Written by Lyz Reblin
Monday, 04 August 2008
Before Hot Fuzz, before Shaun of the Dead, there was Spaced! Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Jessica Hynes first teamed up on the British sitcom SPACED (1999-2001).
They were joined by Nick Frost, Julia Deakin, Mark Heap, and Katy Carmichael to play their quirky friends. Pegg and Hynes play comic-book artist Tim Bisley and struggling writer Daisy Steiner, two recent acquaintances who pretend to be a couple to acquire a flat. They move into an apartment run by their alcoholic super Marsha Klein and her rebellious daughter. Among their neighbors is an angst-ridden artist, Brian, who lives downstairs. The couple is commonly joined by Tim’s best friend, militant Mike, and Daisy’s best friend, fashionista Twist. Though the show is full of pop culture references, the heart of Spaced is in the characters and how realistically their lives are portrayed.The DVD includes both seasons of the series, with all fourteen episodes featuring commentary from Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes, Julia Deakin, Katy Carmichael, Nick Frost, Mark Heap, and producer Nira Park. There is even commentary by celebrity fans such as Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Bill Hader, Matt Stone, Patton Oswalt and Diablo Cody. Other special features include outtakes, deleted scenes, an homage-o-meter (so you can catch every single pop culture reference), and many more bonus features.
IESB's Lyz Reblin attended an interview with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Jessica Hynes from SPACED at San Diego Comic Con.
Read the interview in its entirety below!
Q: How is the United States Spaced Tour going?
Edgar Wright: It’s good. We’ve done New York and LA so far and it’s been amazing. We had a fantastic screening in New York at the Village East, which was incredible. It had a line around the block, and we had to turn away around a hundred people. Then we had another one at the Arclight in Los Angeles with Kevin Smith moderating, which was very funny. So things have been really good. Last year in London we did a marathon Spaced screening at the National Film Theatre, which was the first time we had seen all of the episodes on the big screen. And it was amazing and it was amazing watching it at the Arclight on this huge screen with stereo sound. So great to seven, eight years later see it with a packed house, watching something that was intended to be viewed on the small screen.
Q: How intrinsic is it in your life, now that it is seven years later?
EW: I don’t think it has ever gone away really.
Simon Pegg: It was our first thing together. For me, and I’m sure for Jess certainly, it’s had such significance in terms of our lives. It was such a passion project and to look back on how it got made and how we did it, we were just feeling our way a lot of the time. The whole thing was incredibly serendipitous in how it actually got done. Jess and I were writing the first series, just hanging around each others houses writing a TV show…Next thing you know we’re walking on to this set of this apartment building we had been writing about.
Q: Did you start writing it before you had a greenlight?
SP: I didn’t know what a f*%&$^ greenlight was. I just thought that it was going to be on. I mean the notion of the greenlight, I didn’t know what the term meant, I assumed we had it.
EW: At the time it was a lot more laid back in terms of hearing how a network TV show got made and the various amounts of stages.
SP: So much more ruthless here [in America].
EW: It might have changed now in the UK. We look back at it and see how lucky we were. It was a low budget show so the fact that we were slightly under the radar in terms of the cost meant we kind of had carte-blanch within the budget and schedule to do what we wanted. We never really had any network interference. It’s one of those experiences that you look back on and realize how fortunate we were at that age and that we had this show where we could do anything in reason, reason being time or money but still really not have any type of scrutiny in terms of the content.
Jessica Hynes: I do remember one producer sort of questioning my use of 50s style horn rim glasses without the glass in them.
SP: And yet they didn’t say a word about an episode where everyone is clearly high on ecstasy.
JH: I just think they thought we were high on life.
SP: A lot of the time we were talking about a very specific within our age group, many of which went right over their head. They didn’t realize. In the clubbing episode of Spaced, it was very much a love letter to the fact that you could go out, take drugs, and come back and not die. In every other TV show there had to be some moral message.
EW: A very special episode of Spaced.
JH: There was an innocence about it. It just sort of happened, they all went out together as friends, they all came back and that was the night. Many people only have one or two nights like that ever. And that’s the whole point about it. It’s not suddenly become a show about hardcore drug use. It’s just that happens.
SP: It wasn’t about saying: do this, it’s great. The whole show was about “this happens.” People do this, it happened in our lives. People don’t always crash their cars and kill a bunch of children. We wanted to show things how they were.
EW: I don’t think there’s ever been another TV show that started more frequently where the characters wake up hung-over.
Q: On the DVD release you have a lot of big names providing commentary. How did you feel that such people wanted to be a part of it?
SP: It was amazing, for Jess and I certainly. Quentin Tarantino has become a friend of ours recently; Edgar and he are such firm pals now. But to have him doing commentary on the episode with the Pulp Fiction reference, identifying the scene with Mike in the toilet ala John Travolta as Vincent Vega. With him in the room talking about it are the most incredible moments of circularity in my entire life. To have done that in honor of him and then to have him speak in honor of it, it just doesn’t get any better than that.
EW: I think with the people you hear on the DVD, I’d say most of them had seen the show after Shaun of the Dead had come out. A couple of them, Patton Oswalt and Bill Hader, being uber geeks, had already known about Spaced before Shaun of the Dead and had seen it. And meeting these people over the last couple of years, you realize who the big fans are. So I thought let’s get them all on this commentary track, it’d be fantastic. It was a really good time doing it.
Q: What sort of ultimately greased the wheels to finally get the American DVD released?
EW: I think just some music licensing, a lot of hard work by our producers Nira Park, Karen Beever and the distributors. Ironically, one of the people who helped with the crucial bit of clearing the music was the real Nicholas Angel, who’s a music supervisor at Working Title.
JH: I liked the fact that they had to clear my Elvis impersonation with the Elvis estate. I’m proud of the fact that they approved it.
SP: With the success of the two movies has created awareness, wanting to go back and see what they have done, like when you discover a band for back references. It just took a long time for the right conditions to arise.
EW: It’s much like if you were a fan of Aerosmith through “Walk This Way” and then you discovered “Toys in the Attic”.
Q: Is the series something you would like to revisit?
SP: Our fear is that if we went back to it now is we wouldn’t be qualified to do it.
JH: I’d like to do it.
SP: Me too, but it would have to be different.
JH: We’d have to comment on the fact that we are older. But I definitely think that Daisy is still living in that flat. I think Tim might have moved out.
Q: With Shaun of the Dead being based on the second episode of Spaced, and Hot Fuzz clearly influenced by Nick Frost’s character in the series, is there any possibility of exploring perhaps the comic portion of the show or robot wars?
SP: Funny enough, Nick and I have written a film called Paul that we are going to shoot next year and it starts here [at comic-con].
Taken From: iesb.net