Director Edgar Wright on new film: ‘I thought I’d do my ‘This Is 40′ with robots’

TORONTO – They may have reached the end, but it’s not doomsday yet for the three friends who brought you the zombie rom-com “Shaun of the Dead” and the police anything-but-procedural “Hot Fuzz.”

“The World’s End,” which hits theatres Friday, is the final sci-fi instalment in what has become known as the “Cornetto Trilogy,” a triumverate of genre-riffing comic films that feature Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the main characters with Edgar Wright directing.

“It feels very satisfying to have three done,” Wright said recently during an interview in Toronto. “It’s funny — people always ask, ‘Oh, you’ve done zombies, you’ve done cops, you’ve done sci-fi, what other genres do you want to do. And I say, ‘All of them!’”

It’s been a long trip to get to “The World’s End,” which finds Pegg as a 40-year-old deadbeat desperate to relive his youth by completing a 12-stop pub crawl that he and four high school friends failed to finish, and tracks their wild night of drinking that turns into, as Wright puts it, “an event of planetary significance.” After all, it’s been more than a decade since they started working together — on the 1999 TV cult classic “Spaced” — and things have certainly changed for the trio at the core of the trilogy.

Pegg has gone on to appear in mainstream hits like “Star Trek” and “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”; Wright has directed films including “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” and has been tabbed to write and direct Marvel Comics’ “Antman”; and the three have united on big-budget projects like Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin.” In “The World’s End,” they’re joined by established British actors Eddie Marsan, Paddy Considine and “Cornetto” associate Martin Freeman, who himself has hit it big with the blockbuster “The Hobbit.”

And yet the chemistry’s all the same.

“When you get the five of them together, they’re all the same age, the script has been tailored to them … I hope on screen it feels like five really old friends together, because they genuinely get on. There’s no one within that ensemble that doesn’t get on with the other,” said Wright.

“Martin Freeman actually shot most of his part, left the day after filming to go to New Zealand and start a worldwide tour of ‘The Hobbit,’ and then when ‘The Hobbit’ opened, came back and did one more week with us in the end. … He wanted to be in the movie so much that he was willing to not have any other time off for anything else.”

And it’s a good thing their working relationship has proven so strong, too, as “The World’s End” had to be filmed in just 12 short weeks.

“Myself and Simon and Nick, we’ve all got a really good work ethic. To get a movie out in 12 weeks, you haven’t got time to be on set to say, ‘What’s the intention of this scene? Let’s try it this way.’ We rehearse it, and then we shoot that.”

The film’s themes — the approach of middle age and the fear of Armageddon — seem to be increasingly common in current cinema.

“I always put it (our fascination with doomsday) down as something to do with the end of the space race,” waxes Wright. “I think when the space race started to die in the ’80s, the idea of reaching other planets and life on other planets started to ebb away, and nearly all of the threats and concerns turned inward. People are concerned about the future of the planet, on an environmental level, a social level.

“If anything, I think people have reached a sort of destruction fatigue, in a way. Our film isn’t really about Armageddon, it’s more about personal Armageddon.”

Wright, 39, is the only one of the group who has yet to turn 40, and says their own entry into middle age helped inspire the film’s theme.

“I felt like I wanted to get this film done before I hit the big 4-0. I thought I’d do my ‘This Is 40’ with robots,” he says, laughing.

But Wright, despite the acclaim he’s curried in such a short time, still sounds like someone in awe of where he is and what he does. On Twitter last week, he proudly posted about Robert Downey Jr.’s praise for “The World’s End”; he describes a compliment about the production values of the new film from director Guillermo del Toro as “extremely flattering”; he sounds genuinely surprised that geek overlord Joss Whedon read (and enjoyed) his script for “Antman.”

“If I could, I’d make a movie every year,” Wright said. “I love the medium, I love telling stories.”

And he may yet. Though the trilogy is over, Wright says he, Pegg and Frost will continue to work on new projects in the future.

“We’ve had vague talks about it. Press tours, stuck at an airport, waiting for a flight, that’s when we’ll talk about what’s next,” he says.

“We like the idea of doing something radically different that would be really fun. We don’t have any sort of firm plans, but we absolutely would love to work together again.”