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‘Hot Fuzz’ Q&A: Flushing Birthday Cakes with Edgar Wright and Nick Frost

[IMG:L]Edgar WrightNick Frost and Simon Pegg managed to turn the zombie genre on its head when they released their debut comedy, Shaun of the Dead back in 2004. The bigger challenge for the trio would be repeating their success the second time around. Wright and Pegg worked for 18 months to write the next screenplay, a cop comedy paying homage to the clichés from their favorite action films. The final product, a buddy comedy called Hot Fuzz directed by Wright, stars Pegg as the over-achieving Sgt. Nicholas Angel, a police officer transferred from of his London post to the village of Sandford for making his jealous colleagues look bad. He’s quickly paired with Frost‘s character Cp. Danny Butterman, a small-town cop in awe of his new partner’s big-city experience. When a string of “accidents” occur, Sgt. Angel desperately tries to break the case and prove there is a murderer on the loose.

With the Hot Fuzz DVD due in video stores July 31, Hollywood.com caught up with Wright and Frost to find out about their latest film, what they have on the horizon and why they love to flush birthday cakes…

Hollywood.com: What was the inspiration for the story? Why a cop movie?
Edgar Wright:
We wanted to make a cop film in the UK, because there isn’t really any tradition of cop films in the UK. So, it was absolutely none like the sort of the ones in the 80’s and then very few in the 70’s. We’ve got a lot of TV cop shows, but we wanted to make a cop film. We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none.
Nick Frost: I think British film making came to it from the angle of the mobster and the gangster…Then after Shaun of the Dead people kind of really enjoyed the chemistry between Simon and me. It seemed to be a good way, a buddy cop movie, seemed to be a good way of getting that chemistry back up there.

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HW: With the success of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, what would be the natural next step if you were to team up again?
EW:
We are going to team up. Simon and Nick are writing a script together. Then me and Simon are writing a script together, which will be the third…we wanted to make a trilogy. Like Shaun  and Hot Fuzz are like two parts of a trilogy. The Cornetto ice cream we have in the film, so we wanted to have the three flavor Cornetto trilogy…we wanted three different flavors of ice cream. It’s based off that, Shaun of the Dead is the strawberry one, and so we have strawberry ice cream there. Hot Fuzz is the original one and then the next one will be mint chocolate chip. So, the short answer to you question is mint chocolate chip.
NF: He’s lost in the bloody ice cream trilogy.

HW: What would be the genre then? You’ve got zombies and cops, what would be the mint chocolate chip?
EW:
We cannot divulge at this point what the mint chocolate chip would be.
NF: We know…but we just won’t tell.

[IMG:R]HW: Nick, there are actors like Owen Wilson who will bounce around and do different buddy films with different guys. If you were to pair up with someone besides Simon who would it be?
NF:
Oh fuck, I don’t know. Well, I like making films with Edgar and Simon really. Not that I wouldn’t go and do films with anyone else, but…I don’t know, there are some amazing people…but some of the Saturday Night Live boys. Bill Hader and Will Arnett and stuff like that. Even Owen Wilson, as a performer and as a comedian you look at those lads and you think that they are doing it right now. Yeah, absolutely I would love to work with them. But, we’ll see.

HW: You like to throw around action movie references in this movie. Are you total movie buffs? Could you give somebody like Seth MacFarlane a run for his money?
NF:
This guy could give anyone a run for his money, except Lord High Video himself, QT.
EW: Yeah, I think that Quentin Tarantino is just on a plane above, then we are all pretenders to kind of his geek throne. But like, Seth MacFarlane? What we tried to do with Shaun and particularly with Hot Fuzz it’s not so much that there are that many specific film references. There are some like Point Break and Bad Boys II but then overall it feels like being dipped in genre chocolate. We put so many genre clichés into the pop you can’t necessarily pick what films they are from. They all sound so kind of generic. There are no bits in Hot Fuzz like Family Guy where we say ‘Do you remember the time when Captain and Tennille came round?’ (laughs)

[IMG:L]HW: Edgar, is your brother Oscar the animator who did Danny Butterman’s flipbook animation in the film and in the special DVD features?
EW:
He did the animation, yeah…In the film, the joke is that Danny shares one side of that book and then the punch line of the scene, you see this gory animation and Simon says ‘That’s incredible. We should see the one on the other side.’ You see him flip, you don’t actually see it in the film. We thought oh, we should do the one on the other side. You see cops running, the idea of police brutality in animation form. I and my brother used to do those. We made flip books when we were kids. That’s how we used the animation stuff, we used to make flip books out of school notebooks and stuff. They were pretty much like that, they were always gory stick man animation…[Oscar] works on the storyboard for me, but he has directed recently as well. He’s my older brother and he’s a brilliant illustrator and animator and he’s directing a few as well, he’s great.

HW: Whose idea was it to put the U.S. press tour on the DVD?
EW:
Universal asked us to document it on the DVD, but it was really a nice thing to do. We had done blogs all the way through the production, which we put online whilst we were shooting. It’s just a really great thing to do. We had a friend of ours Joe Cornish who is a director and writer, it was great having him there. It was almost like having somebody like a diary to talk to. It made it a little bit more personal. It was like we had an EPK crew the whole time because we had a friend of ours documenting it. It was actually really good. The idea with it was to kind of show the reality of doing a junket tour. How exhausting it can be, but I hope its fun. Did you enjoy it?

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HW: Yes, I do have a guilt complex now because of my job. But other than that, it was great.
EW:
It’s not the fault of the journalists, it’s just literally the schedule. I would like to stress, particularly the phone bits on there. I was thinking the journalists who are on the other end of the line aren’t offended [by the fact that we were stripping during the interview]. I swear to God it’s literally like, we get sick of the sound of our own voices. It’s more that, you have to try to just keep your brain alive. I can talk about myself for like 11 hours of the day (laughs).
NF: I think there is a certain amount of guilt as well, on our part. We worked on the film for three years and we can only think of the same things to say all the time. You would think that we would be able to be very eloquent about every facet of it. You kind of just tend to say the same things.

[IMG:R]HW: What was your favorite part of that tour?
EW:
I think the Austin. All the cities were great, but I think the Austin Alamo Drafthouse marathon thing was pretty amazing. They have got the whole cinema thing down pat, it was just incredible. [Also] the last night of the tour, this unfortunately didn’t get covered because they had not paid for Joe to stay out that long. The last night we were in L.A. and we did like two Q&A’s at the ArcLight…The first screening Quentin Tarantino came along. Just before we went on I said “Oh, he should introduce us.” So he just walks out with a drink in hand and says “Ladies and Gentleman…” and does the biggest intro ever. Then we come on and do the Q&A. Whilst the second film is playing, we went out for a drink. Jack Black had been in the first performance and Eli Roth, so now in my brain I’m thinking “Okay, for the next one we are really going to pull out the stops.” We came back for the second Q&A, we got a guy from the ArcLight to introduce Eli, who then introduced Jack, who then introduced Quentin, who then introduced us. It was just fucking crazy.
NF: Running through the audience throughout the Q&A giving out copies of Point Break and Bad Boys II. It was bloody great.
EW: The best of it, we had all these left over from the screening. We had all these boxes of Bad Boys II DVD’s, we had the screening at CAA (Creative Artists Agency) and there is a goodie bag at the end. They had like Point Break and Bad Boys II and at the end of the screening all of the Point Break‘s are gone but there were like 50 copies of Bad Boys II left behind. We took all them to the ArcLight and anytime someone asked a question we would give them Bad Boys II.
NF: To be honest, at the CAA I did see Kathryn Bigelow walk off with most of the Point Break‘s.
EW: (Laughs) The funniest thing at the end of this Q&A is that Eli was handing out the DVDs and then also Quentin was as well. The lady from the ArcLight had to wrap it up because there was another performance about to start…I said “We got two more questions.” Quentin had like five DVDs in his hands and he just said “We’re not fucking going anywhere until I got rid of these Bad Boys II DVDs and you have to ask a good question. If you don’t ask a good question, you don’t get a fucking DVD.” The next person goes “Hi, I’m an aspiring director…” [Quentin] goes ‘”Sit the fuck down!” [Laughs] Totally berated this guy for asking one of those kinds of questions. It was so funny. That was probably my favorite part of the whole press tour. That and doing Jonesy’s Jukebox on 103.1, we loved that, it was great…
NF: He was so nice. He was like looking in a time mirror for me. I think I’m going to look like Jonesy which is alright I guess. A high point for me was the third cake we flushed in Atlanta.
EW: High point. [Laughs]

HW: What was it with you flushing cakes down the toilet during the press tour?
NF:
It was my birthday and we spent it up in Chicago. They got a big cake, so it came to me in a dream. I just thought “Yeah, fuck it. Let’s flush this thing.” American toilets are very good. You couldn’t flush a cake in an English toilet. I think you would have a problem flushing a cookie or a biscuit. It was just Joe Cornish and I, who was the videographer, it just brought us a lot of joy. Then the second one with all four of us…Then the last one [in Atlanta], it was just great…Then when Simon and I went on Jimmy Kimmel he got his assistant to flush one live on air.
EW: Also it is catching further because the Superbad boys are on that press tour at the moment, they have done their own cake flush in honor of Hot Fuzz. Bill Hader, Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, and the guy who plays McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) did their own cake flush.
NF: I think its going to be big. I think Tony Blair is flushing at least [a traditional Syrian cake] as we speak.
EW: Yeah, that was the first thing that Posh and Becks did when they came to L.A. They flushed a chocolate shoe down the toilet…
NF: Yeah, and a ball shaped cake.
EW: [Laughs] When they had their party with Tom Cruise and Will Smith. They all bought cakes for the Beckham’s to flush straight out.
NF: There is an advert in Britain for Skoda, for Skoda vehicles. These people make an entire car including engines, seats, everything all out of cake. It’s amazing.
EW: They have jelly lights.
NF: Yeah, it is absolutely incredible. I think I would like to drive that into the toilet.

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