty intelligent, as far as I'm concerned. It's a black comedy and it's very symbolic and satirical.
SP: I think 28 Days is a great film, and even better when you watch it on DVD, just because I thought the video is slightly distracting up on the big screen. But I think Dawn Of The Dead is far more original in terms of the fact that it was Romero using a non-serious genre, at least a genre that wasn't taken seriously, to actually say something and craft an intelligent film. It was overlooked in so many ways because people just assumed it was just a schlocky horror movie. It was banned in England just because of the gore. I didn't see it until I was 19 or 20 years old. And yet it was the stuff of legend in the classrooms for the kids that managed to get a copy of it. I, uh, I forgot where I was going with that...
EW: Zombies?
SP: Zombies? [Laughter]
SA: Just the idea of using a genre that you don't expect...
SP: To say something serious. The root of metaphor is that you take something totally outlandish and non-connected to what you're talking about to describe that thing. So we take a completely fantastic plot device and use it to show Shaun, show a man at a point in his life when he's having to make decisions about responsibility.
EW: That's what's been really nice. We feel really pleased that, on one hand, we've managed to make a film within our favorite genre, and on the other hand, we've made a comedy that's actually quite personal to our life in North London and our relationships and our living conditions. If we sat down and said, "I want to write a film about my friends and stuff and how we live in North London," it wouldn't have been that interesting. So it's kind of nice to have a legion of the dead eating people as part of it.
SA: I'm afraid I have not had a chance to see the comedy series that you guys created, so I haven't seen the style you use in your sitcom. The Saturday Night Live characters, when they make the transition to movies, they are pretty much shot in this completely flat, kind of dull style. You guys have a really sharp, smart visual style, and it's often understated, like those tracking shots when Shaun leaves his flat and goes off to the store. Then, of course, you mirror it again later, the next day when everything is a mess and he's still oblivious. It's really cinematically sharp.
EW: Weirdly enough, Spaced, the original show we did before, was a sitcom. It wasn't like a sketch show, but it had similarities. In a weird way, it had a lot more references in it. Simon, as well as starring in Spaced, co-wrote it with Jessica [Stevenson, who plays Yvonne in Shaun Of The Dead], and I directed it. The entire show is kind of governed by film and TV and music references, in terms [of how] the characters live their lives. So it's a lot more referential. Actually, the visual style is very similar in the way that it's edited and the way it's shot. Weirdly, though, the two tracking shots that are in Shaun Of The Dead are exactly the kind of thing that you can't do on a half hour TV show, because there's not time to kind of play those things out. I'd say the bit in the film which is most similar to Spaced is the "plan" sequence, when Shaun goes through the three different plans. That's the most Spaced-y sequence in the film. It's definitely a very similar performance style, being naturalistic even though there's really fantastical things going on. Spaced was a lot more the type of hilarious like Hellzapoppin' sort of thing in terms of just the visual style.
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