We asked them to give us the lowdown on Shaun Of The Dead.
How did this idea come about, was it from the Spaced episode where Tim has his Resident Evil hallucination?
Simon: Yes. We were keen to indulge our little peccadillos in terms of horror, and the morning we filmed the Resident Evil scenes in Spaced we got to the end of it and just thought it would be great to do that for a lot longer. We started formulating the idea then.
Were you ever tempted to do it as a Spaced spin-off?
S: Not really, because it doesn't really exist in the Spaced universe. We wanted to make their lives more mundane than the characters in Spaced because they live this kind of heightened existence where they are constantly getting into bizarre scrapes, whereas the point of Shaun Of The Dead is that Shaun's life is so without incident before these zombies arrive. We always planned to work with the same kind of personnel, you know, our own little family.
Were you worried people might not be able to mentally move away from Spaced?
Edgar: Jessica's [Stephenson, the lovely Daisy Steiner in Spaced] part in the film is an interesting one because she plays an old friend of Shaun's and the inference in a way is that they've had a past relationship, not that they were lovers, but they haven't seen each other for a while. There is supposed to be a sort of melancholy feeling between them that they should hang out more, so we do trade on it a little bit. But Shaun is definitely different from Tim. Shaun is not as quick-witted as Tim and isn't as able to articulate himself. He isn't thick but he is slow on the uptake. It's as if Tim didn't make it in comics and started working in a shop and went to seed for a couple of years and monged out.
S: And his brain rotted. It is the same people that are in Spaced but if you can suspend your disbelief to believe zombies are attacking them, you get over the fact it isn't Tim and Mike and Daisy. And with the exception of one mention of The Darling Buds Of May there are no cultural references in the film, other than that it is in itself a broad cultural reference. We don't acknowledge the rest of popular culture like we do in Spaced where we are constantly throwing things out. The film itself is very much a reference to the Romero movies of the 1970s. Nobody says in the film, "What would they do in Resident Evil or Dawn Of The Dead?" because they aren't as clued-up as Tim or Daisy. We love the idea of superimposing action onto suburban mundanity.
E: In one of the earlier drafts we had some other horror film references; we took them all out as we thought with all the copycat films they have been done to death, so there are no actual self-reflexive references to horror films in it at all.
S: There are a couple of in-jokes for Romero fans though. Will the general public get them?
E: No, but that doesn't matter. It's like in Spaced or The Simpsons in that if there is a reference there and you get it then great, but if you don't it isn't spoiling your enjoyment.
S: It's not to the detriment of the show. For example, the electronics shop I work in is named after the guy who played one of the main characters in Dawn Of The Dead, so if you do spot that you think, "Oh that's nice", but if you don't it makes no difference whatsoever. What are the others?
S: There's Bubb's Pizza. Bubb was a zombie in Day Of The Dead. My mum in the film is called Barbara. There is a very famous line in Night Of The Living Dead when Johnny says at the start, "They're coming to get you, Barbara", in the graveyard. Penelope Wilton, who plays my mum, is called Barbara and at one point we say, "We're coming to get you, Barbara." It is for the geeks.
What's so great about zombies? Why are they better than werewolves or vampires?
S: I don't know if they are better, I think the point is they're not. I think there is something uniquely crap about zombies. They're not particularly malevolent. They're not evil. They're not strong. They're kind of hopeless and sad and full of contradictions and wonderful metaphors for us. There is something so eerie about them. Edgar and I found this common ground that we both love these films. There is something just delightful about their ineptitude. All they are doing is their stuff, that's all they want to do. They don't hate you.
E: Frequently in 28 Days Later and Dawn Of The Dead the question of what is better, fast zombies or slow zombies, has come up, and it always has to be slow zombies because that is the whole point of them. I always think of zombies as like lava or treacle; you can easily outrun them, but eventually just the inevitable will happen in that you will get cornered and you can't compete against a hundred of them. That is the beauty of the first Resident Evil game, that they really played on the idea that you could run past zombies but if you are in a room with 10 of them youíre stuffed.
Like neutered Daleks?
S: Yeah. And it isnít personal. We had an idea in the formative process of writing the script that we had a character who was a bit like Carla Lane who was being eaten but kept saying, ìItís not their fault, they donít mean it.î
E: I think we should have done that. We had an idea about this woman with loads of dogs and Shaun being attacked by her dogs in the street and her saying, ìDonít worry, theyíre just being friendly, theyíre just being friendly.î Then you see her later on being ripped apart by the zombies and being eaten and she says, ìTheyíre not doing any harm, theyíre just being friendly, theyíre just hungry.î I wish we had done that now.
S: We can do it in 20 yearsí time like George Lucas and do it in CGI. As for zombies, Iíve always been really attracted by them, I just find them really beguiling and strange and creepy. That is Romeroís vision of them as well. He created this kind of mix of lots of different monsters vampires/werewolves to create this self-replicating viral kind of stumbling zombie that we know now. It was the monster that affected me the most when I was a kid. I wanted to ask you about the tattoos you and Nick Frost [Mike in Spaced] have. They seem very similarÖ
E: Thatís because theyíre gay lovers.
S: Nick has a pagan symbol in a star and I have a dog in a sun.
E: Did you spot that in the Robot Wars episode of Spaced? Yeah.
E: I thought that was pretty weird as well.
S: It is just a complete coincidence. We are star-crossed lovers though, we were always meant to meet. Even now weíre both engaged and live in separate parts of London we still secretly meet up online with webcams and strip for each other.
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