Wright, Pegg and Hynes Talk SPACED!

BBC America released a special edition box set for the whole Spaced series on DVD recently. Its recent success has led it to be sold out on Amazon.com and various other sites. At Comic-Con I was able to interview some of the cast and creators of Spaced in a roundtable interview session. This is the transcript of that interview, along with the audio.

Spaced Interview
July 26, 2008
10:00 AM

Simon Pegg: SP
Jessica Hynes: JH
Edgar Wright: EW
Interviewer: ?
Twitch: Joseph Perez

Interviewer 1: How have you felt about the reception of Spaced so far?

JH: Absolutely blown away
SP: It’s been Number two in Amazon. Which is incredible. It’s sold out its presales already
JH: Yeah they’re doing double orders
SP: Aside from that just the amount of affection and knowledge of it. People have genuinely sought it and looked for it. It’s more than we have ever wished for

Interviewer 2: How did you guys line up or decide to release a copy of it (SPACED) here?

EW: I settled that, that came together at the last minute as well, We were just going to release the English collectors edition in the states and Simon said do you wanna do new stuff and I thought no just leave it. This was just around the time that the remake thing was floating in the air and we had a lot of American fans who were giving us press quotes for the DVDs. Well maybe it would be fun to do commentaries with all those people and especially talk about all the cultural differences. Its always fun particularly in a pop culture level to say have you ever heard of this TV show, or do you know what this is? We had one day in particular in Los Angeles where we had Kevin Smith, Diablo Cody, Matt Stone and Quentin Tarantino, and it was just his first day in L.A. It came together right at the last minute literally to the point where I had personally sorted it out. Everyone was doing it for free. They were all driving themselves and in the case of Kevin Smith I had to get him out of bed. I rang him on the day, but I had told him the night before.
SP: You had to sleep with him the night before
EW: I was in the car on the way over to the commentary and he asks “so when is the commentary?” and I said “today?” He says “When exactly” and I say “now” and Kevin Smith says “I’ll put some clothes on”. So when you hear him on the commentary he’s literally just rolled out of bed. We did a Q&A with him on Wednesday when he was in a higher state of consciousness. Which was very funny indeed. Maybe he will be like that at his big talk today (Kevin Smith had a panel he was moderating later that day).

Interviewer 3: Do you feel that it’s not traditional that women are involved in this sort of thing? Do women bring a different sensibility when they’re involved with it?

JH: I think that in terms of comedy women do bring a different sensibility to it. I think in the case of spaced the female sensibility it is brought only in a fact that there is a strong and quite unique female character in Spaced. That is in many ways different but equal to the male character. Not that in anyway you could say that she was in anyway a sort of archetype or stereotype or any type, she is just an original and authentic character. THAT for me was the interesting perspective. Because I am a female writer I was able to do that and that was a really exciting thing for me to do because to sort of have a strong and original female presence alongside strong and original male presences is unique and the only way to achieve that is to have a male and female writing team because what will generally happen, if that isn’t the case, is that people will write what they know and about their own things. I disagree that women are not interested in this. I think they are interested in this. I think that the female fan base that spaced has is as strong as the male fan base, as I think that the female fan base of many things is as a strong as the male fan base for many things. There is no sort of gender division in terms of fans, they’re just fans. The whole point of being into pop culture and sci-fi is about escaping into a sort of fantasy world, where there are no sorts of gender boundaries, there are as many female horror fans and the gender divide is a red herring. In the real world they are just real people

Interview 4: It seems like aside from the obvious components you are sort of writing and have essences from influences like Young Ones.  Aside from writing from your love from the world of sci-fi and those elements, talk a little towards your influences from BBC TV, if there were any.

EW: Funny enough that it’s being released on BBC America on DVD, it was broadcast on a network called channel 4, it’s not a BBC show. You can probably argue that the show as it is would probably not have been broadcast on the BBC
JH: It’s a different channel; it’s a different broadcaster
EW: At the same time they were doing different stuff like Ali G, it was sort of an edgier channel. The reason that it has that kind of ‘joy de vive’ is that we were basically writing and making it just for fun and we were the same age of those characters. At the time that we made the series we were unlike any of the shows at that time that were supposed to be youth oriented sitcoms that were written by people in their 40s and sometimes 50’s. This was a show about twenty something’s written and directed by twenty somethings. And we were all living that life especially during the first series. Playing a lot of Playstation, cohabiting with other people, sharing apartments. There are a lot of personal stories that feed into the show.
SP: The young ones was like a bomb in comedy in 1992, I was like 12 .It changed the lives of a lot of kids in the UK because suddenly there was a comedy show that spoke to them so personally that suddenly people were disallowing their kids to watch it. It was PUNK for comedy the young ones.  Anyone that had in interest in comedy could not go forward unaffected by it. When we wanted to make spaced, we wanted to make our Young Ones.

Twitch: What do you think it is about the show that makes it so apt of being identified both English, American or any other culture that has watched the show? Do you think it’s the versatility of the writing, the references, the directing?

SP: I liked to think it’s a shared experience. Despite it being from another country people say “ Oh that’s like our lives, we did that as well, we’ve sat around and played games and smoked weed, you know gotten into adventures and procrastinated” and also because spaced is by and for people in the geek community and I mean that in the most positive sense.  I think that culture is a unifying thing around the world, while everyone looks to dictators and despots of fear of them taking over the world, you know what, WE are taking over the world.
JH: it feels like that when you’re at the San Diego Comic-Con
SP: I don’t mean “we”. I mean we as in the shared love.
EW: if we got together all of the geeks in the convention center, we could have a bloody coup against the rest of the world.

Interviewer 4: What do you see in American television that casts attention abroad?

EW: I don’t think Spaced has a broad appeal I think it speaks to a very specific audience who really relate to it.
JH: South Park is like the cartoon version of Spaced.

Interviewer 4: Not so much broad but in the ability to reach audiences. On either side

SP: we’re big fans of American culture in the UK and we’ve always have been. We’ve been consuming it longer than the other way around. You’ve guys got certain things. And there’s that perplexing question when people bring up Benny Hill and like what the fuck are you bringing up Benny Hill for? Now with the Internet and DVD America is beginning to have access to British culture more and consuming more of what we got. Shows like Arrested Development for us as a comedy was doing almost the same as we were trying to do in spaced was so make sort of associative, clever, lyrical kind of comedy show. There are plenty of things that come out of this country not just comedy but your dramatic television is amazing, serial television the resources you have to create, essentially 24 hours movies, literally with (the show) 24.
JH: I’m a huge fan of Six Feet under I think that is the most incredible television show

Twitch: What about Heroes?

SP: I love heroes. I got to work with Zach (Zachary Quinto) recently. I was plumbing him for information.
EW: I think what’s interesting is that American television has influenced British television and vice versa, Shows like Seinfeld and Larry Sanders have been huge influences. Larry Sanders is one of the most influential shows in the last 15 years. The UK office would not exist without Larry Sanders. That kind of style and sense of naturalism in part, from that show, not really a big hit in the UK but very influential within the industry. And people love that show.
JH: I supposed with Spaced we never wanted to go for that
EW: Not Larry Sanders
JH: No
EW: I’m saying a lot of the more naturalistic shows are influenced by that
SP: Northern Exposure had that magical realism that is would skip off the flights of fantasy and you know shows like that influenced us.

Twitch: I’m sure you’ve been asked lots of times have you considered making a Spaced Season 3, or a Spaced movie, or even a Spaced Christmas Special like in The Office, but do you think that would end up being a Phantom Menace.

All: *Laugh*
SP: I think that’s the fear. Aside from practical problems is getting it sort of back together having time to write it and shoot it. One of the other writing reasons we haven’t returned to it is that we’re worried that we might just get it wrong now. We’re so much older now. We don’t live the lives they lived anymore. We’re thinking a Halloween special. A Halloween horror Special
EW: We should do it with CGI sets, hardly any of the original cast.
JH: Michelle Pfieffer could play a role in it
SP: Make it purposefully bad
EW: Call it Spaced the Phantom Menace.

End of Interview