Simon Pegg on Paul and Why Scott Pilgrim Failed to Connect With Audiences

How much effort went into making Paul look real? The main group this film is targeting will be the first ones to tear it apart if he doesn't look good.

They did an extraordinary job with him. And there's so much you can do these days in terms of making something, which clearly isn't real, look real, and I think they've gone about as far as you can go. His physicality is so kind of 3-D -- not in the modern sense -- but he just feels like he's there. It's weird the way that people kind of gripe about CGI these days because we never, ever questioned Ray Harryhausen. It's only when things started to possibly look more real than stop-motion then everyone started complaining about it.

That's a good point. Speaking of Harryhausen, if you look at the original Clash of the Titans, I don't remember ever hearing anyone complain about the way Medusa looked. Of course it looked fake, but there was something cool about it.

Yeah! Yeah, you suspend your disbelief. It's like nowadays people are like if it doesn't look like it's absolutely 100 percent real, people are like, "Oh, that's sh*t." And they don't have any idea how much work it took! We finished shooting over a year ago in Santa Fe and it's taken a whole year to create him. And some f*cking dweeb says, "Nah, that's sh*t." But that's inevitable because the Internet is ripe with hate.

[Warning: spoiler alert about some aspects of Paul's third act]

Bill Hader was cast as a quasi-bad guy in this film, which I would have never even thought of. I mean, people like Bill Hader!

We had this idea with Bill: Haggard becomes progressively more evil as he goes. O'Reilly and Haggard are both sort of bumbling but Haggard is the slightly more ambitious one who wants to know what's going on. Just before Haggard meets his [fate], he does shoot somebody. Like, he's gone that far. But we did like the idea of them starting off as being sort of bumbling, hilarious no-good cops. The reason we do what we do to Joe Lo Truglio's character is because, at that point in the story, we need to imply real jeopardy. And if we can knock off the most lovable character in the film, then anyone can be. I love Bill. Bill's a fantastic actor and I think his journey in the movie is great from this sort of goofy guy to this homicidal nutcase.

[End spoilers]

Were you familiar with Kristen Wiig before this film?

Kristen Wiig is just a revelation for me because we don't really know her in the U.K. because we don't get Saturday Night Live. Kristen's kind of been quietly been stealing scenes in the back of Judd Apatow movies for awhile, and when her name came up I had seen her in Knocked Up and I really thought she was funny. Just, you know, those little things she does. And I was like, "Yeah, let's try her. She's good." And then she came on set and was dazzling.

In terms of a structure blowing up all at once, in unison, the exploding house in this movie looked great...

Yeah... I know! A lot of C-4! There's a short film about it on the DVD -- about how we blew it up. Because it was such an amazing explosion, we were probably about less than half a mile from it when it went and we felt it -- the blast wave. It was like an amazing thing; we saw it and then we heard it and then we felt it. You can see us all filming it on the DVD go "Whoa!" because it was so enormous.

The way it blew up so symmetrically, it looked, sort of, like the Death Star exploding.

They rigged it a special way to make it do that. It, literally, atomizes the house. It blows it to smithereens. They rigged it so that the roof went first so it would disappear in the fireball. It was great.

Something I've been wanting to ask you -- when Zombieland came out, there were a lot of comparisons to Shaun of the Dead. What is your opinion of Zombieland?

I liked Zombieland a lot, but I have a problem with running zombies. I don't like running zombies because they defeat the object. I think the running zombie came after 28 Days Later. And in 28 Days Later, they weren't zombies, they were people -- they were still alive. The running zombie is, like -- I wrote a whole big essay on the Internet about this -- death should be a disability. That their death should be physically exemplified by their movement. And it makes them creepier; it makes them more interesting. So the running zombies in Zombieland, I did not like. But... it isn't like Shaun of the Dead. Yes, it's a comedy, but it's a different approach.

I agree. The comparisons were made but I never quite understood them.

Yeah, because it was the last comedy zombie movie. But aside from petty issue of speed, I really liked it. And I love all of the actors in it as well. I think it was a uniformly brilliant cast. It was a different approach, it was more self-consciously cool, and Shaun of the Dead was a metaphor about living in a city -- whereas Zombieland was just a good horror romp.

Over the last couple of years, the films that are popular with the Comic-Con crowd haven't done particularly well at the box-office. How can Paul break a track record that a film like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World couldn't?

I think Scott Pilgrim was hard to pigeonhole, and I think things need to be slotted into digestible, understandable definitions these days. Scott Pilgrim kind of defied definition so it confused the marketing machine, and they ended up not doing a very good job of getting across what it was. Do you know what I mean? I think the people who did see it were lucky enough to have the good sense to go and pay their money and were probably absolutely rocked by it like I was. I was blown away by it, and that's objectively speaking. Regardless of whether or not it was directed by my friend, I thought it was a fabulous piece of cinema. But it didn't really fit particularly well in terms of mainstream kind of offering. There is that core cinema going audience who would rather go and see a piece of sh*t like Vampires Suck, and don't want to be challenged. But the fact that Inception did well is proof that people don't mind being challenged; they actually enjoy being challenged and do like to see interesting, intelligent stuff. Paul, I think, will be slightly easier to market because it's a big comedy: it's broad, it's a buddy movie, it's a road movie -- there are recognizable tropes in the exterior shell of it which will make it easier to deliver to people as an understandable thing.

What you said about the marketing on Scott Pilgrim is interesting. I'm in my 30s and I felt every reference in that movie was aimed at someone my age. But it felt like if I had not had seen it, I would have never of known that.

Well, no, I thought they should have... you know, Shaun of the Dead has got a great groundswell of support in the U.S. and DVD, but I don't think they treaded enough on that, really. They could have at least tried to give people an idea where Edgar was coming from and maybe mentioning Shaun a little bit more. That might have helped, to an extent. The weird thing about Scott Pilgrim is that it's just a classic example of something just confounding the sort of mono-thought people who control marketing. It's like the show Arrested Development. It's why great shows get canceled because the people that own it don't understand it. A
nd Scott Pilgrim was very much like an amazing... I don't know if you ever saw the sitcom Spaced, but it was like an episode of Spaced and how specifically appealing it was. It was talking to a very specific demographic very personally. And in that, it was quite exclusive. It was like the most expensive episode of Spaced ever. When I whooped and cheered when Jason Schwartzman's ring made the same noise as Ming the Merciless from the Flash Gordon movie. You know, I got that sound gag that they had put in there. It was a really oblique reference to Flash Gordon and I was like, "Yeah!" And that's the kind of response that film required. Unfortunately, there aren't enough people like that in the world to make it a profitable enterprise. I guess. Maybe there are and they didn't realize it was that type of film?

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