Gilsdorf: Do you feel this film appeals to American geeks more than British geeks? Are British Geeks the same? It seems that Brits consume mostly the same pop culture. Is there any risk of this offending geeks?
Frost: We’ve always said if you’re going start and try to second guess what your audience or potential audience wants, you’re going to fall flat because it doesn’t work that way. So we’ve always just written a movie that’s going to make us laugh. We’ve written a film that we want to watch and laugh with our mates, that’s always what we have always done. You find that there are pockets of “us-es” everywhere. That’s just what we’re trying to appeal to.
Pegg: I think the geek community, the British geeks, know their onions and a lot a geek material comes out of America. A lot of cinema and television is particularly American so they know all that. That said, the film has done so well at home it’s obviously appealing to an audience of people who just are …
Frost:… normal. “Normals” normal.
Pegg: That’s right, normals. Those people who just appreciate it for its kind of drama and comedy and the chase. It’s huge [in the UK]. It’s the biggest film for Universal since 2007.
Frost: Universal’s first number one.
Gilsdorf: In Hot Fuzz, you spoofed the crime/action movie. In Shaun of the Dead, the zombie movie. Paul is science fiction movie – well, it’s not proper sci-fi, but involves sci-fi fandom mostly and UFO culture. Are you looking to keep going down the line of genre film conventions and take them on, one by one?
Frost: I would agree Paul is a sci-fi genre movie. And a road movie. It’s just stuff we like. What we enjoy doing.
Pegg: We’re fans of genre cinema and we like to make the films that we would want to watch.
Gilsdorf: It’s like with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. No one wrote sci-fi and fantasy back then. Tolkien said, “If they won’t write the kinds of books we want to read, we have to write them ourselves.”
Pegg: It’s not like were trying to tackle each genre. I always use Mel Brooks as a great example of this. When he addressed the kinds of films he enjoyed, he made the best parodies. He made Westerns, or Universal horror movies, musicals, Hitchcock films. Those films are so funny and so classic. Yet when he when he did Spaceballs or Men in Tights he was just doing random “I’ll do that now.” And they were bad. There’s no love for it. I wouldn’t say we’re parodists because Shaun of the Dead isn’t a parody of zombie films; it’s a zombie film that happens to be a comedy as well. In Hot Fuzz we do make fun slightly more, but we also come to that from a love of those big silly action films. Paul is certainly not in any way satirical. It is slightly in certain ways, but not of science fiction. It comes from a place of great affection.
Frost: We are very keen to do a film at one point where we are enemies. Real enemies.
Pegg: I think that’s a great idea but then the trouble is [we wouldn’t be in scenes together]. Unless we were enemies that were thrown together somehow. One thing I like is filming with you. We can’t be separated.
Gilsdorf: Maybe you could be handcuffed or something.
Frost: Like a remake of The Defiant Ones. Or what about that film — there’s space craft, it lands on a planet, and there’s two enemies….
Pegg: Enemy Mine!
Gilsdorf: Right, with Lou Gosseett, Jr.
Pegg: And Dennis Quaid.
Frost: You can do that and I’ll be the beast. [They laugh.]
Gilsdorf: So, I heard that you actually ran into Seth [Rogen] at Comic-Con a few years back, before he was cast.
Pegg: I think it was for Pineapple Express.
Frost: Superbad. I went to see Superbad at Comic-Con and I met Seth and Greg. Nira [Park] was there, our producer, as well. That was the first time we thought, maybe Greg for Paul, right? We looked at his film and thought, “Wow this is great.”
Pegg: Because you emailed me and you’d seen it and said, “Greg would be great.” I wasn’t there, for some reason. Holiday.
Frost: We’d been there [to Comic-Con] a bunch.
Gilsdorf: Tell me about the process of how you settled on Seth as Paul.
