Paul is released in cinemas today, and in case you’re not already convinced to give this one a go you can check out our review of the film here and read on for all the news from the press conference.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost bring their own romantic homage to sci-fi cinema gold to the big screen on Valentine’s Day, and joined other members of their crew, Sigourney Weaver, Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Joe Lo Truglio and director Greg Mottola, in London to chat about all things alien in their new comedy Paul.
As with all press conferences the questions range from the insightful to the bizarre, but the cast and crew do their best and there are SPOILERS for the film here, as you’d expect so who lives, who dies, who cameos etc are all mentioned below.
Here’s a nice introductory video from our good friends at Upbeat to ease you into the transcript,
What’s your favourite movie alien?
Jason Bateman: My favourite movie alien? I’ll go last on that. Paul is my favourite movie alien. Expect for Paul? The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Joe Lo Truglio: I’m a purist. I’m going with Alien. My favourite alien is Alien.
Greg Mottola: I’m going to go with Yoda… I’m extremely dorky.
Kristen Wiig: Is Tubacca an alien? I’m going to pick him.
Simon Pegg: I think In Starship Troopers, in the scene where they’re attacking the base, about five rows back on the left, one of those little back guys. He’s giving it more than the others; do you know what I mean? He’s got something. I never saw him again.
Sigourney Weaver: I always liked the Pod people, you know, the version of yourself that’s completely seminal that’s just sleeping under your bed and whilst you’re brushing your teeth, becomes you, and then, seminally, [you] have an expression like that, that your spouse can’t tell. I just love that concept.
Nick Frost: I think E.T., or the water aliens from The Abyss.
Simon and Nick: how much was the script influenced by the cast saying ‘yes’ in the end, and how much do you have to check because there are obviously references and direct quotes from films, so do you ever have to go to someone and say, can we use this, or is it just the English language so it’s fair game?
Nick Frost: We have a few names that we have to change, so there was one ‘Graham Willy’, spelt G-r-a-h-a-m, and because of him, we had to change Simon’s name to be spelt G –r-a-e-m-e, so it’s just kind of tiny, weird things like that. We couldn’t find that Graham Willy to say, do you mind if we use Graham because he might sue.
Simon Pegg: In terms of the script, obviously, when the cast comes on board, you want to play to everyone’s strengths. You want everyone to bring what ever they want to bring to it, and not feel too constricted. Probably, the most famous line is Sigourney’s, “Get away from her, you bitch”, which Blythe [Danner] says, which I think I said to you [to Weaver] on the night, you know we’re going to use one of your most famous lines again you, and you were like, “Bring it on”…
Kristen Wiig: It was so cute when Blythe was kind of asking you how to say it because she wanted to get it right.
Simon Pegg: Yeah, and you gave her a line reading [session], and Nick and I were just like geeking out like crazy, thinking all our Christmases had come at once. The script is very much a love letter to [those films], there’s nothing that anyone could take offence at who were involved in those movies that we reference, so we didn’t really feel the need to [ask]. I mean the Spielberg cameo was his idea; we didn’t even ask. He was like, why don’t I be in it? We decided, no, no, and he [Frost] went I don’t know, oh, all right.
It’s a fun movie, but do you think you’re going to get any flak from the Bible belt in America?
Simon Pegg: Who doesn’t get flak from the Bible belt in America?
Nick Frost: As I said to Simon early, it’s a road movie with an alien in it. If they’re going to get annoyed at that… Really, if you have faith then a film about a dope-smoking alien isn’t going to affect that. It’s just another way of seeing. We were really interested in the idea that someone could have their belief system shattered by a single moment, and that’s why Ruth, Kristen’s character, is a Creationist, is a very specific wing of Christianity, which you can’t have a film with an alien in and it not be counter to that idea. Even Mac and Me is an anti-Creationist film because there’s an alien in it. We’re not being anti-religion; it’s just that’s the universe that the film takes place in. Paul at one point – I think the line was lost in the end – said: “I don’t know. I’m just saying there probably isn’t”. Certainly, that sort of dogma can’t exist if Paul exists, and we love the idea of Ruth suddenly just changing from being one thing to another in a second, and that was it. It wasn’t a crusade again organised religion.
Jason Bateman: The scales are a bit swayed. I mean you’d have to go along time, make a lot of movies to balance the scales on people thinking maybe that’s not the way everything happened [God’s creation]. It’s like come on.
Simon Pegg: There wasn’t a massive atheist protest when The Ten Commandments came out. There wasn’t a protest at my local school at the Nativity play this year. It’s just a film.
Nick and Simon: There are some great references to cinema magic, but I was wondering whether there were any that didn’t make the final cut?
Nick Frost: I think there were lots and lots of things that didn’t make it, but in the bigger picture, things that Simon and I thought will absolutely make the cut, or we’ll absolutely shoot it, you get to a point where [you think] you don’t need it. It was about taking a piece of work and trimming it down until all you’ve got, essentially, is a very tight and very good 100 minutes that, hopefully, a lot of people will laugh at. We had to kind of say to ourselves throughout the writing that even though this joke was very funny, the audience would never know that that joke didn’t make it. It was all about the finished script, essentially.
Simon Pegg: We didn’t just do stuff for the sake of it, either. The film is kind of referential because the idea is Paul has influenced every Science Fiction film ever, so it’s like we are retroactively ripping everything off by saying, it’s all Paul’s idea. It’s very clever when you think about it. But I don’t think there’s anything where we thought we could have got that in.
Jo, Seth Rogen voices Paul, but you actually sort of played Paul…
Joe Lo Truglio: I did, yeah. I was on my knees for most of the shot, but still kept my dignity. I did have kneepads, so that made things a bit easier. It was great to work with Simon and Nick for two and a half months. I’d been such a great fan of theirs since Shaun of the Dead, so I was thrilled to both be the stand-in and play O’Reilly who is a fan boy with the badge. This mission in the movie, for O’Reilly, is probably that biggest thing that’s happened to him since he saw Lethal Weapon II, and was thrilled when that came out. I’m kidding…
Greg Mottola: We really couldn’t have done it without Joe because Seth was shooting The Green Hornet, so we couldn’t have him on set, so we recorded Seth doing all of the scenes with Simon and Nick in pre-production. Joe was very serious and watched the tape, and saw what Seth was going and channelled it, but also then improv’d and gave a real performance that Nick and Simon could play against, as apposed to just having a script supervisor read lines. I think that’s a big part of why it has life to it; that they’re not just standing around looking at a stick with two ping-pong balls for eyes on it – which they were. We did that, too. When Seth came back to re-record his lines, he saw a lot of Joe’s improvs. You know, it was a weird collaboration. But because Seth and Joe know each other, and they know each other’s style, and it just made it richer.
Simon Pegg: Watching it now – I was saying to Sigourney just a minute ago, you watch it and you think, was he there because, in fact, it was like he was, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that we had someone who was able to fill in with enough life for us to bounce off. It’s hard sometimes when you have to do lines with a script supervisor because the other actor wasn’t there. Script supervisors are brilliant script supervisors, but they’re not always brilliant actors, whereas we had someone to give us the right bounce-board to have the emotions that the scene required. So, Joe was sort of an unsung hero in that respect.
Do you think there is life on other planets? And it you were to meet an alien in real-life, what would you say or do to them?
Simon Pegg: ‘Do to them?’
Sigourney Weaver: After we probe them?
Nick Frost: Of course there’s life out there, but it won’t necessarily look like us, I’m sure. You know, it could just be germs or bacteria, and in that case, I couldn’t say anything to it because it wouldn’t understand me. I think I might say, “Hello. You alright? You eaten?” and then we’d sit down and have a lovely meal. I’d cook it, yeah, and that’s it.
There is a sense of peril in the movie. Was there pressure to leaven that in any way for certificate purposes?
Sigourney Weaver: Are you referring to my death?
Nick Frost: We’ll have Christians on us, and the dog lovers.
Jason Bateman: But it’s not clear that the dog gets it; the dog gets abducted…
Simon Pegg: No, but I think you hear the dog scream in pain as the ship goes… We wanted it to be perilous, you know, because there needed to be danger. [Spoiler] The reason we kill Joe’s character is because he’s so loveable, and because O’Reilly’s kind of the knockabout funny one that immediately, as soon as he dies, you think, well if he can die then anybody can die. So, the rest of the film is like, well, who’s going to get it next? We used to joyously talk about blowing you up on set [to Lo Truglio].
Joe Lo Truglio: Yes, I was looking forward to it.
Simon Pegg: You love O’Reilly because he’s funny and innocent, and he’s kind of love sideways. If he hadn’t done what he was doing, he would probably have been with Graeme and Clive [Frost’s character]. So, blowing him up was joyous. [Spoiler] And then, of course, squashing Sigourney was something of a coup.
Jason Bateman: And then you have one of the little aliens hose her off the landing gear.
Greg Mottola: That was a little graphic… That’s awful.
Simon Pegg: But you’ve got to have peril, otherwise there’s no danger, and it’s important that there’s some threat in the film and that something’s at stake, you know. They are not just going to tickle Paul if they catch him, they’re going to cut his head off and scoop his brain out of his skull.
Greg Mottola: Strangely, the one thing that I think ruffled the feathers in the studio was the scene where Bill Hader [who plays Agent Haggard] shoots Moses [Ruth’s Dad], and looks like he’s killed him. People felt that was just out of character for the rest of the movie. I loved it because he’s about to die, Bill Hader, and I think we should feel like he’s done something terrible. So, he’s really kind of the worst villain in the movie, besides from Sigourney. You know, Sigourney’s death, when I read it on the page I thought this is like a Monty Python moment. There’s too many endings in the movie, and we were like, oh no, another ending – but no, not really.
Jason Bateman: There was also this ‘R’ rating, and a bunch of things trigger this ‘R’ rating, and a lot of them don’t have in the movie. But certainly the tone or the lack of apology with certain elements, like you can’t kill a dog. It’s like it’s an R movie, so if people come in with their knees a little bit more bent, and a little bit more willing to accept stuff outside of the box – the edges aren’t as rounded, it’s nice. I think it’s part of the experience that you get when you go to see an R-rated comedy.
Simon Pegg: Otherwise it’s sanitised and kind of bland. You need a bit of light and shade.
Simon and Nick: How similar are you to the characters that you play in the film?
Nick Frost: We look like them. I think if you took these two and then everyone we’ve played in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, as well, and you were to combine them all, I think probably about 14 per cent of what we are as people.
Simon Pegg: We’re kind of nerdy like them, but we sort of higher functioning nerds. We’re married, for starters. We don’t live alone. Our skin’s fairly clear…
Sigourney Weaver: And you wouldn’t travel in an RV?
Simon Pegg: Well, not without a driver. But certainly, the relationship between them is, there’s a great love between them, and Nick and I are best friends before we’re colleagues, so we channelled a bit of our own romance into it, didn’t we?
Nick Frost: Yeah. Yes, we did.
Sigourney Weaver: Would you guys like to sit together?
Sigourney: is it more fun to play a heroine or a really hard-ass bitch?
Sigourney Weaver: I try to bring the two together. I loved to play a character who was the voice on the other end of the phone who does finally appear gloriously stepping out of a helicopter, and then after a brief scuffle, gets squashed. I just loved the movie. I loved the idea of being part of this ensemble. [I’m] a huge fan of these guys [Pegg and Frost] and Greg Mottola’s and everyone in the cast, so even if they hadn’t let me wear such a nice dress, I probably would have wanted to do the movie.
Greg, Simon and nick: How important a part did Nira Park [producer on this film, as well as Spaced, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead] play?
Simon Pegg: Nira’s our long-time collaborator and friend, and we work out of Big Talk [Productions], which is Nira’s company. Nira’s always been with us and is a very important mentor and creative collaborator. So, it’s vital that she’s as much part of the unit as Nick or I, and she’s an extraordinary presence to have. She’s a great sort of mood leveller, isn’t she, and when things get really difficult, she takes it all, and shields us from it. So, we love Nira, and will continue to work with her forever.
Kristen: your character, Ruth, is wicked. She swears a lot. Did you have a swearing coach, or was that all you?
Kristen Wiig: Kind of these guys [pointing to Pegg and Frost], I mean, obviously what they wrote in the script, we did that. But there were a lot of serious talks about all that…
Nick Frost: ‘Butt horns’… One of my favourites was ‘baby with a hard-on’…
Simon Pegg: One of my favourites, which was one of yours was ‘tit bogus’. It was just a question of getting different words and putting them together. Ruth doesn’t know how to curse, and so she’s learning as she goes and doesn’t do a great job. “Get away from me, you stupid vaginas”, is a good one.
Nick Frost: In Britain, we have a heritage of great swearing. I remember asking a Danish friend of mine once, “What’s the worst swear word you could possibly say in Danish to someone?” He thought about that for ages, and he came back to me and said: “Ok, long-haired, Communist fag”. That was it.
Sigourney: how many times have you resisted taking the offer to send yourself up, especially with the Alien mythology, as you’ve done films like Galaxy Quest. But for a cameo, have you been pestered along the years, and what was it about Paul, considering your part was originally meant for a man?
Sigourney Weaver: I like it when they just write the character, and they don’t really worry about whether it’s going to be a man or a woman. That’s the way our world is. I would actually be quite careful of that. I love the Alien franchise. This [Paul] was done within a context that I found believable, somewhat. I was just a wink. There are winks throughout the movie, even though like all wonderful classic comedies, the characters, what they say, what they do is done fully, without any wonks, but there are little homages to different Science Fiction masterpieces, to the extent that I think you need an annotated DVD. I’m sure, having only seen it once, that I’ve missed some of these things. So, I think if it weren’t in the hands of Greg Mottola and these guys [Pegg and Frost], I would have not wanted to do it. That was my one reservation was; will this just be very organic, and pop out as and when, as it happens, and I knew that they would do it in that kind of seamless way, and are laughing at the scene, you know. It’s just a tiny thing, I hope.
It’s such a comedic ensemble. Do you have any memories of on-set practical jokes?
Kristen Wiig: Used a lot of glue.
Jason Bateman: She loves a glue stick…
Kristen Wiig: There was a lot of singing on set, I would say…
Simon Pegg: We used to write songs every day. There was a running ‘Paul the Musical’ being written out during filming, which features songs such as ‘Who’s The Alien Now?’, ‘I’m Just A Poor Little Creationist Girl’…
Jason Bateman: Is that where ‘Pickled Pie’ came in?
Kristen Wiig: ‘Pickled Pie’ came from my filming test, when I first met you guys.
Simon Pegg: There’s a lot of time on a film set, and you tend to spend a lot of time just hanging out. A lot of time on this, we’d all just hang out together, rather than go back to trailers, we’d stay on set and just chill and have fun. We made up a lot of odd games, like what noise do you make when you fly away at the end of a sentence? Making a face after a trumpet solo – that kind of thing: Little things that mean nothing to you. But rather than practical jokes, it was just ways to relieve the inevitable, sometimes boredom of being on a film set.
Greg Mottola: But I’ve never been on a movie, where people have stayed out of their trailers so much.
Simon Pegg: Minnie my dog was on set who was always a draw for everybody. Got a lovely picture of you two together [to Sigourney].
Sigourney Weaver: I miss her.
Simon Pegg: She’s under the weather at the moment, but I won’t go into that. But she’s going to be fine.
Sigourney and Kristen: A lot of comedy at the moment is about men behaving like children. Do you think there’s limited opportunity for such strong, female comedic roles?
Kristen Wiig: I don’t know about limited. Definitely, for this movie, it was something different than I’ve experienced before. A lot of times I think the female role in big comedies like that is kind of like the nagging wife, or the crazy neighbour, or something like that. But one of the reasons I was so drawn to this was they actually really thought about the female character and gave me so much comedic play.
Sigourney Weaver: I think a good comedy is very hard to find, and it has to come together in a kind of magical way. It’s true that there aren’t as many female-driven comedies that are just about being goofy and irreverent, but I think that will come. You know, now they have to be about shopping or getting married, which is too bad as we can be just as goofy as guys. But I think with the new emphasise on ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’, women have to be not far behind. We will have our moment.
Greg: the movie’s a love letter to Spielberg. Were you conscious of channelling your ‘inner Spielberg’ when directing this film?
Greg Mottola: There were a lot of things I had to try and do in this film that I’ve never done before, like show up to work sober. I grew up at the perfect time for being a Spielberg lover. I was 12 when Star Wars came out, meaning I was 13 when Close Encounters came out. Those films were my childhood. I can’t pretend that I ever did touch him, in as far as technique. I’m not in those skills, like he has. But, strangely, I ended up watching The Sugarland Express and Duel than any other movies, besides the obvious ones like E.T., Close Encounters [etc] just to see what shooting the South-West American landscape felt like. You know those movies came at a time when they were doing things maybe like Close Encounters, maybe like Star Wars. Those films couldn’t have been made a decade prior. The special effects had changed to such an extent that they could do movie magic that in a way couldn’t have been done in that way before, just like 2001[: A Space Odyssey] made in 1967, you couldn’t have made that film, probably, in 1962. Growing out of 2001 into the 70s, you had this whole kind of ability to make films, a film like Alien. It’s such a beautifully designed film and acted film and everything on a piece – it’s such a perfect movie. I think that’s why the references are so obviously from that time because Science Fiction movies changed in that time. They became a different thing. And now we’ve seen where it’s gone since. So, for me, that was when I first loved those movies. I read the script [for Paul] and had all the same nostalgia and love and sincere feelings about it. I was intimidated because there was a lot of visual stuff I hadn’t done before, but you know, I had a great DOP [Director of Photography], and Simon and Nick are like a walking encyclopaedia… like we’d need to talk about shots for movies…
Simon Pegg: And you had to direct Steven Spielberg, which was a big day for you, wasn’t it?
Greg Mottola: Yes. Steven Spielberg came in and did the phone conversation with like Seth [Rogen] in a sound studio in LA, and we were shooting Seth with like multiple cameras because for everything he did we’d record for the animators for reference. So, I was waiting for them to tell me when all the cameras were up and running to call ‘action’. So, it was my first moment of calling ‘action’ for Steven Spielberg, and I somehow missed the signal that the cameras were all running, and I’m waiting, and everyone’s waiting for me to say something, and Steven Spielberg just said: “Can I start?” No, he was very nice and I actually had to give him direction, and he got better. I directed Steven Spielberg very well, I think.
Jason: you got to channel something as well; your inner bad ass. A bit of an action hero as well. Was that fun for you?
Jason Bateman: It was a lot of fun. I haven’t gotten to play that guy. Joe and Bill were doing such great comedic work. You know, you often need a straight man against people who are being absurdly funny, and this guy [his character Special Agent Lorenzo Zoil] was written as prototypically straight man – he’s basically expressionless. So, my job was pretty easy in that sense, expect for trying to keep a straight face when they were doing a lot of the stuff. It was a really fun threesome, sort of a three-handed character all the way through, as men in black.
Simon Pegg: When we cast Jason we were very adamant that Zoil be played by someone who was a credible threat. We thought, what if we get someone who’s not a comedic actor, but the studio was very keen that we get someone who could do funny, and I was very anti this. Then they said Jason’s name, and I kind of went, oh, ok. Jason is one of the few people who can do both, convincingly. You believe both sides of him, and I think if you look at a show like Arrested Development [starred Bateman], in that show, Michael is essentially the straight man in that show, and yet he is one of the funniest characters, and it’s a rare gift. I think it was exactly what we needed for Zoil, and without it, we couldn’t have had that extraordinary double take at the end when he realises that his name sounds like Lorenzo’s Oil, which the joke arrived a long time ago. On set that night we came up with the idea that he’d never realised before. So we go, “Lorenzo’s Oil”, and he’d go, “Ah”. I could watch it over and over again. So, I’m so happy that that decision was made. I think that he’s the only man for the job.
Paul opens in cinemas across the UK today.
