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I'm not entirely sure how to describe Simon Pegg's Hot Fuzz. The heroes are two British coppers, the setting is the Somerset town of Wells in southern England, and the finale features a bloodbath in the market square in which a host of Great British character actors are dispatched in very Great British ways: decapitated by hanging baskets, garrotted by brass knick-knacks, splattered by beer barrels and gunned down by a supermarket meat counter.
It's also that rarest of very rare things: a British film that's actually funny.
"How would you describe it?" I ask him.
"Lethal Weapon meets Miss Marple," he says. "Or The Bill, but as directed by Tony Scott." Which is also more or less how I'd describe Pegg, except instead of Miss Marple he'd be the bloke from some risque TV sitcom, and instead of Lethal Weapon it would be Mission: Impossible.
If that sounds preposterous - and the charm of Hot Fuzz and its central conceit is the absurdity of crossing a Hollywood action movie with a West Country setting - you'd be right. But it does almost exactly describe Pegg too.
Born in Gloucester, he was in Spaced - a TV sitcom he co-wrote with Jessica Stevenson - and last year he did appear in Mission: Impossible III.
Both Hot Fuzz and Simon Pegg are very odd mixes. He's a self-described geek-boy who is into Star Wars and sci-fi and comics and films.
But when he shows up for the interview he's a Hollywood-esque hour-and-a-half late, and in his baseball cap, baggy jeans and silver chain he looks like Tim, the slacker from Spaced, whom he calls his "shadow self", but only after the stylists from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy have got their hands on him.
The lateness isn't his fault, it's Universal Pictures - he's running with the big boys now - and while Tim was an out-and-out loser, Pegg is almost absurdly successful.
After Spaced, he co-wrote and starred - with Edgar Wright - in Shaun of the Dead, a zombie movie set in Crouch End, north London. It was a low-budget first feature which, against all odds, became a cult comic hit. Hot Fuzz is his and Wright's second cinematic effort together and it's hard to see it being anything but a huge hit, not least because of Pegg's weird and eclectic fan base.
There's the usual collection of obsessive-compulsives on the internet, but also: Quentin Tarantino, who championed Shaun of the Dead in the States, David Schwimmer, who cast him as the lead in his directorial debut, and Chris Martin, who's one of his best friends. "Did you have any idea when you started out that one day you'd be hanging out with Tarantino?" I ask.
"None. It's all amazing. But luckily it happened quite gradually. The idea of doing some of the things that I've been lucky enough to do ... if I could have known that before, it would have been too much. I would probably have wet myself. And then cried."
There's a lovely story about how, after Shaun of the Dead, an interviewer asked Pegg if he planned to carry on making films in Britain, to which he replied: 'Well, I'm not about to go and star in Mission: Impossible III."
"I did say that," he says. "I really did. It was when we were doing press for Shaun and an interviewer asked if we were going to go Hollywood - as if you can't live here and still go and do films there - and I said: "Well, it's not like we're going to go away and do, I don't know, er, Mission: Impossible III."
"I pulled it off the top of my head. And six months later, I was like, 'Hi Tom.'
"What a hypocrite. It was fantastic, though. Really fantastic. J.J. Abrams, who was the director, is a real film geek, like me, just a regular guy. He saw Shaun of the Dead and liked it, and I got a call at the office one day and he said, 'Oh hi, do you want to be in Mission: Impossible III?' And I was like, 'Oh, okay then?" It was my dream-come-true moment'. "
But then nobody could have predicted quite how popular Shaun of the Dead would be in the US.
Robert Rodriguez, director of From Dusk Till Dawn, led a standing ovation in Austin, Texas, and Tarantino did a private screening at his home.
Pegg is quite humble when he talks about how amazing it's been, but then he has that comedian's trait of being quite earnest about a lot of things.
He wrote his thesis on "a Marxist overview of popular 1970s cinema and hegemonic discourses", and when I roll my eyes and say, 'Oh there's nothing like a bit of hegemony,' he tells me that 'an awareness of the postmodern condition is still the intellectual bedrock' of his comedic method.
I'd like to scoff but, hell, it gets results. And Pegg and Wright are hoping that Hot Fuzz will do for cop films what Shaun of the Dead did for zombie films.
"We started thinking about the cop genre and the whole notion of investing the British police service with some sort of cool, because it just seems that the British cops are up against it in some ways - they wear jumpers, they don't have guns."
The plot is about what happens when an overachieving Metropolitan police officer, Nicholas Angel, is transferred to the sleepy town of Sandford and paired with local boy Danny, played by Nick Frost - Pegg's best friend and his best man, as well as his co-star in Spaced and Shaun of the Dead.
When they met, Frost was a waiter and Pegg a stand-up. "I just thought he was the funniest person I knew, so when I came to write Spaced I wrote a part for him."
It's all a bit incestuous, the comedy scene. After studying film and theatre at Bristol, where he set up a comedy club with David Walliams, Pegg became a stand-up comedian and met Jessica Stevenson while doing a sketch show for Meridian, and Edgar Wright while developing a project at Paramount.
Since then he's worked with almost everyone. The cream of contemporary comedy is in Hot Fuzz - Martin Freeman, Stephen Merchant, Bill Bailey, Steve Coogan, Adam Buxton. Plus more Great British character actors than even Harry Potter can provide employment for - Billie Whitelaw, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy, Edward Woodward, Timothy Dalton, Paul Freeman, Kenneth Cranham.
"We had a rule early on: let's try to populate the film with British actors who have been in Hollywood films and who have played bad people in Hollywood films? We wanted an ensemble of brilliant actors playing really small parts.
"So the fabric of the village is made up of this really impressive cast of people who you glimpse every so often. So there's Paul Freeman, Stuart Wilson and Kenneth Cranham, people I'd grown up seeing in films. Paul Freeman was in Raiders of the Lost Ark , for God's sake. I mean that film was a huge influence in my life, and suddenly he's playing a vicar in my film.'
In some ways, it's not so suddenly. Pegg has worked hard at it and he takes it quite seriously - Jessica Stevenson is said to have made him burst into tears on more than one occasion when writing Spaced.
And when I email my friend Kevin Cecil, who wrote a part for him in the TV sitcom Black Books ("We wanted to see him play a baddie, and he did it brilliantly") to get some gossip, he tells me that he's uniformly popular with more or less everyone.
More excitingly, he tells me: "He used to share a double bed with Nick Frost."
"Did you really share a double bed?" I ask him.
"Actually we shared a single bed. I was staying at his place on the floor and that was too uncomfortable, so we slept top-to-tail and that was too uncomfortable, so we ended up sleeping the same way.
"It was a very gradual process into being okay sleeping with a hairy man next to you. I think that infuses a lot of our work too.
"It's very easy to reduce the relationship in the film to having some homoerotic subtext, which it kind of is because that really does exist in a lot of action movies, particularly Lethal Weapon. "But a more intriguing relationship is the heterosexual male fighting his programming to be affectionate to another heterosexual male. And it's the relationship between Angel and Danny that is the real romance of the film."
More than anything else though, there's a very British sensibility at its heart - the amateur dramatics society, the floral arrangement competitions, the village of the year contest. His mum is in the film as one of the judges, and she is still a leading light of the am-dram scene in Gloucestershire.
"I grew up around a really passionate group of people who were doing theatre for nothing, doing it simply for the sake of doing it. And that's where I got my love of it from."
His jazz musician father split from Pegg's mother when Simon was 7. He went to the local state school, used to do a performance spot during morning assembly, and, says a former teacher, went through a rough time when his stepfather left home during his teenage years.
Not that Pegg tells me this. He's visibly uncomfortable talking about his private life. He tells me his wife's name is Maureen, but apart from that "it's not something I want to talk about".
While Pegg happily admits that most of his work has an autobiographical element - - Shaun of the Dead was set in Crouch End because that's where he lived, Tim from Spaced was obsessed with Star Wars because Pegg was too - he once told an interviewer that the stepfather in Shaun of the Dead was influenced by the slightly troubled relationship he'd had with his own stepfather. But he now denies this.
And then there's his celebrity pals. Tom Cruise is a "great guy", as is David Schwimmer. But it's obvious that I'm not supposed to ask about cosy nights out round Chris'n'Gwyneth's. Chris doesn't talk about his private life "so I'm not about to".
"Oh come on," I say, "on the one hand you're Mr Normal Bloke living in Crouch End, but on the other there you're mixing it up with the Hollywood A-listers. Isn't that a bit odd?"
"They're just normal people," Pegg says.
"They come in for a lot of stick. But it's all lies, all just bullshit. All this macrobiotic crap and yoga."
So what? You're telling me that Gwyneth comes round for a nice juicy steak?"
"She loves a drumstick. Smokes 40 a day. Can't get enough of McDonald's. Other people make stuff up so I might as well too." Then he rants about what it's like being a celebrity. "Like being in The Matrix - everyone's an agent."
Fair enough, they are his friends. Although, whether he likes it or not, it sets Pegg at one remove from us, the little people. That's success for you though It's what happens when you cross Hollywood with the West Country - but I can't help feeling that we should cheer him on as one of our own.
- OBSERVER
