Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Click here to listen to the interview.
There are many reasons I adore the trio who has brought us the Cornetto Trilogy. At the top of the list is that I can ask a question involving western hegemony and Marxist dialects and get a scintillatingly brilliant answer about the pros and cons of the corporatization of modern life. And courtesy of Nick Frost, who, as he puts it, doesn’t say much, but when he does, it’s gold, I can get a different perspective on the perils of being able to stay home and conduct life from a computer terminal.
This is no surprise from the people who concocted SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ, films that are not just absurdly funny, but astutely satirical while never being particularly mean-spirited. When I spoke to them on July 23, 2013, it was for the third, but one hopes, not the last part of the trilogy (with apologies to Douglas Addams), THE WORLD’S END. I started out by asking them about how they treat serious, even dark themes, in their comedies, then learned the origins of pub foo, the particular style of martial arts evinced by the characters in the film as they slog through 12 pubs in order to save themselves and, possible, the world. We finished up with a shout-out to good coffee, and a measured consideration of the concept of improvement.
THE WORLD’S END is the third and final flavor of The Cornetto Trilogy, and, indubitably the crowning achievement. It’s a synthesis of all that has come before distilled into a film that is funny, touching, insightful and very, very silly as a group of old school friends attempt to recapture their glory days, and end up confronting their emotional baggage by recreating an epic pub crawl ending up at the eponymous pub, THE WORLD’S END where they not only have to face what they have done with their lives, but also the fate of the world itself. The film co-stars Pegg, Frost, Eddie Marsan, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, and Rosamund Pike, along with a host of surprises, a treacherous roundabout and the Eye of Horus. Wright directed from a script he co-wrote with Pegg, as was the case with SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ, the two previous flavors. Wright speaks first, then Pegg, then Frost.
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