Details on The World's End - the final part of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy - have been wrapped up tighter than your average mint flavour ice-cream snack. But no longer: we spoke exclusively to Pegg and Wright for the new issue of Empire, on sale this Thursday, and gleaned some enticing new details.
We knew that the movie revolves around a pub crawl involving Gary King (Pegg) and four childhood friends (including Nick Frost as a character called Andy Knight), while a cataclysmic, possibly apocalyptic event, rages around them. But now Pegg tells us that the movie involves "a crawl through twelve pubs, culminating in the final one, which is The World's End."
Wright chips in, "This is as much about where you grew up as the people you grew up with..." But, while it seems that The World's End is more mature than either Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, he's keen to point out that "it's also very silly. I would say it's darker, more personal and more silly."
Good to know. For more from Pegg and Wright on the movie's themes, influences and the differences between Gary King and Shaun Riley, turn to the issue. But we couldn't let the writer-actor-director duo go without finding out which genre we're dealing with here. If Shaun was a rom-zom-com, and Hot Fuzz was a pastiche of explosive buddy movies, then where is The World's End taking us?
"Hard to say," says Wright, before deciding. "It's a sci-fi comedy." "Social sci-fi," adds Pegg. "Social science-fiction," agrees Wright, warming to the task. "Look it up on Wikipedia and then bone up on John Christopher and John Wyndham."
Ooooh...Given that Christopher (a pen-name, admittedly) wrote The Tripods and Wyndham wrote The Day Of The Triffids, does that mean The World's End deals with a kind of alien invasion? We'll find out next year. Meanwhile, the film remains on course for a start this autumn. Cannot wait.
Empire
