Gary: I listened to you guys on the radio on the Mancow show this morning. You guys sounded great.

Edgar: Thanks man. I couldn't believe it, we were there and Bruce Campbell called in on the phone. Bruce was saying he heard about our film already and he said, "You guys got some good stink going there. I don't know what you guys are doing but you're doing a good thing." He said, "Good luck making another movie. Maybe you'll kick some ass in this industry."

Gary: My first interview ever was Bruce Campbell.

Nick: Really? Where do you go from there man?

Gary: Tom Savini.

Edgar & Nick: That's pretty good.

Gary: Thanks, one of the questions I always ask horror people is, "Do you know who Bruce Campbell is?" And you guys came walking in talking about him so I guess you know what's up.

Edgar: It's great we are getting to meet all of our hero's now.

Gary: That's great. Well just to let you guys know we here at Film Monthly covered the premiere of Shaun of the Dead way back in April when it opened in London. Our guy Jerome DeGroot was out there. So we've been on the bandwagon for a while now.

Edgar: Make sure you tell people it comes out September 24, 2004 here in the states.

Gary: You just did. So what is Shaun of the Dead about?

Edgar: Shaun of the Dead is about a guy who is a bit of a lovable loser. His life isn't going that great and he's about to turn thirty and he has a lousy job. He has a lovely girlfriend and he's been a bit complacent in their relationship and he gets dumped and he decides to get his life back together and patch things up with his girlfriend and he also has a strange relationship with his step dad. So he decides to get his life back in order, unfortunately...

Nick: Here it comes...

Edgar: Here it comes...the living dead have taken over London. It's really bad timing.

Gary: Wow. Edgar you directed a lot of television before this, but this is your second feature film?

Edgar: Yeah well kind of, let's say it's my first good feature film. I did a film when I was twenty, hardly anybody has seen it. It did get made but with my school friends, none of which were great actors. It was an epic western set in a very urban area. But it kind of paved the way to meeting people and doing the comedy stuff on TV.

Gary: You and Simon co-wrote Shaun of the Dead. What inspired you to write a zombie film?

Edgar: Because we're big fans of the genre and we wanted to do our own spin on the genre. We're big fans of the Romero trilogy and we wanted to make a horror film that had a slightly different tone. We wanted to be funny but also very bloody and go as far out as possible. We thought the thing with this movie was to make the horror elements realistic and then make the comedy even though it's very funny and fantastical also slightly realistic and have a mundane edge to it. It plays out like what would happen to you or I on a Sunday morning if you had a hangover and had to cope with a zombie invasion.

Gary: Nick you're hilarious in this movie. Let me give you a high five.

Nick: Cool.

(Gary high-fives Nick)

Gary: There's really no forced comedy in this film.

Nick: Well that comes from the fact that Simon who plays Shaun and I have known each other for ten years. It's nice in the fact that we know what the other is thinking a lot. We met ten years ago through a love for Star wars.

(Nick starts making Droid noises)

Gary: You pay homage to a lot of zombie films in Shaun, which I think is important in a film like this. Obviously you guys pay homage to the greatest Night of the Living and the other Romero films but I felt there was a lot of Peter Jackson's, Dead Alive influence in this film. Except you guys had a better ending but no lawn mower.

Edgar: Dead Alive is amazing. I was really very lucky to meet Peter Jackson a couple of weeks ago and he loved Shaun of the Dead. In fact he's giving us a poster quote.

Gary: So you have a quote from George Romero and Peter Jackson?

Edgar: Yeah. It's fucking great.

Gary: It doesn't get much better than that.

Nick: Yeah except for maybe a quote from Jesus Christ.

(Everyone laughs.)

Nick: I laughed my crown of thorns off.

Edgar: No, but really Peter Jackson said to me that watching our film made him want to make another low budget film like this and I said to him that watching his movies makes me want to make a hundred million dollar film. But Dead Alive is amazing. Dead Alive is kind of the last word in gory slapstick.

Gary: It definitely is.

Edgar: There's so many FX gags it's kind phenomenal. And because we are such big fans of Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi when knew we had to go another way. We didn't just want to do their thing. We even shared a make-up guy from Dead Alive named Stewart Conrad. He's worked on things like Nightbreed and Hellraiser. He used to be a sculptor and he's probably going to be the next Tom Savini or Greg Nictero.

Gary: What kind of budget did you guys have on Shaun of the Dead?

Edgar: Four million pounds?

Gary: What that in American money for us idiots?

Edgar: About six million dollars, given that it was quite an ambitious film for that money. A lot of special FX and exterior shooting. All the way through the shoot I was always saying Peter Jackson made Dead Alive in like six weeks and it's got all kinds of gags and FX in it. It can be done. And when I met him I said, "How did you make Dead Alive in six weeks that's crazy?!" And he said, "No, it was like twelve or thirteen weeks." I said, "I fucking drove myself crazy during the shoot trying to top Dead Alive." It took us like nine weeks.

Gary: How did you approach a film of this size with a cast of this size?

Edgar: It's tricky with comedy and horror because you have all these fancy camera angles and moves but the comedy has to be there and can't be forced. Everyone has to be on in the same place and that was the hardest thing about a film like this on a small budget.

Gary: Nick, can you give me an on set horror story or two? People love to hear about when things go wrong.

Nick: Christ. Simon almost broke my shoulder one day. It was the scene when we were in the Jaguar and he was supposed to punch the car seat and instead on the first take he punched me in the shoulder and we had to get a doctor on set and I actually had to have injections to work. But we did record the injections. It's on the DVD.

Edgar: Remember the contact lenses?

Nick: Oh yeah. We had lots and lots of zombie extras and this one zombie had a slight thyroid problem or something and when the nurse went to put the contact lense in, his eyeball popped out of it's socket and they had to put it back in.

Gary: His eye popped out?!

Nick: Yeah.

Edgar: I kept saying I couldn't believe we didn't get that on film.

Gary: How did you guys find each other for this cast?

Edgar: Well Nick is Simon's friend of old and we all did this TV show called Spaced together. Which you should see if you can get it. You can get it at Amazon UK. It might get released over here. Nick wasn't sort of a struggling actor as he was a struggling waiter.

Nick: Yeah I had been a 'waiter for like ten years. You know, I didnt really want to do anything apart from play X-box and smoke spliffs.

Edgar: Much like the character.

Nick: Yes, and then Simon wrote Spaced and asked me if I'd like to be in it.

Edgar: Some people in the film are from Spaced, like the guy who plays Pete, who is also the voice of Darth Maul in Phantom Menace.

Nick: He told me a nice story about when he was doing the Darth Maul voice over in London where...who's the director?

Edgar (laughs): George Lucas.

Nick: Yeah, George Lucas, I blanked out. Pete was doing his voice work and to make all the crew laugh he was saying weird things in between takes in the Darth Maul voice. And George Lucas walked up to him and said, "What are you doing?" and Pete said, "Just goofing around." And George said, "Well don't."

(Laughs)

Edgar: But some of the other cast was new and we rehearsed a lot and had real good chemistry between them.

Gary: I love how irony plays throughout the film. At the heart of it, the story is about a turning point in Shaun's life.

Edgar: Yeah a lot of it was self-reflection.

Gary: We already talked a little about Bruce Campbell; I usually ask people if they know who he is right about now.

Edgar: Yeah but we didn't talk about our favorite Bruce Campbell lines.

Gary: Go for it.

Edgar: The obvious are, "boomstick," and "groovy," but the one I really like is in Evil Dead 2 when he says, "I say we go down stairs and carve ourselves a witch." I really like the supermarket ending at the end of Army of Darkness where he says, "Yo, she-bitch, let's go!"

Gary: At the end of Shaun of the Dead I noticed a burn on 28 Days Later. Is that a legitimate burn or friendly competition?

Edgar: I'd say it was a legitimate burn. My only problem with 28 Days Later, because I think that certainly the first half is fantastic, and Alex Garland the screenwriter who I have never met has always been really sweet about Shaun and Spaced. He loved Spaced, but one thing that annoyed me about that film 28 Days Later wasn't really the film itself but Danny Boyle the director did a lot of press in the UK and went out of his way to dis the Romero trilogy. People would ask him, "Are you a big zombie fan?" And he would say, "No, I don't really like zombie films and this is a lot more serious. My film has more of a sociological comment and is a lot more satirical." And I was like, "Have you seen Dawn of the Dead?! Because your film has whole things that are lifted from it. And the last third of the film is lifted from Day of the Dead."

Gary: Man, you've got to pay homage to the master.

Edgar: Yeah and Alex Garland on the other hand was completely cool to say hey this film is a homage to George Romero, John Windom and other influences. But Danny Boyle was saying that it was completely original.

Gary: He's Mister Trainspotting, Duh.

Edgar: Yeah. And that was what we were saying. Danny refused to use the "Z" word.

Gary: They're infected, not zombies.

Edgar: I do think it was a good film. In a way the fact that it was a hit in the UK helped us out on getting this one going.

Gary: What is next for you guys, vacations, and new projects?

Edgar: I think we might tackle the cops versus action genre.

Nick: I'm working on a television show called Cliff Yager.

Gary: Cool. Anything you want to say to the struggling filmmaker whose trying to make it big time like you guys?

Edgar: Stick with it. It's very hard but just stick with your project and what you initially intended it to be.

Nick: Don't take any shit from actors.

Gary: Nice. Thanks guys.

Gary Schultz is an independent filmmaker from Chicago. Look for his feature length zombie film, The Last Days: Zombie Island USA, shooting next year!

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