|
|
 |
| 14 December 2005 | Hot Fuzz Gets The Green Light!
Exclusive: Pegg confirms Shaun follow-up |
|
Get ready for a dose of Hot Fuzz. Yes, at long, long, long last Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s British cop movie – their eagerly-awaited successor to Shaun Of The Dead - has been given the green light by Working Title.
How do we know? Well, we spoke to Pegg about, ooh, five minutes ago and he happily confirmed the good news, which we’d been hearing on the grapevine for the past couple of weeks.
“We got the green light yesterday,” said Pegg. “It sounds as if it’s going to be March, which is exciting.”
The movie, which will star Pegg and Shaun cohort/real-life best mate, Nick Frost as two mismatched cops who team up in a West Country backwater, has been mooted for over a year now, with the delay in official news causing some people to fear that it would ever get made. However, just to put to bed the pernicious rumour (in no way started by us) that Pegg and Wright may have been slacking in any way, Pegg revealed the real reason for the delay.
“We’ve actually been writing it for most of the year!” laughed Pegg. “We’ve been working so hard on it. It’s such a complex script. I think the first draft was 235 pages long because we thought ‘oh fuck it, let’s just go for it, let’s just vomit it onto the page and see what happens’. And we’ve shaved off a hundred-odd pages, but it’s one of those things where if you remove one thing, there’s a pay-off later on that needs to be addressed.
“It’s been a far more intensive process than writing Shaun,” he continued. “Shaun kinda wrote itself in a way, but this took some real brainpower. It’s been brilliant fun and a real exercise in comedy and logic. Sometimes we’d sit there frowning at each other, thinking ‘we’re writing a comedy!’ We’d be scratching our heads and crying, but I think that what we’ve come up with now is a better script than Shaun Of The Dead, so fingers crossed.”
Pegg (and Wright) have been loath to give away plot points, but both have confessed to us recently that Shane Black has been a big influence on the flick (along with Dirty Harry), so we might be getting something a little darker and rougher than we first thought.
“We watched a hell of a lot of movies before we started writing and his movies have that kind of sass,” said Pegg. “It’s a tribute to those movies, in a way, like a British Shane Black movie. I’m going to sound like whatsisname off Matrix Reloaded -‘we’ve raised the bar!’ - but I just hope we can live up to what we kind of inadvertently did with Shaun. We definitely can. We’ve eaten the bar!”
Sounds good to us. Needless to say, Empire will be all over this the beautifully-titled Hot Fuzz like Velcro. Stay tuned for further news.
|
Have Your Say...
We want to know what you think? To have your say on this, and all of Empire's news stories, register here or login now.
Advertisement
|
|
|
|
