We spoke with Edgar Wright and Nick Frost about nostalgia and killer robots in The World’s End

 

The World’s End may just be the summer’s most maudlin blockbuster.  The third collaboration between director Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (following Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) centers on Gary King (Pegg), a middle-aged burnout with one simmering regret; his teenaged crew’s failure at completing an epic pub crawl back in 1990.

Now 40, Gary has never truly given up on the past. He still sports the same goth wardrobe from high school, and longs for the days when he and his pals would tear up Newton Haven, their small U.K. suburban hometown. In an effort to right history’s wrongs, Gary plots a scheme to reunite his long-separated friends, and attempt a final run at “The Golden Mile”, a pub crawl consisting of downing one pint each at 12 establishments, culminating in one final drink at The World’s End pub. However, Gary has to contend with a roster of friends he has fallen out of sorts with, including his former best-friend Andy (Frost) and a legion of small-town residents that are strikingly more robotic than Gary remembers.

A mid-life existential drama mashed against an absurdist sci-fi backdrop, The World’s End is an affectionate look at the dangers of holding onto the past, yet also a slapstick action comedy that features our increasingly drunken heroes squaring off against an extra-terrestrial force set on world-domination, as they attempt to drink their way through to the final pub.

“You realize you can’t stop the march of time, and I think the film is sort of about the dangers of nostalgia,” says director and co-writer Edgar Wright, in Montreal with star Nick Frost for the film’s premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. “You can’t turn back the clock. The film is about a loss of identity, and we draw sharp lines between [Gary King] who is quite content to try to be 18 forever, and another civilization who want to move into the future.”

The pitfall of the harmonization of small-town culture is another notion that re-occurs throughout the film. As Gary and his friends reach each successive pub, they are struck by the updated uniformity of the previously-unique watering holes, from the Starbucks-style color palette, right down to the same identical faux-handwritten bar menus.

“It’s a bittersweet experience when you go back to your hometown and it’s changed without you there,” says Wright. “Not just socially, but architecturally. That’s just the passage of time.”

Music is the guiding force in the film that links the characters from their carefree teenaged selves to their current world-weary mid-life existences. The film is brimming with early 90’s Brit-pop and alternative rock, featuring the likes of Primal Scream, Blur and The Happy Mondays, a soundtrack that was painstakingly put together by Wright to accurately reflect that time-period.

“I was 16 in 1990, so all of the music that was in the movie was from the time when I was in school and going to college,” says Wright. “I did a pub crawl when I was 19 in 1993. But really, we wanted to set it in 1990 because we wanted to make everybody feel old. I told Simon [Pegg] to say 1990 like he was saying 1890. “It was nineteen ninety.” “It’s in the previous century,” jokes Wright.

“Musically, I was never a goth, I was never like Gary King,” stresses star Nick Frost. “But we’ve done a lot of these interviews and kind of all agree that apart from alcohol, which is maybe not as good a time-traveling device as music, music is the one thing that we can all agree on where you can hear a song and you can actually shut your eyes and be there. I was 18 in ’96, so this is my music, you know what I mean? It’s an important part of the film, and it’s something that Edgar loves doing. He put together a 300-something song playlist, and him and Simon sat and wrote to that playlist, and then some of those songs became plot points in the movie, so it’s like another character really.”

While Shaun of the Dead tackled the zombie genre, and Hot Fuzz skewed buddy-cop action film tropes, how does Wright place the more adult, albeit sci-fi, themes of The World’s End into the trilogy?

“Well, on the surface level they’re linked by things like the cast, but I think the deeper themes are growing up and taking responsibility and the individual versus the collective,” says Wright.

Gary King lives in a state of “perpetual adolescence,” says Wright, a theme that permeates all of the director’s work.

“Since Spaced [the U.K. TV series that Wright directed, co-starring Pegg and Frost], we’ve always dealt with different themes on that, with different kind of characters as well,” explains Wright. “So it was something that we thought was a nice way…to completely wrap that up.”

 The World’s End is available on Blu Ray, DVD and ITunes now.