Paul
Press Conference Interview with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg
posted by Brad Balfour
March 17, 2011
Paul screenwriters/actors Nick Frost and Simon Pegg crash San Diego Comic Con, get the girl, mark off some of of the talent they have on their “favorite stars to work with” list and forever endear themselves to the fanboys. But it was inevitable that the Brit minds behind Shaun of The Dead and Hot Fuzz would come up with something that both exploits their cultural background and wllows in it at the same time.
Add into the mix director Greg Mottola — who made both Superbad and Adventureland — and Paul becomes a film that is not only about aliens but pot-smoking as well. Given this combo of talent would be enough to make this sci-fi comedy worth a viewing but then it also stars SNL vets Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader and Joe LaTruglio plus Jason Bateman and Sigourney curious star turns to say the least. And one of the funniest performance is animated over on screen, from one green costume to the next – Seth Rogen.
How does Paul compare to some of the other alien movies out now?
Simon Pegg: I think of all the alien films that have come out recently, and we do seem to be a part of a zeitgeist of alien cinema, Paul is probably the only one who would pass you a joint rather than shoot you in the head. The others seem to be malignant and Paul is the only one that’s benevolent.
If you actually encountered an alien here on Earth what would you ask them?Nick Frost: I would ask them what they eat and how they prepare it.
Pegg: He’s a keen chef. I guess I would enquire about the secrets of interstellar travel. I mean, they’d have to have overcome an extreme hurdle to get here. That’s the thing, I think there’s definitely life on other planets. There’s more chance of there being life than not, but the thing is that we may never meet because of the distances between our worlds are so enormous.
Frost: Maybe he’s already here. Maybe he’s inside. If the ship landed, the doors opened and like a shrimp it came out that wouldn’t be any weirder than anything written by science fiction.
Prior to penning the script you actually did a road trip throughout the Southwest U.S. and drew a lot of inspiration from that. Can you encapsulate that trip and in what ways did it inspire you?
Pegg: It was the single most important thing that we did prior to writing the film, making the trip.
Frost: It’s the only thing we did, too.
Pegg: That’s true. We’ve traveled around America a lot. We’ve been to a lot of places in America, but always we’ve gone airport to airport and we’ve never driven. It’s not until you drive that you realize just how enormous and breathtaking and beautiful and scary and lonely and varied and extraordinary this country is.
The fact that it has so many people in it and you can still go an entire day and not see a soul. A lot of what we experienced on the road in terms of some of the people that we met, some of the adventures that we had, went straight into the script.
The only thing that didn’t happen to us on that trip was meeting the alien. We made that up, I confess. But a bird hit the window. We ran into some sort of scary hunter types at The Little Alien.
Frost: We were the only people in The Little Alien, a pub,before they arrived and we were being quite boisterous like we owned the place and then these two guys walked in who looked to be very serious men with kind of hunting suits on. We got quite quiet and went, “Come on, lets just go.”
Pegg: An atmosphere descended on the place, and so, yeah, that was important. When I look back on it now I think, “It’s amazing that we actually considered writing the film without doing that.”
Frost: Originally, we were going to sit, or I think for the first few hours, we sat a little table in the RV and tried to write things and we suddenly became very aware that that was ridiculous. What we needed to do was sit and watch America drift by.
Pegg: Look out the window.
There’s a lot of road trip in science fiction. ‘Star Wars’ is a road trip. ‘Star Trek’ is a road trip. ‘Lost in Space’, ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and on and on. Would you look at science fiction genre, it is usually a road trip movie or has that component somewhere in there.
Pegg: I guess that it’s a journey into the future itself. The very nature of science fiction is about pioneering into a time that we don’t yet know or a technology that we don’t yet know. In that respect it has the momentum of a journey. So, yeah, it is.
It’s sort of about uncharted territory and that’s what the road trip is all about, the sort of voyage of discovery. So in that respect, yeah and it’s a metaphor for travel, I guess, science fiction. It’s a metaphor for forward movement, forward momentum. For us, it was just about wanting to make ‘Easy Rider’ and put an alien in it. That was it. The agreement was to make Greg’s [Mottola] first film ‘Daytrippers’, but instead of Liev Schreiber we’d have ET.
Frost: Kevin Costner out of ‘Fandango’. That’s what we wanted to do, I think.
There are so many references in the film. How did you go about figuring out what references you were going to put in there, what tributes — and were they based on your favorite films; what are those?
Pegg: It’s more organic than that. We didn’t have a checklist of films that we wanted to sort of name. Obviously, we’re appealing to our love of ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘ET’, but we didn’t really set out to make any references. It’s just that that’s our frame of reference culturally.
We grew up on cinema and television and is what we sort of defer to for our metaphors in life, those touchstones. So, the cantina band music in the roadhouse was Greg’s idea, and it was entirely that thing of, like, we’re in a situation where strangers are going into a sort of bar which is a bit unnerving and the first thing that springs to mind is that scene in ‘Star Wars’. So we had the Dixie Band play the cantina band music.
Frost: And with Sigourney, as well. I mean, you’ve got Sigourney Weaver onboard and I think we all three had that conversation, like, “Well, lets see if we can get it in somewhere we she says, ‘Get away from her, you bitch.'”
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