When I interviewed Edgar Wright for Hot Fuzz, we got to talking about the great titles of action movies. My favorite was Hard Rain but his was Half Past Dead. He wanted to make sequels, Five After Wound and Quarter to F**ked. He promised to make Quarter to F**ked for me personally, so when he made the press rounds for the Hot Fuzz DVD, I got to check on the status of my personal action movie.

What is the status of Quarter to F**ked?
“Oh wow, well, currently The Weinstein Company, we’re trying to do a deal to do Quarter to F**ked and maybe do it as a direct to DVD trilogy, Quarter to F**ked, 25 Past Shattered…”

So development hell?
“Yeah, I can’t think of another one.”

Do you believe Michael Bay was too busy to see Hot Fuzz?
“I can believe that, to be honest. I guess I’m sure he probably would have been working right up. I’ve heard that from a couple of [people]. Did you ask that at a roundtable? I read that. Somebody told me about that, another journalist said that was the first question and I read his answer. Another friend of mine from Empire had asked him as well. I think maybe he’s nervous about watching it because he assumes it might be like in the Team America style. I think in a weird way, Hot Fuzz is done with a bit more affection than the Team America joke. So I would hope he would watch it at some point because I think he’d probably get a kick out of it.”

Did you write the DVD trivia track?
“I did and it took me f**king ages and I’ll probably never do it ever again. I did the same one for Shaun. I did most of that trivia track whilst I was on a plane during the US press tour and it was really good doing it but it was really tough work.”

So it’s all your knowledge of action movies?
“Pretty much, yeah. I wrote all of the trivia track things.”

What scenes did you take out of the movie for the deleted scenes?
“One thing that’s good about the DVD aspect is now when you’re editing a film, you can cut scenes out with the knowledge that it will be seen in some form. Most of the stuff in Hot Fuzz is kind of extra character and subplot stuff. There’s probably 22 deleted scenes and they all give you a picture of a longer version basically. There are a couple of whole scenes that came out. There’s one about Point Break which is funny. A lot of the other stuff is character stuff where you can see things, what we tried to do with the writing that didn’t quite work. We did commentaries on the deleted scenes. I hope it’s stuff that people find interesting in terms of the process.”

Do the deleted scenes have cool two-word titles like the chapter stops?
“No, I wrote all of those as well. I had fun doing that. All of the different things have cool, funny touches but the idea initially with the chapter titles, which I wrote, was I wanted them all to be films. I wanted them to be films so the first one was going to be Executive Decision and then they were all going to have film titles, like Death Rides a Horse. But then Universal got a bit weird about it because they said it was copyright things. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m just going to make up actually sounding titles like Rural Weapon, Man Heat, Sub Morning Maximum Running, Total Bullets.’ So I had a lot of fun doing that. Also, because there was some criticism of the film having too many endings, which has to be said was part of the joke, doing an action film with way too many endings like any of the action films of the last 15 years. That’s why the last three chapters are Final Chapter, Final Chapter Part Two and Final Chapter: The Final Chapter.”

What are some homages to your favorite action movies we should look for on repeat viewings?
“The thing is there are less homages than people maybe think. Some of them are…we didn’t really do too many scene recreation things. We used to do that in the TV series Spaced, but the two big ones are Bad Boys II and Point Break which Danny Butterman talks about and we see clips from. The rest of it is really just like an immersion in genre cliché. But there are little place names named after people like Spencer Hill who’s Terrence Hill and Doug Spencer. As well as the different products we named after things, like Brannigan’s Farm. They’re drinking Cobra beer at one point. There’s lots of really, really subtle ones like that.”

Didn’t you want to include the “Gimme your gun and your badge” cliché?
“That’s one of the ones we didn’t put in because it felt like it’s already been done to death, handing in the badge. I think we didn’t do that because it felt like - some of these things, you wanted to make it more of a celebration of them. There have been, right back as far as The Last Action Hero and stuff, jokes had already been done. We wanted to do something a bit different in a way.”

Why do you think this year so many action film lovers have made action film homages like Grindhouse and Shoot ‘Em Up?
“Well, I think some of it kind of reflects, and you can reflect that with all sorts of films in terms of there’s kind of like a wave of people making films that are essentially inspired by the films that got them excited about films in the first place. Grindhouse was about that in terms of it was recalling a particular cinematic experience. Like Hot Fuzz is inspired by not just ‘70s Briticop films but the explosion of buddy cop action in the ‘80s. Those are the films that when I was a teenager, watching on VHS, like Die Hard, Robocop, The Last Boy Scout, Lethal Weapon. These were films that I would see on VHS. I wouldn’t be old enough to see in the cinema. I think some of it reflects that.

I think maybe there hadn’t been that many kind of… I mean, cop films, you tend to get a good cop film every three years. The same with action films as well. There’s been more action this year, like Die Hard obviously. It’s been sort of a return to action films.”

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