January 20, 2005 - They've got a plan, now what remains is to execute it. Simon Pegg and his Shaun of the Dead crew – writer/director Edgar Wright and star Nick Frost – are presently gearing up for their next film: Hot Fuzz.

"We're trying to tell the story of a policeman from the metropolitan police who gets involved in some crazy stuff," says Pegg in an exclusive interview with IGN FilmForce. "It should be quite fun because we're dealing with a culture that doesn't really have guns and the police aren't really armed. So that should be fun trying make an action movie out of that. At the moment a lot is up in the air. I can't be really more specific than that."

The success of Shaun of the Dead both in England and America has led the involved production companies to open up their wallets a bit more. "With [Shaun of the Dead] in the States and the kind of interest in it there, it's been just so wonderful for us, so we were kind of surprised," says Pegg. "Working Title was very pleased with us this year, in fact this year we did them proud, and Universal as well. So the budget for [Hot Fuzz] is kind of more than double what Shaun was."

Production on the film is tentatively scheduled to begin in the spring in the UK. That's if Pegg and Wright can get the necessary elements together. They're working hard to do so, but merely getting their schedules to mesh can sometimes be an issue. Wright recently directed a music video for the band Ash.

"We've just been trying to find the time to sit down and get it together," says Pegg. "We've got lots of ideas. We've made a little bit of real progress already. Actually, we've been hingin' out with the police over here, just sort of researching. We've been going out on patrol and touring loads of police stations and talking to both the cops and criminals; between the altercations. That's all been very interesting. That's the research work we've done so far on the new film."

So how far along are things with the script? Pegg explains that almost all of the elements they want in the movie are there, but, "We haven't actually written it. I've got it next to me now on index cards, it's all written out, which is just the pre-flipcharts stage, so we're just about there. We've got the whole story. It's just the dialogue and the exact structure of it that we don't have yet."

The question comes to mind, why did they choose to follow up with this type of film? Is it the genre that's next worth lampooning? "I know that the action film is very much an American film, and also an Asian one perhaps," says Pegg, "but I think the Brits are very much into American cinema, but I don't think there's been a take on it where the conventions of an action movie have been put into a very parochial British context."

He adds with a laugh, "We want to make a British action film. And we kind of want to do a similar take as with Shaun. You know, the Zombie movie was very much an American tradition, and what we did was we took that and we put it somewhere else."

Many fans in America would have preferred Shaun of the Dead to be released a lot sooner than it was. With Hot Fuzz, from conception to its theatrical release in England and the States, Pegg says, "I think it's going to be out quicker than Shaun was."

Even this early in the process, Pegg has had to fend off the comments that his main police characters are going to slap each other around. "There's that great Robin Williams joke about the British police," he says. "Stop or I'll shout stuff again!"