"The World's End": Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost Toast to Smart Comedy and Meaningful Sci-Fi

There's only one way to describe The World's End: It's as good as fried gold.

In the hotly anticipated conclusion to what's come to be known as the Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy—a joke started in Shaun of the Dead (2004), carried on by Hot Fuzz (2007), and bittersweetly referred to in The World's End (in theaters nationwide today)—director Edgar Wright and mainstays Simon Pegg and Nick Frost take on a new kind of evil: alien robots. Of course, they're not just any evil alien robots. 

The film follows Gary King (Pegg), a functioning alcoholic keen on reuniting his childhood friends for one last attempt at the Golden Mile, a 12-pub crawl they failed to complete in their youth. But unlike Gary, his friends—played by Frost, Paddy Considine (The Bourne Ultimatum), Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan), and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit)—are now all suited up like adults for their fancy jobs and sweet families. After a little convincing, King rounds up the crew and they return to their small town. However, nothing—that is, besides King's former fling (played by Rosamund Pike)—is as they left it. The entire town falls under the control of an intergalactic organization called The Network that's turned everyone and their mother into mindless droids living in a false utopia.

As the friends struggle to check off the Golden Mile that's eluded them all those years, all of their buried issues that've kept them separated bubble up to the surface, creating another monster for them to beat down.

True to the style of filmmaking that's made Wright, Pegg, and Frost cult film heroes, The World's End is more than a fun summer sci-fi action comedy. It's the best kind of movie: one replete with eye candy but also with something substantial to say. And we'll let Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost tell you exactly what that is.

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino) 

RELATED: The 50 Most Anticipated Movies of 2013 
RELATED: The 10 Best American Directors of the 2000s 

There's only one way to describe The World's End: It's as good as fried gold.

In the hotly anticipated conclusion to what's come to be known as the Three Flavors Cornetto Trilogy—a joke started in Shaun of the Dead (2004), carried on by Hot Fuzz (2007), and bittersweetly referred to in The World's End (in theaters nationwide today)—director Edgar Wright and mainstays Simon Pegg and Nick Frost take on a new kind of evil: alien robots. Of course, they're not just any evil alien robots. 

The film follows Gary King (Pegg), a functioning alcoholic keen on reuniting his childhood friends for one last attempt at the Golden Mile, a 12-pub crawl they failed to complete in their youth. But unlike Gary, his friends—played by Frost, Paddy Considine (The Bourne Ultimatum), Eddie Marsan (Ray Donovan), and Martin Freeman (The Hobbit)—are now all suited up like adults for their fancy jobs and sweet families. After a little convincing, King rounds up the crew and they return to their small town. However, nothing—that is, besides King's former fling (played by Rosamund Pike)—is as they left it. The entire town falls under the control of an intergalactic organization called The Network that's turned everyone and their mother into mindless droids living in a false utopia.

As the friends struggle to check off the Golden Mile that's eluded them all those years, all of their buried issues that've kept them separated bubble up to the surface, creating another monster for them to beat down.

True to the style of filmmaking that's made Wright, Pegg, and Frost cult film heroes, The World's End is more than a fun summer sci-fi action comedy. It's the best kind of movie: one replete with eye candy but also with something substantial to say. And we'll let Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost tell you exactly what that is.

As told to Tara Aquino (@t_akino) 

RELATED: The 50 Most Anticipated Movies of 2013 
RELATED: The 10 Best American Directors of the 2000s 

If you're going to advertise a film as the conclusion to a trilogy, you better go balls out. That's exactly what Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost did for The World's End. Not only did they have a bigger budget to play with, but they expanded their bro fest to some of the UK's finest actors—Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, and Rosamund Pike. 

The idea of a bar crawl first came to Wright when he was 21. Back then, though, it was more in the style of Superbad—i.e., teenagers getting fucked up for the hell of it. When it came time to write the final film, the trio decided to return to Wright's original idea and make it a part of a larger narrative. One that happens to include the apocalypse and blue-ink-blooded robots.

Edgar Wright: "The film I wrote was in the vein of American Graffiti. It wasn't until way later after Hot Fuzz that I was thinking about the old script and thought, 'Maybe there's something in the idea of adults trying to recreate their teenage years.'"

Simon Pegg: "[The script Edgar wrote] was pretty much the first three minutes of this film—a kind of glorious night of hedonism and abandon. When we were starting to think about our follow-up to Hot Fuzz, Edgar brought it up a couple times."

Nick Frost: "Edgar and I went down to the west country. We hired a cottage and a hired a nice Mercedes to write. [Laughs.] We went down there for a week to write, and we wrote not a sentence. We just drove around with the top down listening to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion."

Pegg: "We thought it would be interesting to look at going back to your hometown and that weird sense of detachment and that odd combination of familiarity and alienation that you get when you go home. We thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if we gave a very concrete reason to identify that feeling? And that came to be an alien invasion. That fit nicely with Edgar’s pub crawl idea, so we combined it."

"We had the idea in 2007 but we didn’t write it until 2011 because we went off and did Paul and Edgar did Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I don’t think we could’ve written it in 2007. I don’t think our life experience was completely full in terms of what we need to do to write this film."

Wright: "When we had the plot and the story [down], we named the pubs after something that happens in the movie, but they're all real pub names. The one with the fight, that's the Cross Hands. The one where he gets barred, he's The Famous Cock. The one with the sirens, that's The Mermaid. We liked the idea of the pub's signs and their names being tarot cards."

"In a way, the song titles are on-the-nose, too. Even 'Fool's Gold' by The Stone Roses is over the scene where [Gary's] looking at somebody else's beer. It literally says 'Fool's Gold' when he's looking at it. Like, 'You are a fool is you're going to drink somebody else's lager.'"

Pegg:

"I went to see Bill Nighy before the film to talk about the voice in The Network and he said, 'Well, who else is in it?' When I told him, he said, 'Well, you’ve got a team of assassins there.' And that’s what we always wanted to get. Knowing that we were releasing the film [internationally], we wanted to bring the very best of our acting pool to the rest of the world, and those guys represent that."

You can trust Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost to deliver more than just dumb fun. There's a reason for everything in their movies. The World's End is no exception. The trio take the idea of alien robots invading a small town to its literal extreme, using the plot to communicate the themes of alienation, addiction, and conformity versus free will.

Wright: "Because I came from a small town, any movies about small towns used to really speak to me. Like the original Invaders of the Body Snatchers, which is in a smaller place. Even The Stepford Wives. It's not like we wrote half an hour of a pub crawl script and then just picked to make it sci-fi out of a hat. It was because it was literally an expression of our feelings about the town."

"There's a scene in the film where Gary King starts to realize something otherworldly is going on, and you see that he's smiling as he's explaining it. The reason he's smiling is he can accept more readily that there might be an invasion than he can the idea that he's old, the town doesn't remember him, or maybe the town isn't all what it's cracked up to be in the first place. He would rather leap to the most fantastical thing."

"In the same way, for me and Simon, it's a coping strategy. You can't stop the march of time and [your hometown] is going to change without you architecturally and socially. You were on first-name terms with the pub owner and he doesn't remember you at all. It's that bittersweet experience." 

Pegg: "We didn’t really want to have a stance [on the idea of conformity versus free will]. You know, there's this whole notion of Starbucking. But the coffee shop that was there before the Starbucks was shit. Just because it’s all new and corporate and branded doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing."

"For the greater good, to take a phrase from Hot Fuzz, maybe it would be better to give yourself over to a higher power. Maybe we do need some control and someone to tell us how many guns we can own. Maybe that will help us not be such an erratic and dangerous species. But that comes at the cost of personal free will and that’s something we hold very, very dear."

"At the end, and I hope this doesn’t give away anything, it does come down to just that. We wanted this whole notion of The Network to be a benevolent force."

"There’s a very telling speech that Steven [Considine's character] makes in the movie where he says that he had a company and he got bought out, but he likes it because it’s less stress. That really is a very key line because it's about what the whole situation with Earth is. We want people to think about what’s more important."

"Also, with Gary’s illness, there’s a reason why there are 12 pubs in the film. There’s a reason why he faces off against a higher power. There’s this idea of, 'Are you responsible for yourself and, by that, your planet or are you prepared to rely on somebody else to be?' We all do, in some sense. We elect leaders to do things for us because we don’t want to do everything ourselves."

"I don’t know what the answer is. I just like the idea of people coming out of the movie house and going, 'Wait a minute, were they bad guys or good guys?' The best thing you can do is inspire debate and conversation. The worst thing you can do is make a film that people forget before they validate their parking."

When Shaun of the Dead premiered in 2004 to critical acclaim, the response was easy to understand. Edgar Wright was like a breath of fresh air to the industry. Having only directed TV episodes, namely for the British sitcom Spaced, and a no-budget film, A Fistful of Fingers, Wright came out of the gate swinging with a style of moviemaking that was visually snappy, amusingly current, and thematically relatable.

Shaun of the Dead isn't just a zombie movie made for the morbid thrill of watching the undead get bludgeoned over the head. It's a movie about a burnt-out man (Pegg) learning to take responsibility for the people in his life, disguised as zombie movie made for the morbid thrill of watching the undead get bludgeoned over the head. Wright also admitted that it's an apology to his ex-girlfriend for being, as he put it, "useless."

Reteaming with Pegg and Frost, Hot Fuzz continued on the thread of taking a tried and true genre formula and adding a human element to it. This time, the buddy cop flick is used to communicate the story of a best friendship. At this point, the trio had set in a stone a new standard to aspire to. Action flicks didn't need to be so mindnumbing.

With The World's End, the three are wrapping the themes that they've so expertly weaved throughout the trilogy. And trust us, they've put a lot more thought into it than you can imagine. 

Pegg: "We’ve never set anything up as [a genre send-up]. I would never call Shaun of the Dead a parody, and Hot Fuzz is not really a parody. It draws attention to some of the formal aspects of cinema, but not in the way that it is satirical particularly. It might, by changing the context, make you realize how ridiculously rambunctious these films are sometimes."

"The films that I’ve made with Edgar are like Trojan Horses to say more important things about life. If you want to make a film about a guy breaking up with his girlfriend, not many people are going to go see it. But if you put zombies in it, you can use them as metaphor and make everything a little more poetic. The same thing about friendship and male bonding in Hot Fuzz or alcoholism or the sense of loss when you go home in The World’s End. We always liked the idea of taking the kind of cinema we love as big kids and using it to say what we feel as adults."

"When Nick and I made Paul, one of the central jokes was that he had an influence on all pop culture. By that, every reference we made to the film was by that Paul invented it, even to the point where he helped Spielberg make E.T. That film is so referential. Edgar also got pissed off after Scott Pilgrim at the people who were like, 'Oh yeah, there’s a bit of some video game in there,' when there was some smart writing in the film that was his idea and isn’t all references."

"We decided to not make any of the references in The World’s End. If you put it under a microscope, you can see the social science fiction, the paranoia writings of what’s become known as the cosy catastrophes of John Wyndham and J.G. Bellum, and insidious invasions where everything changes very subtly, like in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Invaders from Mars."

"Outwardly, the only references to the other films that remain in The World’s End are the connective tissue between Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, and The World’s End, which is the fence gag and Cornetto. And also, all of the films are about the loss of identity, whether it be zombies literally eating you or the NWA reshaping you or this combination of the NWA and the zombies, which is this huge galactic force of corporate change, which is what The Network is."

"When you take away all the referentiality, what you’re left with in The World’s End is seemingly just references to ourselves, but those references are important in order to bind the films as a trilogy. If we’re gonna use a term as lofty as trilogy, we wanted it to actually be true. When The Hangover III came out, it was like, 'The thrilling conclusion to The Hangover.' It’s not a fucking trilogy. It’s two sequels because they made some money after the first one! I think the thing with this is we wanted it to be a piece that you could watch in one day and see the connections."

Wright: "[The loss of identity] is something we've had in all of the movies. They're all movies about growing up. In Shaun, it's about Shaun has to grow up and take responsibility. In Hot Fuzz, it's about Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman meeting somewhere in the middle—one of them needs to grow up and the other one needs to dumb down, or at least become a human being and stop being like a robot."

"In The World's End, it's that the four of them are growing up and have seemingly conformed in Gary's eyes, and he wants to be the high school rebel forever. You cannot be that rebel forever unless you're willing to be completely off the grid. The reality of it is that me and Simon and Nick live happily somewhere in the middle and we're happy with our Starbucks and our Apple Macs and stuff, but in the movie, there's a sharp line. Is he going to be with them, or with the other guy? Are you going to be with Gary King or are you going to be with the robots?" [Laughs.]

Pegg: "I think any expression in art, even in popular culture, is an expression of how we’re all feeling at the time. All of our preoccupations bubble to the surface in our artistic output, whether it be high-brow art cinema or fuckin’ Jersey Shore. It all comes out in the way we express ourselves and indulge in entertainment. I think you could reach more people."

"It’s good to adopt [from other art]. You use the tools available to you to show as many things to as many people as you can. If you can harness popular culture, you’re likely to be less in a position where you’re preaching to the converted. If you make a heavy piece of art cinema, then a lot of very intelligent, cinematically literate people will go see it."

Frost: "Also, in terms of our output, we never tried to second guess what people want. We always just made what would make us laugh. I think we realized quite early on that if you’re going try to pander to a particular group of people, you’re in trouble because what you give them is probably not what they want, and you’ve diluted the thing they liked in the first place. We’ve always been really firm that what we make benefits [the interests of] the mates who we’ve always hung out with and laughed with."

Pegg: "And trust that there are other people like that."