MCN Interview: Shaun of the Dead

Crossing over to these shores after enjoying huge box office success in the U.K., Shaun of the Dead is a genre-bending movie being billed as a " rom zom com" (romantic zombie comedy). The filmmakers-director/writer Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg (who plays Shaun) and co-star Nick Frost (who plays Shaun's best friend Ed) - have long been fans of zombie films, and particularly the work of George Romero. The night before I spoke with them during their recent promotional tour, they wowed a preview audience of twenty-something film fans who got all the in-jokes and references, and, judging from the cell phone conversations I overheard later, are busy spreading good word of mouth.

ANDREA GRONVALL: This is a 17-city tour, and Chicago is what--city four that you're on now?

EDGAR WRIGHT, SIMON PEGG, NICK FROST: Five!

AG: And, after getting off of a plane and barely having time to freshen up, you worked the crowd! They were with you. Now, Simon, you come from standup, so you have a long familiarity with live audiences, but Edgar and Nick, you both were comfortable as well.

EW: As soon as we're brought up, we start crying. (LAUGHTER)

SP: We've done this so many times, now, we have gone up in front of lots of audiences to introduce the film. We've been doing it since April.

EW: Every Q&A is always different. We had one in Minneapolis where they started playing the film in the wrong order, the reels were all mixed up. And luckily we were in the screening and yelled, "Stop the film!" And that sort of made it the crux of the Q&A, because we kept making jokes about it being the "Zombie Memento."

AG: I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice this, but it was great how you played the movie straight. Both the comedy and the romance work so much better because you ground them in recognizable scenarios.

SP: What we wanted to do was create a very realistic and--albeit a comic one-naturalistic environment, and plunk this crazy fantasy thing in the middle of it. So we spent some time getting to know these people, seeing that they're sort of real, lovable people, and then once you've been lulled into that false sense of security of thinking that you're watching a sort of kitchen sink comedy-drama, suddenly the zombies start happening. So that when Ed and Shaun find themselves in the garden with the girl is a real shock, because you've almost forgotten you're watching a zombie film.

EW: We wanted to make a distinction. It's all too easy-and kind of cheap---to make a spoof [of zombie movies] and take the rise out of those films, because we love those films! And so ours is very affectionate horror-comedy, in that the horror's horrific and the comedy's funny.

AG: I want to get back to the garden scene you just mentioned, that features Mary the checkout girl.

EW: Bloody Mary.

AG: I read that a comic strip was created around her, which was a great way to help promote your film. But in the movie, when you first see her from the back, it's kind of scary, and also kind of sad.

EW: It is kind of sad, and that's part of why we didn't make a farce, because with farcical zombie movies, you never get any personality. The great thing about the old George Romero films is that every now and again you get a scene where you see, like, a zombie mother dragging around a plastic doll-obviously having some kind of remembrance of the daughter she once had.

SP: One of the reasons we cast Nicola Cunningham, who plays Mary, from all the girls who came and basically - I say, hardly READ for the part-but actually was a zombie and so moaned for it, was because she had a deep, wonderful sadness about her. Mary seemed to be really upset that she was a zombie, and there's some real depth in the way she characterized that part, in that she was almost indignant about being undead.

AG: What you said about zombies being both scary and sad at the same time; that makes the movie's outer story the perfect platform for the inner story. Like the conflict Shaun has with his stepfather Philip, played by Bill Nighy - that sort of sad, wrangling dispute that seems to have been going on since Shaun was an adolescent.

SP: In a lot of the first part of the film, there's nothing overtly strange happening-it's only ever happening in the background. We wanted it to be shot like a horror film, and have the feel of a horror film, and we wanted to introduce Philip as sort of this monster character, but then you realize that he's not. We liked the idea of seeing the world through Shaun's rather narrow focus, and so we get the wrong idea about certain people.

AG: Nick, what were your early comic influences?

NF: Well, Simon, I think. His standup; I used to follow him around the comedy clubs.

AG: You are a natural. Your character's exchanges with Shaun are so very natural, I believed you could have been flat mates for years.

NF and SP: We were!

AG: And Simon, you've had some straight acting roles (Band of Brothers, The Reckoning). Your character's moments of being genuinely stricken are moving. When you were upset, when you were teary, I really believed Shaun was feeling that. And your character has to do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting.

SP: He has to face up to a lot of truths, and go through some terrible, terrible moments. We always asked ourselves, "Well, how would you react in these situations? What would you really do if this were happening?" That was one of our concerns. Shaun isn't a stoic, [Die Hard] John McClane-style action hero. He's just a guy.

AG: It's important that your characters, before the zombies attack, are in situations that people can understand. In the Fifties, in that great heyday of science fiction films, you had three main themes, predominantly: apocalyptic scenarios, because of widespread fear of the Bomb; plots about robots, because of fears about automation; and movies about the undead, or people taken over by aliens or other forces. The first two fears today aren't with us as strongly as in that decade, but as a metaphor in this century for anonymity and dead-end jobs-well, the zombies in your movie couldn't be more spot on!

SP: The thing about the zombie as a movie monster is that it's an all-purpose allegory for ourselves. The monster doesn't have an agenda-it's not like a werewolf or a vampire-and it doesn't have any moral imperative. Zombies are just like us, working on instinct. There are other concerns represented in film now; if then it was automation and the atomic bomb, now it's about having the enemy within, a kind of viral paranoia that reflects fears of terrorism. The zombie is an enduring figure for uses in allegory. In Romero's Dawn of the Dead, they are conceived as literally consumers. Romero took Descarte's philosophy to the shopping mall: "I think therefore I am" becomes "I am, therefore I shop." Which is very funny - Dawn of the Dead is a very funny film. In Day of the Dead they become a metaphor for vivisection. In our film, if they're anything, they stand in for apathy, and urban living, and becoming, as you said, an anonymous automaton in a collective, where you don't have any identity other than as a member of a gang. They're human beings who are just a little bit different.

When people jumped on the Romero bandwagon in the Seventies and Eighties and started making horror films [like his], they mistook the interesting thing about zombies, thinking that it was that they ate people, and they're gory, and their arms are falling off and their eyes are dropping out. That's not the great thing about zombies. The great thing is much more subtle, and much more eerie, in a way. They're just us. They're us, reduced to our most basic. And also, of course, they are the literal, living embodiment of our greatest fear, which is death-they are walking death.

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Shaun of the Dead opens nationally September 17.

September 13, 2004