Simon Pegg Quotes & Trivia



Quotes

Also, if you watch the film once, there are lots of things that you won't get because there are punch lines in the first act, the setup to which isn't until the second act.

American audiences tend to be more expressive than British ones.

And also, isn't the root of the word zombie from somnambulist, which means sleepwalker. By the very running immediately stops them from being zombies.

Because once the word got out that we were making Shaun of the Dead, we didn't want people to think we were backtracking or changing our minds.

Both me and Edgar are firm believers in never underestimating or talking down to an audience, and giving an audience something to do, to give them something which is entirely up to them to enter into the film and find these hidden things and whatever.

But I think there's plenty of British comedy that Americans have never seen that they would like but sometimes things just get through.

But Shaun Of The Dead was the first thing that Edgar and myself had written together.

Chris Martin's a good friend of mine. I'm actually Apple's godfather. He's an old friend and we've been mates for quite a few years now.

Doctor Who was a big part of my childhood so it was a great honour to be in it.

Every person should have their escape route planned. I think everyone has an apocalypse fantasy, what would I do in the event of the end of the world, and we just basically - me and Nick - said what would we do, where would we head?

I always loved horror and that's sort of the reason we decided to make the film. We were nourished on those sorts of films, so it was a labor of love.

I don't know about doing a sequel. I think you can retroactively damage a product by adding to it.

I just love listening to the laughter.

I loved playing Shaun, he's not that different from me.

I mean, yeah, I'm sure that Python and the other things have paved the way for a greater understanding of the British sense of humor, but I don't think it's all that different than the American sense of humor.

I particularly recall monsters like the Sontarans, who had very strange heads; the giant insects in The Ark in Space and in one episode, Julian Glover tearing his face off to become this one-eyed creature.

I think at its best the American sense of humor is the same as the British sense of humor at its best, which is to be wry and ironic and self deprecating.

I think that the joke and the ghost story both have a similar set up in that you kind of set something up and pay it off with a laugh or a scare.

I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.

I wrote Spaced with Jessica Stevenson, who plays Yvonne in the film - who is our savior that comes and gets us at the end.

I'd got into Doctor Who just before Jon Pertwee regenerated into Tom Baker, and as a kid I never remember the special effects being as primitive as they were.

In England, we don't have any guns whatsoever.

It's the very British thing of reserve and keeping everything shut in, that's what people do with their emotions, shut the curtains on them.

People are constantly just spoon fed mindless rubbish because it's easy to just sit there like a zombie and consume it.

That's what we wanted to get across in that moment, particularly when Shaun goes to the shop when he's all hung over. He doesn't notice any of the zombies around him just because he never had before, so why should he at that point?

The last time I played a bad guy was in Black Books and it is always fun to play a bad guy, particularly if they are really smilingly nasty.

The main jokes in this film are about big things, love and life and zombies - we all get that.

The only spoof I think is the title, which was just we thought of very early on and it kind of stuck.

The simple fact is that what you see on the screen is pretty much real.

The whole point is that in London, the way people are, they're just very insular and no one ever looks at each other.

There are a lot of visual marks that have to be hit, and lines that need to be said in a right way - so there wasn't really any improvisation on the set when it came to the bulk of the script.

There are actually quite high profile British TV star cameos in it that you probably wouldn't even notice, that the British wouldn't even notice, let alone the American audience.

There is a universality to comedy.

There's this thing of you can live in a city and be completely alone, not notice anything going on around you.

We don't watch the film anymore because we've seen it so many times, so we'll introduce it, walk out and we'll come back in right about when I wake up in the morning and walk over to the shop and everything's changed.

We suddenly saw how people reacted in the event of massive social upheaval, and the way that the little problems in your life don't go away. You don't stop being frightened of spiders just because the world's blown up.

We wanted the humor to happen as a result of the zombies, you know? Like the humor being a result of their presence, rather than them being funny.

We work with every one of them to see if their character wouldn't say a certain thing or if something is worded awkwardly - we work with them to rectify that.

We work with the actors in rehearsal for months before we start shooting to get the words comfortable in their mind.

You always worry about films when you hear about them making decisions after announcements are made.

You don't look at each other on the subway.

You look at shows like The Simpsons or Larry Sanders or Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld, they're really sophisticated shows that we all love back home.

Your instinct, rather than precision stabbing, is more about just random bludgeoning.

Trivia

He was cast in the role of Benji in M:I:3 after Ricky Gervais was unable to take the role. JJ Abrams, director of the film, is said to be a huge fan of Shaun of the Dead.

Simon married Maureen McCann on 23 July 2005. They are still together as of 2006.

Simon was the drummer in a band called "God's Third Leg" when he was 16.

Simon Pegg is God-father of Apple Martin, daughter of Chris Martin & Gwyneth Paltrow.

Pegg recently revealed that he would like to return to Spaced, in the form of a one hour special. The one-off show would reveal what became of the main characters. Pegg revealed this in a recent interview with Spaced co-star Bill Bailey.