The stars of The World’s End answer our readers’ questions and tell us why pubs are such an integral part of British culture.
Director/screenwriter Edgar Wright, actor/screenwriter Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost have been in Wellington for a whirlwind visit to attend the New Zealand premiere of the final instalment of their Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy.
The film, released here on Thursday follows the 2004 zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead and the 2007 cop comedy Hot Fuzz.
It tells the story of Pegg’s character Gary King, a 40-something fed up with his life, who decides to reunite his teenage mates and convinces them to re-enact a pub crawl they attempted 20 years ago.
Essentially the movie was about “going back to your home town and finding yourself alienated”, Wright said.
And alienated the “five musketeers” really are when they realise this pub crawl was not just about re-living their youth but very much about saving the world as we know it.
Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End have different characters but are linked through “the themes of perpetuate adolescence and the joys and dangers of that, friendship between men, the individual vs the collective,” Wright explained.
Then, there’s of course also “ice cream and fences collapsing”.
And pubs.
“The pub is a very integral part of the British cultural landscape, so it would be hard to make a film about living in England where we wouldn’t feature a pub,” Pegg said.
In Shaun of the Dead it was the safe haven, in Hot Fuzz a place of bonding, and in this film it is the beginning and end of everything.
The importance of pubs could also be explained by a look at the British psyche, which was was repressed, and alcohol being a social lubricant.
“Part of the reason that so much of our culture revolves around pubs is that it’s a place where we can facilitate a certain loosening up of ourselves for a bit,” Pegg said.
“I think the British culture revolves around drinking and part of it is about unlocking our sort of inner personalities, because we’re so buttoned up.”
And then it was time for some of our readers’ questions to be answered:
