Monday mornings are generally not to be looked forward to. However, this Monday morning I had the distinct pleasure of fleetingly enjoying the esteemed company of Messrs. Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis a.k.a. Burke and Hare.
Burke and Hare, if you didn’t know, is the new pitch black comedy from John Landis (An American Werewolf in London and The Blues Brothers). It follows the wacky hijinx of two 19th century grave robbers – William Burke and William Hare.
In town to promote the cadaver ridden tale, Gollum and Shaun awaited me within room 209 of the super plush Soho Hotel. After enjoying a swift pre-interview fizzy water and garibaldi biscuit, I was ushered into a hotel room that had been converted into a miniature studio for a few short but sweet minutes of their time.
FilmShaft: Hiya guys, it’s a pleasure to meet two heroes of mine.
Both: Hello!
Simon Pegg: FilmSHAFT?
FS: Yep, Shaft.
Pegg: Hmmm, “Shaft”. (clocking my Astonishing X-Men t-shirt) What’s that on your shirt there?
FS: Astonishing X-Men, Whedon’s run.
Pegg: Oh, cool.
FS: Simon, on Daybreak this morning did you do the Garden State ear pull? (If you’ve not seen Garden State, Natalie Portman has a secret signal whereby if she tugs on her ear, it means she wants to leave).
Pegg: “The Garden State ear pull”? No. It was… I’m entirely… Sometimes I mess with my face when I’m nervous. No hidden signals.
FS: (unconvinced) OK. So how would you describe the tale of Burke and Hare?
Andy Serkis: Shall I start?
Pegg: You start.
Serkis: OK. William Burke and William Hare were two Irish immigrants who landed in Edinburgh in 1828, looking for work. At that time Edinburgh was a center for excellence for schools of anatomy and one of the places was run by Dr. Knox. They were forever running out of corpses. So William Hare, who was married to a woman who ran a boarding house and one of the lodger’s dies, so they have to get rid of the body. So they take the body up to the school of anatomy and they make five pounds. Five whole pounds out of it. So they decide to become mass murderers.
FS: As you do.
Serkis: (laughing) As you do. It was a neat segue but err… Everyone thinks of them as grave robbers and that’s entirely erroneous. They actually started to shorten people’s lives using a method called “Burke-ing”, which Simon will demonstrate.
Pegg: (placing his hands over his nose and mouth) Basically just covering the nose and mouth. They used it in the military to put soldiers out of their misery, when they were dying on the battlefield. For Burke and Hare it’s a way of delivering the bodies untouched, because the fresher and more intact the cadaver – the more money they’d get. So it was important for them not to go bludgeoning or cutting or anything like that, you know? A lot of the gore in the film is in the medical bits, but Burke and Hare’s bits.
FS: So what drew you to these gruesome characters?
Pegg: Well… it was Mr. Landis for me. Not just for American Werewolf, which is one of my favorite films, but for his comedy work in terms of, you know: Trading Places and Animal House and Blues Brothers, The Three Amigos – which is an underrated film, but beloved by many people.
FS: Did you ever do “the salute” with him? (I am, of course, referring to the awesome Three Amigos salute)
Pegg: What the Dusty Bottoms *grunts and does a pelvic thrust* yeah! John hasn’t done a movie for a long time. He’s been working documentaries and television, but he’s become disenchanted with the way the film industry works in America. Some of the things he did were just tampered with beyond recognition, so he just thought “screw this” and left the film industry. Basically. Then he was in the mood for a feature, came over to England, met up with Barnaby Thomson at Ealing Studios, this script came up, he was just like “Hey, I could do this. This is more like what I’m used to doing” and I was on board straight away.
Alarmingly, a lady to my left starts making “one more question” hand signals at me (at least I hope that’s what they were, else she’s very rude. And mean).
FS: You’ve both done motion capture for the upcoming Tintin movie (The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn), Andy did you have any advice for Simon?
Serkis: Oh, I didn’t need to give Simon any advice – he wears the suit well!
Pegg: I don’t make it look as good as you do!
Serkis: Well actually we just kind of glanced of each other during Tintin, didn’t we?
Pegg: We’d see each other on the set, which is a thing called The Volume, which is an area of the studio that can be rendered digitally, and we’d see other passing through in our various… because a lot of our scenes are… you know… it was great to see Andy in a performance capture suit actually, because obviously Andy’s pioneered and been at the center of some of the most remarkable performances in that style. He’s also done a lot to educate people in that it’s not animation, it’s acting. It’s just a different kind of costume. When you see those characters in Tintin it’s us. Everything they do is us, it’s not animated
Serkis: Yeah, in terms of acting, you don’t approach the role any different.
Pegg: It’s harder in a way, because you have to go back to the very childhood notion of acting, which is play acting. You don’t get props, you can’t do method acting. Performance capture requires you to act on a very base level and for that reason it’s extremely exciting and kind of enormous fun.
… And then my plug was pulled. Though I didn’t get as long as I’d liked, which would have been all day, Andy and Simon were a really great to talk to. They were warm and friendly and exuded a relaxed and confident vibe that made me instantly feel comfortable with them.
Burke and Hare is released in the UK on the 29th of October.