Comic-Con this year was loaded — LOADED — with Hollywood stars and associated talent coming to San Diego. Yet for some of us, the most important weren’t the likes of Edward Norton (yeah, take that, Marvel) but two men who we already know delivered one of the most satisfying films of the year, Hot Fuzz. To promote the DVD release (out today) in the US, Nick Frost and Edgar Wright braved hordes of fans and even sat down for a press conference.
They entered to applause from the press, Edgar a little dazed but bright-eyed, and Nick smiling while clutching his coffee. It sounded, too, like both men had been doing a lot of talking in panels and with fans. Edgar’s voice teetered on the edge of hoarseness throughout the conference.
Edgar Wright: Just for the record, we cannot answer any questions about Heroes.
Question: How much better does a pint look when it’s shown in HD?
Edgar Wright: That’s a good question.
Nick Frost: I’d say thirty percent better.
Edgar Wright: I haven’t actually got an HD player yet, so I haven’t seen either of our films in HD, but now that you’ve said that I’ll take a look. I wasn’t convinced, but now there’s a chance of seeing what a pint looks like in HD, I’ll check it out. Good, I expect.
Question: Your movies always make me thirsty.
Edgar Wright: Good. I think you should do good drinking games with both Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.
Question: Is there one yet?
Edgar Wright: I don’t know. How would it work? If you took a pint of beer every time they had a pint, a shot every time they use the f word?
Nick Frost: A pint of beer every time you see a policeman! Yes, Jenny, Reuters…
Question: I’ve always been fascinated by movies shot in supermarkets. What made you decide to have your finale in a supermarket?
Edgar Wright: I used to work in a supermarket. I used to work in the very supermarket that’s in the film. I was a shelf-stacker. That was my Saturday and holiday job for like five years. When they storm the outside of the supermarket in the car park, that was where I used to work. So I think that when I was a teen-ager, I used to dream of f***ing the place up. (laughs)
Question: In the Shaun of the Dead DVD, you had a lot of extras, including ones that showed the other stories. Are you going to do that kind of thing for this one, too? Are there lots of extras?
Edgar Wright: Yeah. Absolutely. There’s loads and loads of extras. Even while we were deep in the film, we were doing DVD content. We kind of produced the DVD extras ourselves. Some of them are on different versions. The HD version has everything, and I think the Wal-Mart has a kind of two-disc edition as well. So there’s basically reams and reams of extras.
We really enjoy the stuff like “plot holes,” the bits which we animated for Shaun of the Dead. We tried to do the things people liked from the first DVD, like plot holes. And we expanded, like on the first DVD we had “Funky Pete,” in which we tried to do the television safe version.
Actually, we did get in trouble with Universal because we never completed our TV version; contractually you have to do that. So this time around, we did all of our swear word replacements, and we had a lot of fun doing that. That’s on the DVD called “Hot Funk.” When it turns up on American Airlines, I want it to be at least entertaining in the clean version. I always thought the TV versions of 80’s action films like Lethal Weapon, Robocop and Die Hard were amazing. So many things that they’ve given us like “melon farmer,” “muddy funkster,” — “forget you!” We wanted to come up with some good ones. We kind of go “funk,” “silt,” “mother hubbard!”
Nick Frost: “peas and rice”
Edgar Wright: Peas and rice! Another good one. We had a lot of fun doing the TV safe version. Also to replace the C word we got to take from The Nutty Professor the word “klump.” So that’s a good sort of dialogue replacement as well.
Question: Isn’t it worse than the actual word?
Nick Frost: It can be, yeah.
Edgar Wright: That’s what’s funny about it. I think Patton Oswalt does a funny routine about dialogue replacements that sound even ruder than the actual word.
Question: Nick, I noticed that at least on the U.S. release of the DVD, you’re not on the creator commentary. Was this your decision, or they didn’t include you?
Nick Frost: It’ll be on the HD and I can’t even say the company, it hurts my mouth.
Edgar Wright: Wal-Mart.
Nick Frost: Yeah, Wal-Mart. It’s on the double disc.
Question: It’s an exclusive Wal-Mart thing? How did that happen? I’ve never even heard of that.
Nick Frost: You’ve never heard of Wal-Mart?
Question: I’ve never heard of Wal-Mart having a special edition set, especially with something like you guys.
Nick Frost: Yeah, it’s a mystery to us, too. On the Wal-Mart one all the way through it in the corner it just says “Wal-Mart.” It never leaves.
Question: Has the movie already been released on DVD overseas?
Edgar Wright: Yes it has. It’s out already in the U.K. It sold a million copies in four weeks.
Question: It broke records when it opened in theaters there, too. Did the studio do anything for you, buy you a car?
Nick Frost: We got a case of Cristal champagne, which doesn’t seem much.
Question: Did they buy you that coffee? (Nick came in with a Starbucks cup.)
Edgar Wright: No! We had to buy that ourselves!
Question: When you stand in line for coffee, do you get mobbed by the people out there? Do they recognize you?
Edgar Wright: We generally get mobbed by baristas in Starbucks. That’s our fan base.
Nick Frost: It’s a very low level…
Edgar Wright: We basically try to walk up and down the line until we get recognized.
Question: Can you talk about what you have next?
Edgar Wright: We’re all writing at the moment, having a furious writing period. Simon is writing something with Nick, and Simon and I are going to start writing something later this year. That should hopefully be the third in what we’re calling “the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy.”
Nick Frost: The three flavors Cornetto.
Edgar Wright: I’m writing two adaptations, both of which I’ve been doing before Hot Fuzz. We’ve only really finished doing the press tour for the film last month in France. We’ve been essentially doing press for six months, so now we can get started writing.
Question: Do you guys switch off? Is that why Simon isn’t here?
Nick Frost: He’s shooting a film at the moment.
Edgar Wright: Simon Pegg has actually said “I hate all geeks. I’m never going to Comic-Con again.” (laughs long and loud) You put that on record!
Nick Frost: No, he wasn’t here last year, either. It was just Edgar and me.
Question: So he does hate all geeks.
Nick Frost: Yeah, I think he fears what he loves most.
Edgar Wright: He came here three years ago and saw a Batman made out of Legos. He never recovered.
Nick Frost: He didn’t think it could get any better than that. So he never came back.
Question: In your third film, is there another genre you’re going to try to latch onto and pay tribute to, or do something completely different?
Edgar Wright: I think so. We try to come up with the story first, really. I’d hate it to be like we have a list of genres. I suppose we like making the kind of films that they don’t make in the UK. There used to be such a great tradition of genre films in the UK in the sixties and seventies, and it just doesn’t happen anymore.
That’s really what we want to do. Certainly, we did the films that we do back home to do something that isn’t coming out of the UK. It’s a British spin on an existing genre. So it’s not like we sat back and thought “god, cop movies really have it coming,” after eight Police Academies. (laughs)
It’s just that we wanted to produce our own spin on it, which was to do an English action film.
Question: Can you talk a little about Ant-Man and the other film?
Edgar Wright: No. (laughs) Only in that they’re both being worked on at the moment, one of which I’m co-writing, and Them, which is not a remake of the giant ant film. It’s an adaptation of a Jon Ronson book. It’s something that I’ve been developing with Mike White. He’s been writing that.
Nick Frost: So you’re doing a film about a small ant and a big ant.
Edgar Wright: Yes.
Question: What about Scott Pilgrim?
Edgar Wright: That’s another one that I’m writing at the moment. It’s in progress as we speak, and we’ve been working with Bryan Lee O’Malley, the original creator, on that as well, which has been great.
Question: Have you read the next volume yet?
Edgar Wright: I have. I have some of it in my bag. I’m not going to show it to you. It’s only some photocopied pieces of paper. He’s great. I think Bryan is an amazing writer. He’s got such a great voice; it’s exciting to be working with him.
Question: Have you guys walked the floor yet?
Edgar Wright: This morning. We did an early run. We got in at exhibitors’ time and got out at ten past ten.
Question: Did you buy anything?
Both: No. (Edgar laughs)
Edgar Wright: We got a couple of free comics. I don’t know. I find it quite overwhelming being on the floor. There’s so much stuff that I don’t know where to start. I kind of gave up and went back to the hotel, fell asleep in front of Black Christmas on the hotel cable. You can quote me on that.
Question: Did you ever get overwhelmed in your research, trying to put in references to action films?
Edgar Wright: There’s a trivia track on the DVD, which kind of explains everything. There are obviously very explicit references in the film like Point Break and Bad Boys II. The other kind of references are really kind of sly. With this one particularly, we tried to cover the entire genre, and there are aspects of so many different cop films.
There are really little details, like streets that are named after characters in films. Some of those are obvious and some of those are very obscure, like one of the streets is called Spencer Hill, which is a reference to Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. That’s from Supercop, Superfly and Miami Supercops. One of your favorites, I’m sure.
There are less references in the film than people think. If you look at Wikipedia or IMDB, you’ll find that people have read a lot more into the film and you see on Wikipedia it says things like “..in the climax of Hot Fuzz, Nicholas Angel opens the door much in the same way that Agent Smith does in Matrix: Revolutions.” I’m thinking, “hmmmm.” Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia. You didn’t need to be told that, I’m sure.
Nick Frost: I did.
Edgar Wright: You did.
Question: Does it disappoint you to work so hard on a well-received film that audiences just love, and yet not have North American in-theater box office reflect that?
Edgar Wright: It doesn’t disappoint us because by the time we got a release in the U.S. we’d already made our budget back like four times in the UK. From just a profit level, it was similar to Shaun of the Dead. It’s nice that it was major in the UK and over here it’s kind of a cult thing. DVDs kind of help that. Shaun of the Dead became more of a thing through DVD than it did the box office, and I feel it will be the same with this.
I think there’s a thing in this day and age in the way box office is reported. It’s all an obsession with three-day totals. If it doesn’t open at number one then it’s kind of nothing. That doesn’t really account for sleepers and cult films. If you look at some of your favorite films from twenty years ago, not many of them opened in the top three or top five. It doesn’t really matter to me. As long as people like the film and it finds its audience, then that’s great.
Obviously if it had cost like fifty million dollars and made twenty, then that would be a disaster. But it didn’t. It cost fifteen and made eighty-five. So we’re happy.
Question: Nick, I think your performance in the film is underrated, especially compared to the attention that Simon gets. From Spaced to Shaun of the Dead to this film, you’ve really matured as an actor. Do you think your experiences have helped you with that?
Nick Frost: Ummmm… yeah, I think I kind of think a little bit more about my job now. I was never an actor; I don’t think I did any acting at all until Shaun of the Dead. Really up until that point, I was just pretending to be an actor. After that, I put more effort into it, I think.
You know what? I learned to enjoy it. I learned to enjoy the nerves and not feel as if it was the worst job in the world. But thank you.
Underrated by who?
Question: Isn’t pretending to be an actor acting?
Nick Frost: Ahhhh… but I was thinking more about my pretense.
Edgar Wright: That was very zen-like. I like that. It’s almost like that Starship Troopers thing – (hushed) If you pretend to be an actor, then you are.
I like it.
Question: After Shaun of the Dead, you got to meet George Romero and have cameos in Land of the Dead. Has Hot Fuzz opened any doors like that for you?
Nick Frost: Police officers. It opened police officers’ doors.
Question: Since Simon and Jessica (from Spaced) have both had them, when do you get your pivotal role in Doctor Who?
Nick Frost: I wouldn’t do it.
Edgar Wright: Why not?
Nick Frost: I’m not a big Who fan. I’m sorry everyone. I would actively shun a role in it because everyone goes nuts for it.
Edgar Wright: I was asked to direct the first episode of the new series, and I didn’t do it. I am a big Doctor Who fan, but I couldn’t make it work. And my mum has never been more disappointed in me. She’ll never let me forget that.
Question: Have you thought about jumping into a show?
Edgar Wright: I find it kind of difficult to jump into something. I tend to invest everything into what I’m doing. It’s tricky to jump into something else that’s pre-existing. I’d rather work on the first part of a show, and kind of set the trend. That said, I’m always impressed when people do it. I was really impressed when Quentin Tarantino did that episode of CSI as the first thing after Kill Bill. To do a shoot for a year, and then CSI shoots for fifteen days.
So if it was the right thing, I’d do it.
