I got to sit in on a roundtable with Simon Pegg for The World’s End at Comic-Con and I took the opportunity to jump in with a lot of questions of my own. Pegg stars in the film as Gary King, a grown up loser who wants to recreate the glorious pub crawl of his youth. Directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by Wright and stars Pegg and Nick Frost, The World’s End crosses genres like all of the trio’s comedies do. I also touched on his Star Trek Into Darkness fakeout from last year, so spoiler alert if you haven’t seen Into Darkness yet.
Watch CraveOnline’s interviews with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Comic-Con 2013!
CraveOnline: You have a lot of long passages of dialogue in the movie and I was impressed how you delivered them so rapidly, especially the list of pubs. Was it easier to deliver those lines because you wrote it yourself also?
Simon Pegg: You’d think, but actually that was incredibly difficult because it was a one shot deal and I had to get it right. Martin [Freeman] and Paddy [Considine] and Nick and Eddie [Marsan] were all standing behind me waiting. It was getting towards the end of the day and I did it about 15 times because I’d just get one pub wrong. I could do it probably now without any problems at all but on the day it was tough. Yes, writing a film is no guarantee that you’re going to remember all the lines.
We don’t see a lot of movies that end somewhere so completely different from where they start. Was that important to you, we won’t spoil where it ends up, but that it ends somewhere completely different?
Yeah, we wanted for you to be watching the film and thinking, “Wait a minute, was this the same film with the kids at the school at the beginning?” Yeah, because I think the re-establishment of the status quo is a device which might anesthetize audiences a bit, might make them feel a bit nice when they leave the theater, but ultimately it makes you forget the film. When we go to the movies often, we see normality and then we see it disrupted, then we see it return to normal and that’s why we leave kind of thinking, “Oh, that was nice.”
When in actual fact, sometimes it’s good to upset the status quo completely and leave it undone. Maybe boy doesn’t get girl. Maybe man doesn’t save the world. Then you think about it a bit more. You walk away and you question it and you start thinking about what would be the alternative to what happened? How would the ending be different if they’d gone along with the plan or if they hadn’t gone along with the plan? I think it’s more challenging to an audience to not give them necessarily what their comfort zone wants. And we didn’t want to welch on the title. Right from the beginning, we said let’s go through with it.
Did you call dibs on the role of Gary King or was the casting flexible in the early stages?
No, I wrote it for myself. I wanted to be the funny one this time. That was my plan.
Now that Star Trek Into Darkness has come out, I remember the interview you did in the Telegraph last year where you said Benedict Cumberbatch was not playing Khan. Were you doing a misdirect?
Yeah, of course I was because I didn’t owe that person the truth. All that person was trying to do was spoil my film so the least that I owe him is the truth. It’s not a guessing game. If you get it right, I don’t go, “Oh, well done. You win. Here’s our film spoiled for everybody” just because some guy wants advertising on his website. We protect our film at all costs because the audience reaction to it is extremely important to us. Some people might want to anesthetize themselves against the twists and turns by knowing what’s going to happen but I’m not interested in helping people do that. And I got so sick of people asking me and going, “Come on, come on” like I was going to say fucking yes, I just said no because “I can’t say” starts to sound like an admission. So I just thought, “Fuck you, I’m going to lie. Sorry!”
Do you watch “Community?” Does it seem somewhat akin to “Spaced?”
Yeah, I like “Community.” I watch “Community” and sometimes I think, “We were doing this 10 years ago” but I like it.
Not that they’re copying, but another show that’s incorporating references.
Not at all, not at all, but they did their paintball episode everyone was going mad about and I thought, “Yeah, we did that in ’98.”
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
