Is the romantic zombie comedy — or rom-zom-com, as Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg like to call it — a genre whose time has come?
Wright and Pegg, the creative team behind “Shaun of the Dead,” sure hope so. Their feature debut, a slacker romantic comedy set against a plague of flesh-eating living dead in North London, is a breakout hit in Britain. Now the undead minions are pushing an American invasion. (The film opened last week in Chicago.)
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“Good comedy is only a breath away from the truth,” says co-writer and star Pegg. “You don’t have to be just absurd to make something funny. It can be just slightly skewed. This is what we did with `Shaun.’ We had a guy who has to fight to sort his life out. It just so happens that the thing that gets in his way is an army of dead people.”
Perfect timing
It was, appropriately enough, a Friday the 13th when I met the pair for a midmorning interview, the night after their appearance at a rousing Seattle screening of the film.
Pegg plays Shaun in the film, but his focus and seriousness in person is so different from the blank-eyed slacker that you’d never confuse the two. The scruffier Wright, the film’s co-writer and director, looks more like the slacker, likely a result of the hectic barnstorming press tour.
First impressions suggest they are quite the odd couple — Wright is garrulous and fidgety, jokey and enthusiastic, while the trim Pegg is quieter and more restrained — but in a few minutes they are Ping-Ponging jokes and sharing remembrances with laughs like old mates down at the pub.
They apologize for the spelling of the hero’s name (“In your article, since you’re S-E-A-N, you could just have a typo and pretend that that’s the title of the film,” says Wright with a smile) and settle down to discuss the serious business of comedy, horror and the undead.
“We feel really pleased that on one hand we’ve managed to kind of make a film within our favorite genre, and on the other hand we’ve made a comedy that’s actually quite personal to our life in North London and our relationships, and our living conditions,” says Wright.
“If we sat down and said, `I want to write a film about kind of like sort of about my friends and stuff and how we live in North London,’ it wouldn’t have been that interesting. So it’s kind of nice to have a legion of the dead eating people as part of it.”
It’s a tricky balancing act between comedy and horror, laughs and death. Wright offers one example: “There’s a scene where one of the lead characters dies, and it seemed kind of flippant to make too many jokes straight afterward. We wanted it to become slightly more serious in the last third because we thought you’ve invested so much time in these characters that to have their demises as throwaway or jokey would be to do the entire film a disservice.”
“And at that time, flippancy seemed to undermine what we set out to do,” adds Pegg. “We wanted those moments to be very dramatic and to have resonance. So to go and undermine them would be self-defeating.”
Says Wright: “It’s funny because then you try to work it out. You can say, `OK, a lot of people have died, when is it OK to laugh again?’ Alan Alda has a line in `Crimes and Misdemeanors’: `Comedy is tragedy plus time.’ So tragedy plus time is five minutes. Five minutes after somebody gets it we can have another laugh.”
`Dawn’ influence
All seriousness aside, “Shaun of the Dead” is also full of good-natured references to films, often translated into a specifically British sensibility. George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” was a major influence (“I don’t think that it gets the credit for being satirical and allegorical,” Wright says), but where Romero’s heroes took refuge in a shopping mall, Shaun finds a haven more suited to his lifestyle.
“Romero is obviously satirizing the nature of consumerism and the instinct of purchase,” observes Pegg. “But for us it was drinking. For Shaun, the pub is his Graceland. It’s where he thinks he’s going to be safest, and where he always goes. Inevitably, the zombies follow.”
Will Americans embrace the British slacker odyssey of a pub-dwelling bloke in a city of flesh-eating zombies? Pegg sees no reason why not. “The themes are very universal. It’s about love and life and redemption and responsibility and zombies. It’s something everyone can understand. Ironically, in a film about walking dead people, it’s all about the human condition.”