A Trip To My Own Private Comic-Con With Paul

On how shooting Paul is different from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Simon Pegg:  In England you get breakfast, lunch and sandwiches around 4 (pm). Here it's just food all the time. It's really hard to not just eat all the time. We've been here for six months now and I just really love working with American crews. In England there's no overtime so you ask someone to do something and they don't particularly want to do it. But here there's overtime so nobody gives a sh*t about things running over.

Nick Frost: We did 10 night shoots back to back with crews even at 5 a.m.. Everyone just really enjoyed it I think.

Simon: It's been really good fun. We've really felt like we had to raise our game on this movie because everyone is so fucking good. Like Jason [Bateman], Bill [Hader], Joe [Lo Truglio] and Kristin [Wiig] are so, so funny. Sigourney Weaver was absolutely lovely and so up to it.  One of the biggest ironies of this shoot was the sheer unpredictability of the weather. In that the very motivation for the film was like let's go somewhere hot. I know let's make it in the desert. He's an alien. OK it's Area 51, yeah?  We talked about this in 2003, and we all joked about doing it.

On being funny against special effects.

Simon: It is tough, the guys we work with are people we've worked with for a really long time. It's hard to talk to a red light with eyeballs.

Nick: We have to shoot Paul so many times. Like the other day we were doing a night shoot and because the sun was coming up I had 10 minutes to do my single shot. Then we reshot Paul's stuff the other day and he had like an hour and a half. Christoph is our small actor who is doing reference and sometimes suits up. He's doing an amazing job. They call him the anvil.  Sometimes we do it with a puppet, sometimes we do it with a gray ball. Then nothing. So when we have one shot Paul has eight. What Joe has done which is remarkable is he is not only playing agent O'Reily, but whenever Paul is on set he does Paul's offlines and sometimes stands in for him. He's joking all the time which is great, he's a fantastic guy. He's so much fun.

Simon: I knew him from Superbad and Pineapple Express. Just that one little scene from Superbad, he makes that cameo of that creepy little guy.

Will this be your last CGI film?

Simon: I don't know. The great motivation for this was we thought how cool it would be to have a character who isn't real, a CGI character. The context of that movie would offset that character to make him look even more real. Having said that, there's a lot of incredible flow and motion in the camera. It's really Spielberg at heart, which is great. He needs to become a character and for people to forget he's CGI. So, it depends on how it turns out. My problem with Jar Jar Binks was never the technology, but particularly the character.

Nick: That was everybody's problem.

Simon: Yeah, yeah.