Touring Australia with two major blockbusters being released in December from Paramount, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. We were lucky enough to sit down at a roundtable with Simon Pegg when he visited Sydney.
[quote_right]”Tom is Mr. Incredible, Paula is the mum, I’m Dash – and Jeremy is the girl.”[/quote_right]We chat with Mr. Pegg on working with Tom Cruise, his expansion of the role of Benji, the experience of working in motion capture and the giddy thrills of Nazis melting and fulfilling a dream of working with Steven Spielberg and holding onto cinema as an art form. He also let slip some details about the upcoming conclusion to the so-called “Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy”, The World’s End.
If you hear a yelp, followed by lots of laughing, fear not! We didn’t attack the actor. Instead, it was director Brad Bird, who we spoke with earlier in the day, sneaking back into the room to pull Simon Pegg off his chair as part of a practical joke. If only we’d been filming it!
On The World’s End
“We’ve written it. We’ve written the frist draft, and now we’re trying to write the second. But Edgar’s in LA, and I’m in Hartfordshire in the UK, and because BT didn’t set my Internet up when they said they would, me and Edgar couldn’t Skype and carry on with our second drafts. So I was just angry at BT and decided to blame the hold-up in writing on them”.
[quote_left]”World’s End is like the answer to the equation Shaun times Hot Fuzz.”[/quote_left]”I’m really excited. I can’t start wait to start shooting this movie, which we really will hopefully do sometime next year after I complete Star Trek. It’s very much the culmination of those first two films. It will make those series of films a trilogy. You know, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are related insomuch as the personel involved and a few kind of little in-jokes as well, but they’re really very different films. Whereas World’s End is like the answer to the equation Shaun times Hot Fuzz. And it seals it it as a three part film series”.
It’s going to be really good I think, I’m very pleased with it…We wrote it so fast compared to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz because it came so easily, because we have this language now with each other. But it was really fun to right with Edgar again, and we’re dead excited about this film. It’s going to be awesome I think”.
We’d like to thank Way to Blue and Paramount Australia for making this possible, and of course Simon Pegg for his generous answers.
About the Roundtable
The interview took place on 4 December 2011 in Sydney, Australia. Participants in the roundtable included David McVay from Geek Actually, Richard Gray of The Reel Bits, Geoff Reid of Cinefools, Matt Pejkovic of Matt’s Movie Reviews, David Longo of Damn Good Cup and Jorge Duran of The Spotlight Report.
About The League
In the beginning there was chaos, a vast information network that provided few islands of hope. Then there was a light, a shimmering hope in the darkness. A portal for lovers of the wonders of celluloid and the entertainment industry. Then there came another, and another ushering in a golden age of wonders the likes the world had never seen. By day, they live out their lives as the humble David McVay of Geek Actually, Jorge Duran of The Spotlight Report, Richard Gray of The Reel Bits, Dave Longo of Damn Good Cup and Josh Philpott of Hip Hop Net. But when the signal goes out they come together as one! The League assembles! Tremble all who dare stand in its path!
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is released in Australia on 15 December 2011 from Paramount. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is released in Australia on 26 December 2011 from Paramount.
Great interview Richard, such great insight into Pegg’s work on so many different films and what inspired him to get into acting/writing.
Thanks, Cam! It was such a fun interview, and another one of those ones where we could have kept talking for hours. Pegg is definitely “one of us”.