Why don't you let me drive? Paul (Seth Rogen) and Graeme Willy (Pegg) pilot their RV into comedy
Frost: Every scene we do, often, after every few pages, we’ll act it out. Simon does three characters, I’ll do three characters. Just to see how it sounds. Something obviously looks good on the page but when you act it out it just doesn’t work, or it’s not funny. So whenever we did Paul, he was always this kind of gruff guy. Being a big fan of The Larry Sanders Show, we always thought of Rip Torn. That was what we did through the whole writing process. He’s an older character, he’s been down there [in Area 51] long time. Been there 60 years. He’d become very cynical and smoking cigarettes had done something to his throat. So that was what we always imagined. Then it came to the kind of point where we were actually going to make this film. Because it’s such an expensive picture, it’s not just about what we want. We have to find a way to work with Universal. And we have a list, and they have a list of people who are comedy on trend at the moment. The person on both lists was Seth. I think what Seth brings is, he is very funny, he’s got a great set of comedy chops on him, he’s relevant. But he also has this great old voice. Straight away we thought, “This is great. This could work really well.” Simon says it perfectly. He says when he watches Paul he forgets that Seth is in it. Because he’s Paul.
Pegg: You buy it. That’s got a lot to do with Seth. I think he was channeling Neil Young and he watched a lot of old hippies talking. And he wanted to do Paul as this laconic, laid back, old Sixties renegade kind of creature.
Frost: There’s that phrase I heard him [Rogen] say, that he’s “actively” laid back. I thought that was really cool.
Pegg: He’s an actively laid back guy. But also Double Negative [the special effects house] did extraordinary animation, which is so good. So cutting edge that you just buy it. You buy it 100 percent. That’s what we always wanted. One of the things that really inspired us was that wouldn’t it be brilliant to have a film like Easy Rider, but instead of Jack Nicholson, you had an alien.
Gilsdorf: Well, Dennis Hopper was sort of alien like.
Frost: It could be Dennis Hopper for Paul.
Pegg: [The other idea was] have him sitting in really ordinary situations, like sitting around eating a cheeseburger, in a gas station. We always see these characters in fantasy environments. We see Gollums in Middle-earth and all the Star Wars animations are in the Star Wars universe. So the context fits the sprite. But in Paul, we wanted that character to be in an environment that was totally, literally, alien to him. And by that, make him seem even more real because you don’t expect to see him.
Frost: I think Greg had a meeting with someone before we began shooting — we probably shouldn’t say who — and Greg was trying to pitch him the idea of Paul and how he’d shoot it, and the locations. And the guy said, “Oh you’re going to try to shoot CG in the day? Good luck.”
Pegg: [On location], we did what called an LPP [a lighting and puppet pass]. After every time we’d shoot the scene we’d do the scene again, with the lights and the puppet so the effects guys could see how the light would bounce off his body. We had a company called Spectral Motion build a life-sized Paul model and an animatronic. So when we shot the movie, basically how we did it was, we had two weeks in LA with Seth. We did the whole film on video with Seth as Paul, acting with Seth, so we got used to his characterization, and the effects guys could see how he moved. Then we moved to Santa Fe, we shot movie as you normally would but every single set up, we did a light and puppet pass and we’d be acting with Joe Lo Truglio [Editor’s note: Joe Lo Truglio plays Agent O’Reilly] playing Paul. Just a stroke of luck. Seth then listened to what Joe had done so he could pick up that conversational style, and incorporate a few of Joe’s improvs into it. But [we never acted with Seth]. We were acting with a child, a small man, a ball, a stick with balls in it, some lights. Constantly, all the way through, I was thinking, this is never going to work. How do I know where to look?
Frost: We’d get really grumpy sometime on the set. It wasn’t the kind of thing where you fly off the handle slightly, but then you see it you think, “Oh, I was such a dick.” But you’d be saying, “The eyelines aren’t going to work! What are we looking at?”
Pegg: If you’re Paul, this is how complicated it is.
Frost: Or how uncomplicated, if he’s talking about the LED thing.
Pegg [demonstrating]: If you’re Paul, when Nick’s looking at you…
Frost: … your eyeline would be where those curtains are. [He points to the other side of the room.]
Pegg: So Nick would have two lights on the back of these curtains for your eyes. I would have two lights on that back wall there. That becomes something completely different when I stand up and am looking down at Paul. [He gets up.] Those lights have to be on the floor.
Gilsdorf: Someone has to measure that angle? That seems really complicated.
Frost: Constantly, for every shot.
Pegg: But it worked. There’s no point in the film where you think, uh — like when you see Ewan McGregor looking at Jar Jar Binks, he’s looking above his head!
Frost: When you think of that kind of technology, you’d think, you’d just animate the eye line to the actor. And not the other way around. Wherever the actor is looking, you’d put the creature there. You’d move it a little to the left.
Pegg: The things they can do with CG now is amazingly subtle. Like for instance, there was a scene when Paul jumps off the RV to talk to Nick’s character.
Frost: This was my practical brain at work.
Pegg: You’re the one who said it, didn’t you? When we watched [the scene] afterward, when Paul jumps down, the RV doesn’t move at all. So then they went into the movie to make the RV tip slightly.
Frost: RVs have such soft suspension. Whenever you get off of it [he gestures, rocking back and forth gesture], they move. I was watching it and it doesn’t move.
Gilsdorf: Yes, many subtle things. I noticed in the “stoke the fire” scene with you two and Paul, in the campground, when it’s getting dark, you can see faint shadows under Paul on the ground.
Frost: If it wasn’t there, you’d notice it.
Pegg: When Joe Lo Truglio speaks to [Paul], when he feels his balls in the comic book shop, you can see Joe in his eyes. You can see the reflection of Joe’s face in his eyes. Tiny things like that.
Frost: And a tiny bead of sweat. [Frost makes a gesture down side of face.] The weight as well. We talked a lot about that with Greg and Double Negative. A lot of the time you look at CG and [CG characters] don’t sit in the chair, they sit on the chair. You can tell they weigh nothing because they’re not there. So it was important that every time Paul sat on something, he looked like he weighed something.
Pegg: They’re kind of airless. That’s always been a problem, that there’s no presence to CG.
Frost: You feel like you could just click on them and move them to another location.
Pegg: Whereas I think what Double Negative did is, they kind of cracked that. They’ve done work before and there was definitely stuff happening in Lord of the Rings as well where that was changing and you feel a presence more. And I think with Paul, I look at it and I try and remember, “Was he there?” Maybe he was there. Double Negative would say things like, when we first started talk to them — [one of the animators] who was an animator at Disney who went back to England to work with Double Negative — he was talking about this thing called specularity or something. It’s how light enters our skin and bounces off a layer just beneath the epidermis …
Frost: … and scatters.
Pegg: Right, and scatters. That’s it. The scatter effect. And we were thinking to ourselves, “We got the right person.” It’s why we’re pink. Anyway, it’s a science.
Gilsdorf: You hired the right geeks. Luckily, with Paul, his skin was green.
Frost: Gray.
Gilsdorf: Right, a kind of green-gray it seemed to me. He kind of reminded me of a combination of Gollum, E.T. and Yoda. And that classic, Fifties, big-headed, big-eyed alien.
