Interview: Simon Pegg & Nick Frost talk to Holly Cozens

Make mine a triple

Simon Pegg & Nick Frost talk to Holly Cozens about the last film in their ‘Cornetto’ trilogy; male friendship & blowing up roundabouts

How did the idea come about for The World’s End?
Simon Pegg: “The pub crawl thing comes from a script Edgar [Wright] had when he was young. I’ve never been a big pub crawler, me. I like to stay in one pub. It’s like, if we go from pub to pub we’re on a quest, there’s a reason to drink 12 pints when really the reason is that you’re probably an alcoholic.”
Nick Frost: “I don’t think alcoholics do pub crawls though.”
SP: “No, they don’t need to.”
NF: “They just sit there and they don’t give a hoot who sees them.”

Do you ever wonder what happened to the people from your school days?
NF: “No, not at all. I’m not a nostalgic person, I don’t look back, I just kinda plod forward and that makes me happy. I’m not on E… I’m not on eBay?”
SP: “You are, you’re currently £149.99.” [laughs].
NF: “I mean I’m not on Facebook, and I think if I was gonna keep up with people from school it would have happened before that point. I always think the thing about Gary and Andy in this film is that is what happens if things don’t evolve and then you have that thing where you meet 20 years later. Also, I am terrible at small talk so the thought of being in a room with a hundred people I went to school with when I was 14 and say: ‘how you doin’?! You alright? you got kids?’, it doesn’t interest me at all, and they’re like” ‘Ooh we’ve been watching you!’”

So how does yours and Simon’s friendship work when you’re working together?
NF: “I say ‘ooh I’ve been watching you on the Star Wars!’” [laughs]
SP: “We just move forward, we’ve never stopped moving forward. If we’re both doing something separately and we don’t see each other for six months, there’s never any period of getting to know each other again. We just pick up where we left off. That tends to be the case because we stay in touch all the time. Friendships that live are friendships that evolve, you have to mutate to survive, you can’t stay where you are.

“Friendships that live are friendships that evolve, you have to mutate to survive”

NF: “Last night was the case in point of our relationship. We laughed, literally for an hour, coming back from Dublin and all we said was the same thing over and over again with little tweaks here and there.”

Nick, why weren’t you involved in the writing process for this film?
NF: “Shaun Of The Dead and Hot Fuzz worked with Simon and Edgar writing it; they did pretty well and they were successful so I wouldn’t want to assume I would be invited to take part in that writing process.”
SP: “Well, it wouldn’t be a ‘Cornetto’ film otherwise.”
NF: “Yeah, exactly. What if I’d helped and it was terrible, I would get the blame for that in some weird way, shape or form. I have my turn on the script. I give it back to them, we go through the whole thing line by line and we move forward from that point.”
SP: “We wrote Shaun Of The Dead and did Hot Fuzz in the same way. Both times we bought Nick in towards the end of the process and said ‘sprinkle your magic fairy dust on this’, and these films have always worked. Nick and I wrote a £100million film together called Paul, which he wrote. These films are written by me and Edgar, directed by Edgar. They’re set in the UK, usually about conformism, about an individual versus a collective force…”
NF: “About male friendship…”
SP: “About male friendships and that exists within a bubble of these three films.”
NF: “The next thing me and Simon write will be the second part of the alien roadtrip trilogy [laughs].”
SP: “Who knows what we’ll do next.”

Tell us about your experience filming in Hertfordshire, and the first roundabout which is a bit of a local landmark?
SP: “We destroyed it!”
NF: “We blew it up!”
SP: “We actually paid for it to be re-flowered because we de-flowered it.”
NF: (Laughs) “That’s really good, that’s the first time I’ve heard that.”
SP: “I am a Hertfordshire boy, you know? For me it was great shooting in Elstree, Welwyn and Letchworth. It’s a 15-minute ride into work for me, it doesn’t get much better than that. We had great fun, we were thoroughly welcomed. I think we were a big novelty for people at first, we were a slight annoyance to some of the local residents as well as we held up traffic and shut down shops. But people were so lovely.”
NF: “There were times where the camera was on the back of a quad bike so you can’t just shut off one street, we would have to shut off all of it! For five to ten minutes at a time.”
SP: “The idea was that it was set in a garden city, it was set in a new town and Newton Haven is somewhere that’s just sprouted up and we liked the idea that part of it had been made by an alien life form. The film is not a comment may I say on Welwyn Garden City or Letchworth!”

Any favourite pubs?
SP: “Yeah, there was like one pub in the whole town! We actually turned Letchworth train station into a pub so a lot of people coming back from work would look back at the train station and think ‘what the f***? I didn’t realise I’d just left the pub! I thought I’d come home from London’.”
NF: “We were saying it would be funny for people to say ‘I’ll meet you at the pub at the station, you know, the pub that is at the station!’ and people not being able to find each other.”
SP: “We turned the Broadway cinema into a nightclub which was great fun because obviously people will be able to watch the film in the Broadway cinema which is interesting.”
NF: “Very meta!”

How proud are you of the reaction to this film as the final part of the ‘Cornetto’ trilogy and a stand alone film?
NF: “It’s fantastic. I don’t think the three of us have ever sat back and thought ‘yeah, we made it’ – that’s not in us. We’re about the work, we like working. Now and again we’ll text each other and be like ‘you know we just f****** did this’ and have those moments but that’s about it, that’s the only way we indulge ourselves.”
SP: “We felt very proud of the film. We are very proud of what we’ve done, how hard we worked.”
NF: “The fact that we finished it, that we finished three things!”
SP: “When the reviews started to come in, it was an incredible moment because it was proof of what we had hoped. We’d made a good film and lots of other people seemed to think we had. It was extraordinary and means an awful lot to us because we’ve managed to make three films in the UK which are very much about living here and concerns that we find very personal, and they will be seen across the world, so we feel inordinately proud.”
NF: “I’m proud that we essentially haven’t sold out, haven’t put our heads up our own arses and been all ‘aren’t we amazing?!” [laughs].

The World’s End is released Friday 19 July, showing at Dukes @ Komedia, Odeon and Cineworld