Aging With A Smile

Edgar Wright is staring down the barrel of 40, and so he's considering putting away childish things. But as befits the director of much-loved movies like Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, he's doing so in his own inimitable fashion. Sure, his new film The World's End may point out the perils of arrested development and nostalgia addiction, but it does so in the framework of a “sci-fi apocalypse” comedy that pits five long-time friends on a pub crawl homecoming against a mysterious force out to take over the planet.

“I think this movie is me clearing my desk,” he smiles, making a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Getting rid of a lot of stuff.”

The World's End, which reunites the dream team of Wright and actors Simon Pegg (who co-wrote the screenplay with Wright) and Nick Frost, brings together a number of themes and concepts in a funny, violent and introspective mash-up. “I sometimes get freaked when I have bouts of nostalgia and wonder why I want to look back when I'm perfectly happy in the present and thinking ahead to the future,” says Wright.

“I think I even tried in my late twenties to get Simon and Nick to join me on a pub crawl in my home town, which was completely pathetic,” he laughs. “And I wondered why I tried to recreate something from my teenage years. So that idea started stewing away, the idea of the dangers of going backwards, and on top of that coming from a small town and that bittersweet feeling of going home and meeting old friends and realising that the town is changing without you – that seemed to fit perfectly with this paranoid science-fiction idea, which we've liked in American movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives and British ones like Village of the Damned and the Quatermass stories. What we really tried to do with The World's End was make the character-driven comedy and the more personal, autobiographical aspects of the story really dovetail with the genre aspects.”

Leading the charge against the invading enemy in The World's End is Pegg's Gary, a high school hero who hasn't moved on from his teenage glory days and is intent on roping his four forty-something friends – played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan – into revisiting the past by way of a marathon pub crawl. Gary may view himself as the life of the party, but the fact is... well, he's kind of a dick.

“We wanted him to be as funny as possible while the truth of him was kind of awful,” says Pegg. “And the more we wrote him, the more fun I knew I would have playing him because he is wilfully annoying. He's not sympathetic; he's the villain of the film, really. And it's not until you see what's behind his behaviour that he becomes sympathetic. Edgar and I have said that movie is like The Big Chill if the corpse came to the party. Because that's what Gary is: a relic. He's the ghost of sixth form past.”

Wright says he and Pegg hatched the idea for The World's End six years ago while flying between Australia and New Zealand on the Hot Fuzz press tour. “But even though we came up with the idea six years ago, I'm glad we didn't start writing the screenplay until around two years ago,” he says. “You see a lot of American comedies with that whole man-child thing where actors you know are married with children are playing stoner flatmates forever, and I think we wanted to be a bit more honest in terms of these guys being older and the problem is that one guy in their midst wants to be a teenager again and he's going to drag his friends back with him. There's a glorification of that in those man-child comedies but they never really scratch beyond the surface. If we'd taken six years to make a movie that was funny but also light and fluffy, it would have felt completely ephemeral. I'm glad this movie has got some weight. Some middle-aged heft!”

Pegg admits that the man-child phenomenon – “this grown-up kid thing” – has been a recurring theme in his collaborations with Wright and Frost, going as far back as their cult classic TV series, Spaced. And like Wright, he feels ready to call it a day. “I think this film marks the closing chapter of that preoccupation,” he says.

Still, it's a subject to which he's clearly given considerable thought. “This generation is perhaps the first that has been afforded this odd annex onto their childhood where you don't have to grow up immediately like your parents did,” he says. “I think of my mum and dad – they were married and parents when they were in their early twenties. The very notion of that is bizarre to me, that they were asked to portray adults when they were still essentially children.”

So wallowing in nostalgia, whether it involves trying to down lager after lager like someone half your age or dressing up in a school uniform and dancing to the soundtrack of your youth (which memorably occurs in The World's End), can provide a respite from the stresses and disappointments of adult life. Speaking with Pegg, Frost and their co-star Rosamund Pike, they believe it's not necessarily a gender thing – both men and women have a tendency to reminisce – but Pegg does think the cause of it can run a little deeper in men.

“Guys have an odd crisis of self because of our purpose in society,” he says. “Women maybe have more purpose – they don't have to grow up but if they become mothers there's a reason to be an adult. There is something to do, whereas guys can be lost in that respect. It's the root of some of our biggest neuroses. It's why we build things and smash things and fight each other and subjugate women – we don't know what the fuck we are for! Remaining a child is a way of putting that off, really.”

But a little escapism isn't necessarily a character flaw, Frost believes. “You can be a grown-up and have collectibles,” he says. “We're off to Comic-Con this week, and that's the hive of that. And, you know, you can be some middle-aged man living in Montana 51 weeks of the year but for one week you can walk around dressed as Chewbacca. And who the fuck can tell me I can't do that?”