"Hot Fuzz" trio: These blokes throw lit matches, make hit films

Before there was "Hot Fuzz" or "Shaun of the Dead," there were Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, 20-something buddies and struggling actor/writers, and they would sit in an empty flat and throw lit matches at each other. Because, you know, that's what blokes do.

Pegg, a native of Gloucester, England, explained how this came to pass. He'd broken up with his girlfriend and told her, "Just go, take everything except my books and go." Sure, enough, she did exactly that. "I came back from work and everything had gone except my books and a wardrobe, a big wardrobe on its side. And so [Nick and I] would sit watching 'The X-Files' in that big, empty room."

"And when we got bored," said Frost, "one of us would get into the wardrobe and the other would throw lit matches through a hole on the side."

"It was a weird time," said Pegg fondly. "It was the last great Shaun-and-Ed moment of our lives."

Shaun and Ed are, of course, the slacker roommates played by Pegg and Frost, respectively, in "Shaun of the Dead," the hit 2004 zombie romantic comedy (a zom-rom-com) directed by their pal Edgar Wright. (Desperate to figure out a solution to an imminent zombie invasion, the two ... have a sit-down to think about it.) The trio had first collaborated in "Spaced," a popular British sitcom that ran from 1999-2001. "It was that period of wardrobes and 'X-Files' that kind of inspired us to start writing 'Spaced' and move forward," said Pegg.

Now, presumably living in comfortably furnished homes, the three visited Seattle recently to talk about their newest project: "Hot Fuzz," a cop comedy that opened big in Great Britain earlier this spring, and started Friday in several local theaters. It's a goofy tribute to the cop/buddy movie genre, just as "Shaun" was for zombie movies — and for Wright, it takes him back to his childhood. As a teenager with a video recorder, he once made an hourlong cop movie called "Dead Right."

"Imagine a Dirty Harry film where people's voices haven't broken yet," said Wright. "Sort of like a Harry Potter version of a cop film."

"Dirty Harry Potter," interjected Pegg.

"Hot Fuzz," the story of London cop Nicholas Angel (Pegg) sent to fight crime in a picturesque village, was filmed in England's west country in the town of Wells (renamed Sandford for the film), where Wright grew up — and where, as it happens, "Dead Right" was filmed. Then, they chose the location out of necessity; in "Hot Fuzz," it's the whole point of the film, which finds absurdity by its mixture of genre and setting.

"It's a big adventure in a tiny place, whereas when I made ['Dead Right'] it was the other way around," said Wright. "Dead Right," he admitted, will appear on the eventual "Hot Fuzz" DVD.

The idea for "Hot Fuzz," co-written by Wright and Pegg, came from their mutual love of American cop movies, and their realization that British film lacks an equivalent. "There is no precedent for British cop movies, at all," said Wright. "They just don't do them in the U.K."

"They tend to be all gangsters," said Pegg. "I think our response as a nation to the American mode of action and crime movies — the only way we could swing it was to draw in our gangster culture and slightly romanticize it and exaggerate it." In contrast, Wright and Pegg wanted to make a film with a cop at its center. "We thought it would be fun to make the bobby the hero," said Pegg, "and not the pariah."

To prepare, Wright and Pegg watched dozens of cop films, revisiting their favorites and discovering new ones: "Dirty Harry," "The French Connection," "Serpico," "Bullitt," "Lethal Weapon," "Die Hard," "The Last Boy Scout," "Beverly Hills Cop." And they spoke to numerous cops, both in London and in the country.

"We all went down to the west country to spend some time with the country coppers to see how they did things down there," said Frost, who played the laid-back young Sandford cop Danny Butterman (whose father is the police chief). "It was a real eye-opener. They're tiny communities and they need a certain style of policing — you can't just barrel in and arrest anyone like Angel would.

"In London, there are nine police officers for every square mile. Down in the west country, there are nine officers for every 250 square miles. So ... down there, you self-arrest. If you're caught fighting, they'll say, 'Come see us on Monday and I'll arrest you then.' "

Some of the movie's stories came from real-life incidents related by cops — "quite a lot of the broader bits in the film are true," acknowledged Wright.

In Sandford, one of Angel's early assignments is an emergency call to rescue an escaped swan. "In Wells," Wright explained, "the castle has a moat where there are swans that are trained to ring a bell for food."

"Pavlov swans," interrupted Pegg, busily folding a piece of paper into an origami swan.

"Yes, Pavlovian swans," said Wright, unruffled. "Basically one of them escaped at one point and was kind of flapping around the high street. It was an avian breakout. The inspector, who'd just moved to the city, had come from London. He had to eat humble pie and chase a swan around a field and catch it with his jacket."

Since finishing "Hot Fuzz," the trio have been busy, together and separately. Pegg and Frost are working on another writing project; meanwhile, Pegg has acted in several movies (among them "Mission: Impossible 3" and the upcoming "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"), and Frost starred in the British television series "Hyperdrive" — "in which I'm commander of a spacecraft." (This is, apparently, a long-cherished dream.)

Wright isn't commenting on his next project (with "Hot Fuzz," he said, they announced the title and genre too soon), but undoubtedly it'll follow in the footsteps of "Shaun" and "Hot Fuzz."

"We want to make genre films that happen to be funny," he said. " 'Shaun of the Dead' is a real zombie film, the zombie threat is real, but what's funny is the character's reactions. In 'Hot Fuzz,' the story is real, but what's funny is the incongruity of the setting; this kind of stuff just doesn't happen in the country.

"Once you have that kind of central conceit, you can approach the characters and the story quite straight-faced. The jokes and everything else flow out of that."

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com