Pegg: We wanted him to look like we’ve seen him before. We wanted him to look almost like every alien you’d ever seen [was] in him, because of the joke that he’s been influencing culture. That a lot of the designs [for aliens] have been taken from him. So, yes, he’s very much a combination of other creatures we’ve seen and our gag is that we’ve retroactively ripped off everybody and said that it was our idea.
Frost: It’s quite interesting for us, you know. We were fairly stubborn, and you get to the point where you have to hand it all over [to someone else], and again we’re talking about trust issues. But we wanted Paul to have black eyes. We wanted him to be gray, a classic gray [alien]. We didn’t fight very hard, actually, but as soon as you start speaking to these Spectral Motion guys, and they say, “Well, as a character it’s unsustainable for two hours.” Being a gray you need people to be sympathetic toward him or to empathize to what he’s saying.
Pegg: And you can’t track the emotions.
Frost: With those big black eyes, it may look amazing, and it would be a bit creepy and cool, but people can’t warm to it. And we didn’t think of that.
Pegg: We did a lot of experiments with the shape of his eyes so they’d bulge in certain places, and you could see where the pupils were.
Frost: We tried stuff, tests, with eyes, salamander eyes, tiger’s eyes. I think he has bear’s eyes now.
Pegg: I think he has bear eyes now, except they’re blue. They’re good. I think one of the last things to fall to place with CG is life in the eyes. You see those early motion capture films like The Polar Express and aren’t those creatures, aren’t they dead behind the eyes?
Gilsdorf: If I can move away from special effects for a moment. One of the shifts I write about in my book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks is that the various gaming, fantasy and sci-fi and fandom subcultures have evolved to the point now where they have a much better capacity to make fun of themselves.
Frost: I think they were probably tired of having fun poked at them. That gets a bit boring if you’re on the receiving end of it.
Gilsdorf: That seems the spirit of Paul. That geeks have a better sense of humor. And that here, with Clive and Graeme, we see you being geeks who make fun of yourselves. What’s that line you ride, paying homage versus making fun?
Pegg: We never wanted to make fun of it. Obviously those kind of fans are our bread and butter and helped get us where we are. We didn’t want to then turn around and say ‘Ha, ha. You big bunch of losers.'” We wanted to portray Clive and Graeme as being slightly dysfunctional, a bit of sort of insular and co-dependent, as those people are sometimes, but at the same time show them in a positive light.
Frost: It’s easy to take the piss out of people, but what’s a little harder is for everyone to have a good laugh. You’re not taking the piss out of something, you’re enjoying something together. That’s important for us. As a side note: For the Paul press, I did this cookery show called “The Saturday Kitchen” at home. There’s a butch chef called James Martin and he was very anti-nerd. It was very, very weird. He sort of treated me as if it was the Eighties and I was a screaming gay man. He wouldn’t put his bum near me [Frost gets up, makes a sexual gesture with his pelvis.] It was really weird. The producer was saying to me, “I just can’t understand it.” But in the same breath, he served me a raspberry soufflé. [Laughs.]
Gilsdorf: Do the names of your characters, Graeme Willy and Clive Gollings, translate as “nerdy” in the UK? Here, we might use a name like Leonard.
Pegg: They’re quite British names. We wanted them to sound slightly alien. The central joke in the picture is that the real aliens are Clive and Graeme. We chose just stodgy British names and Gollings and Willy just made us laugh.
Gilsdorf: Sounds like a law firm.
Frost: “Good morning, Gollings and Willy!” [Laughs.] But “Graeme,” we had to change. Originally we were spelling it G-R-A-H-A-M. You don’t realize this when you write. Someone has to name check this. Can we use these names? Are there people called this?
Pegg: If there is more than one person called this name, then it’s OK. But if there’s not more than one then, if they find just one “Graham Willy” with the spelling G-R-A-H-A-M, then we have to change it. We changed it. He probably hasn’t even seen the film.
Frost: He’s probably a 95 year old man who lives in Lincoln.
Pegg: Weird litigious world we live in.
Frost: Image rights.
Pegg: Name rights.
Gilsdorf: Tell me about your writing process.
Frost: Simon got to type. He’s a better typer than me.
Pegg: What we had was, we put it all up in a board. What then were the major events. It changed dramatically. So we knew where [the plot] was going and all we had to do was fill in the dialogue and the events.
Frost: [joking] Easy.
Pegg: Easy. So we wrote about 40 pages, then I went on holiday. Or I started work on a film.
Frost: Yeah, you were on a film.
Pegg: So Nick carried on writing and filling in what we had to fill in. And then we got together and from this great block of potential we whittled it down. And then that draft changed dramatically. Because there were tornadoes, and alien human hybrids and all sort of crazy shit. It was a government chimera that they bred from Paul’s blood that they brought in to hunt Paul down.
Frost: He was a complete psychopath but a real gentleman. He had a guy who looked after him who he could have eaten, but because he didn’t eat him, they had a good laugh together.
Gilsdorf: So then what happened in the development of the script?
Frost: We had written abortive sitcom and sketches and ideas before, and when Simon was working, I wanted us to finish it. To complete something. He was working and I wasn’t and I didn’t want to sit around and wait for Simon. I wanted to say as soon as he got of the job, “Let’s do this.” It was more out if necessity.
[Editor’s note: SPOILER ALERT! Several spoilers in this next response]
Pegg: The sitcom we had written for Channel 4, they had bought it but we decided we didn’t want to do it. We’d written another sitcom that was too ridiculous to shoot, because it had dinosaurs in it. We then got to the point where we said, “Let’s get this made. We have to get something made. Let’s phone it around.” And that became Paul. It was such a hoot to write it. We had such fun in the office. At its best, it was such an organic process. It just sort of wrote itself. Just discovering stuff like Devil’s Tower, having them end up at Devil’s Tower, or that the voice character of the Big Guy should be a woman — and what if that’s Sigourney Weaver, and then what if Blythe Danner says, “Get away from her, you bitch!”? How [expletive] cool that would be? All that stuff was so fun to write. I remember that day. I remember that day. We laughed much. We had just a hypothetical idea, just the imagining of it. Never knowing that it would actually [expletive] happen.
Shameless self-promotion: Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and the author's book "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks."
Gilsdorf: That was a great moment in the movie. Time’s almost up. Thanks for agreeing to speak with me.
Frost: You’re welcome.
Pegg: [Looking out the hotel window to the Charles River below] So, we went out this morning to do some brief radio and television. Can I ask a silly question about the river?
Frost: Which way does it flow?
Pegg: Does Ben Affleck swim in it every morning?
Gilsdorf: Yes. Yes, he does.
Pegg: Which way does it flow?
Gilsdorf: That way. The ocean is that way.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the Somerville, Massachusetts-based author of the award-winning travel memoir/pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, now in paperback. He also publishes travel, arts and pop culture stories regularly in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and other magazines and newspapers worldwide. He is a film and book critic for the Boston Globe, his blog “Geek Pride” is seen regularly on PsychologyToday.com, he teaches creative writing at Emerson College and Grub Street, Inc. and he has been a guest on talk radio and spoken at numerous conventions, book festivals and universities. You can follow his adventures (and read more about the book) here: http://www.fantasyfreaksbook.com
