The makers of the greatest romantic comedy (with zombies) ever, "Shaun of the Dead," strike the U.S. again this Friday with the latest in their series of parody homage to the film industry - a send up of the buddy-cop actioner titled "Hot Fuzz." The director and stars of these films were kind enough to sit down in a round table discussion of what drove the film, the remarkable cast and insight into how they work.
Make no mistake, these filmmakers love the genres they work in, and rather than go for straight parody of the "gloriously unpretentious entertainment" that makes up "Bad Boys II" and "Point Break," they lovingly caress the blatant homoeroticism and the ability for seemingly inert objects to explode on a whim that makes up the action genre.
"Any film that spends $130 million smashing up cars is all right in my book," director Edgar Wright said.
But according to Wright, there's more than that to "Hot Fuzz."
"The idea behind 'Hot Fuzz' is that these films just exist within the UK; there's no precedent for them at all," Wright said. "So we thought we'd have a lot of fun by taking the sleepy, rural UK and dropping a Bruckheimer in the middle of it."
The filmmakers might not have been able to get the great "Hot Fuzz" cast, made up of some of the most respected actors in the film industry," Wright said. "If it had not been for their first film. "Shaun of the Dead." However, the success of "Shaun" moved actors Paddy Considine and Jim Broadbent to approach them and ask to work on their next production. The dynamite script did the rest.
The casting works in two ways. "The police service is pretty much all the comedic actors and the Sandford village people, as we like to call them, are all the living legends and the real institutions," Wright said.
The film, which clocks in at close to two hours, is epic indeed. But given the time and money, the team said that it would have enjoyed "blowing more shit up" and perhaps even "a Viking burial -a burning longboat," according to Nick Frost.
"These projects work as a team," Frost said.
Despite the established nature of the cast, there was a general feeling that as long as something works for the good of the picture, it was worth it, he said.
"We wanted to play a little bit and assume that people had seen the first film. Even though they're not sequels, it was a way of using the first one to augment or inform the second one," Simon Pegg said on the way "Hot Fuzz" was treated by the same team that made "Shaun of the Dead."
Suffice to say, "Hot Fuzz" is a treat from start to finish, improving on its predecessor and offering something the British film industry has been lacking for a long time - that "gloriously unpretentious entertainment" these moviemakers love.
