I don’t prize it less, but you become less idealistic and more realistic. It gave me a grounding in generating material.Īs your career has progressed, do you come to prize that sense of self-reliance and autonomy less? You have to be very self-reliant and very self-motivated. You have to write your own material, and that disciplined me. The thing about the contemporary stand-up comic is you can’t just tell jokes.
I’ll have control.” Stand-up offered that. It looked at the social aspects of film and theatre, and I thought: “I don’t want to be an actor that is a puppet to the whims of casting directors and be sat waiting for the phone to ring, in the hope I’d end up in things I don’t have any love for. Having gone to university wanting to be a actor, I came out not wanting to be an actor because the course was very theoretical. You spent a lot of time working as a stand-up comedian before going into acting. I need a space that I can go to, even if it’s just on the other side of the garden. I was thinking about that when me and Edgar started writing at Working Title’s L.A offices. When we were writing Spaced we’d sit opposite each other on separate laptops – massive chunky things. We work in an office with Final Draft, and we’ll plug the computer into a monitor. You have to constantly make decisions about whether to say: “Ok, fair enough I concede,” or argue yourself blue in the face. Sometimes when you’ve had three ideas in a row shouted down it begins to feel personal, and things can start to feel tense. You wouldn’t be sat in the room with them if you didn’t respect their opinion. It is a collaborative process so you have to take on the opinion of the other person. I’ve had very vocal debates with all my writing partners, and argued about things for ages and ages that I genuinely thought was right before eventually conceding on. It’s hard, and it always lead to arguments. What are the constraints of writing in such a collaborative way? I insulate myself from that by trying to write with other people, be it Jessica (Hynes) or Edgar (Wright) or Nick (Frost). There was an empathy at least, if not a total understanding. The blank page is an awesome adversary, and it can drive you up the wall when you haven’t got someone to spark off or if it has to all be you, particularly when there are things that can be projected on to that page that you don’t necessarily want to deal with.
Jack is victim of himself, and I totally understand that predicament. Was there an autobiographical aspect to your character Jack in A Fantastic Fear of Everything? Pegg Simon Pegg talks to movieScope about A Fantastic Fear of Everything, new film The World’s End, collaborative writing and retaining control on high-budget films.
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