So how does he plan to get us cheering on the body snatchers?
He fought off zombies in Shaun Of The Dead and battled aliens in Star Trek but now Simon Pegg is facing his toughest task yet: to make cinemagoers fall in love with two of Scotland’s most reviled criminals, Burke and Hare.
Pegg -- whose wife Maureen McCann comes from East Kilbride -- is best known for playing nice guys, such as lovable loser Dennis in Run Fat Boy Run. With his new film Pegg brings William Burke, who killed 16 people in Edinburgh from 1827 to 1828, to life in the Ealing Studios comedy named after the pair. The 40-year-old actor, a self-proclaimed geek, admits it was a challenge to try to make audiences connect with the body snatchers.
“We need you to sympathise with them and root for them in a way which forces the viewer to re-evaluate their own feelings about what happened,” he says. “We’re never saying it is justifiable or a good thing, [the film] dares you to go along with it and gives you every opportunity to support them even though they still killed a lot of people. The idea is that you get to the end and think ‘F***, they were bad.’ And they [the filmmakers] have spent the whole film tring to make you like them.
“The story is used as a means to challenge the audience’s moral preconceptions. I like it for that reason. It is smart. It is subversive in that it sneaks these challenges at you although it just seems to be a light comedy romp about a couple of murderers.”
The actor even suggests that these despised killers helped make Edinburgh the pre-eminent medical centre of its time by ensuring a steady supply of bodies for research. “There are questions raised that are fascinating,” he says. “For instance, if they hadn’t done what they did, maybe medical science would not have progressed as quickly as it did and more people would have died as a result.”
It’s not just Pegg who is running a risk. Director John Landis, the man behind such cinematic classics as An American Werewolf In London, Animal House, Trading Places and The Blues Brothers, is in danger of doing a disservice to the capital of Scotland. It’s got nothing to do with the fact he’s shooting the film in deepest England, or that the protagonists -- Andy Serkis, Pegg and Tom Wilkinson -- possess scant Celtic blood. No, the danger is inherent in the tone that Landis demands of the film. “It is a very fine line we are walking here because we are after extremely black comedy,” says the director when I visit the set, “and yet these guys were loathsome psychopaths. They were evil, murdering scum who did horrible things in Edinburgh, and yet I am making them like romantic leading men.”
We are standing in a barnyard at Luton Hoo, an estate in Hertfordshire. The production has filmed in and around Edinburgh, but today’s section of the schedule, in which an old English barn stands in for an Scottish tavern, proves the best day to spend time with the filmmakers and cast.
There is something of a family atmosphere on set — the talk is of foul murder, but the mouths are smiling. Landis works with his wife, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, an Oscar-nominated costume designer, and strides around the muddy set like a laird, booming away with his foghorn voice; ordering, cajoling and chattering constantly. The set is buzzing as Michael Winner is due here this afternoon to film a cameo (Ronnie Corbett, Bill Bailey and Stephen Merchant also feature), and everybody is urging everybody else to “calm down, dear”. Landis doesn’t get the joke, but doesn’t seem bothered.
“Do you know what burking is?” he asks me, suddenly, as we pace from yard to barn. Being well researched, I do, and begin my explanation before realising that the question is rhetorical. “The US and the British secret service, they all do it,” he continues, cutting me off mid-flow as he offers his own elucidation. “You hold the nose and mouth and the victim suffocates and there are no visible marks on the body.”
The subjects of the film were Irishmen who worked together in a macabre enterprise, selling 17 corpses to Dr Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer with students at Edinburgh Medical College, who wanted unmarked cadavers. In the early 19th century there was an insufficient number of legitimately available corpses for the study and teaching of anatomy in medical schools, and Burke and Hare spotted the gap in the Edinburgh market.
Their first sale was the body of a fellow tenant in the West Port area of town, an old army pensioner who had died of natural causes owing Hare £4 in rent. Instead of burying the body, Burke and Hare filled the coffin with bark and carried the cadaver to the University of Edinburgh, where a student directed them to Knox, an ambitious anatomist, to whom they sold the body for £7 and 10 shillings. The other 16 bodies were obtained via murder.
“What they did mostly was get people drunk and smother them,” continues Landis. “Yet the film is still quite gruesome because it deals with dissection, vivisection and murder.” He ponders for a moment. “Yes, it is pretty gruesome. The gruesome parts are the medical parts, with Dr Knox, played by Wilkinson, and Dr Munroe, played by Tim Curry. These two are learned men doing important work.
“Edinburgh was the centre of medical education for years. You should go to the Royal College of Surgeons; they have on display a notebook about this big” — he draws an A5 shape in the air — “it’s a notebook made from Burke’s skin!” This rat-a-tat volley of information is halted only when Landis, 60, is beckoned to the camera.
The bulking, bearded filmmaker ushers me into the barn, which is brimming with an assortment of extras shabbily clad in 19th-century garb. Landis inspects them and evicts two. “Too clean, too healthy,” he says as he packs them off outside. The scene that unfolds, involving both Burke and Hare (Serkis), who are hatching a dastardly whispered plan, is smoky and quiet. The two look furtive.
Landis is pleased. “You are very much going to like these men,” he continues once the scene is done. “The movie fails if you don’t.” Landis laughs. “I think we’re doing something different, and something strangely accurate with this story.” The Burke and Hare story is no newcomer to the screen. Landis himself has found 16 different cinematic incarnations, and has watched 12, from Britain, France, Germany, Italy and America.
“The Flesh And The Fiends is one of the better ones with Donald Pleasance and Peter Cushing,” he says, pondering the variable quality of the dozen he’s seen, “but the key factor is that every single one of those versions has been set in the Victorian period, and yet it is not a Victorian story. It is earlier, 1828, and it is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1828 and 1829, which is extremely specific.”
He smiles. “So this picture is going to look different from any of the others because we are doing it pretty accurately. The great irony is we are doing a comedy and it is historically the most accurate one yet.”
In telling his version of the tale, Landis is determined to do justice to both the setting and the story, hence his decision to turn to popular performers for his malign bad-men cast as likeable leading men — Serkis, who has followed his scene-stealing performance as Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy with the likes of King Kong and Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll, and Pegg, the writer-director-star of TV series Spaced and hit comedy films including Hot Fuzz and How To Lose Friends And Alienate People.
Australian actress Isla Fisher (who at least has Scottish parents) joins them. The big names are important: Landis hasn’t made a high-profile movie in more than a decade, his sequel Blues Brothers 2000 was critically reviled, and he needs the box-office draw. Pegg, a father of one, stays at his table in the byre cum tavern after his scene with Serkis is over to explain how working with Landis came about. “Shaun Of The Dead brought us to his attention,” says Pegg. “He is a voracious consumer of film and TV so I guess he backtracked and discovered Spaced.”
Then came the big LA meeting. Landis called him up and took him to see Terminator Salvation “in dinner jackets”, before treating him to a meal “at the diner where Michael Mann filmed the Pacino-De Niro moment in Heat”, where he pitched him Burke And Hare.
“It was a great date,” offers a deadpan Pegg. “No, seriously, it was great to hear John Landis so enthused about something. I know his other recent cinematic experiences have not been good for him. He has felt very much that he had been forced to do things he didn’t want to do and those films had not done well and he knows why. So the idea of his going back to do a smaller budget piece, which he had more control over, was really attractive to me. I am a great fan of American Werewolf and Trading Places.” Pegg’s role is the (slightly) less morally bankrupt of the duo, an actor and performer who is nudged towards malignant activity by the especially amoral William Hare. Their descent into murder is gradual; to begin with they’re humble scammers, selling mouldy cheese as a miracle cure, before fate places a dead body in their path.
“It starts out almost innocently,” Pegg explains. “They have a dead body that they sell, and then they try grave robbing but that doesn’t work because the bodies are so rotten. Then they start to kill people.
“The first people they kill are almost on their last legs anyway and it is a gradual descent into homicide. It is in the great tradition of the black comedy. That is exactly what it is.”
In Landis’s movie Burke is inspired by his passion for his lover, played by Fisher, and his desire to help fund her theatrical ambitions and makes a noble sacrifice at the end to save her from the gallows.
Pegg says: “It is an honourable thing that he does, sacrificing himself for love. Even more so it is a trick to get people to believe that he was somehow gallant.”
Landis adds: “In our version Burke is more like the innocent, and Hare is the Machiavellian, the one who is amoral.
“There is a human story in there, too, particularly with Burke: the way he has to weigh and try and balance up his moral depravity and his own love. Burke is the slightly innocent guy who goes along with it, which is no excuse at all. In some ways Burke is the bitch and Hare is the butch,” he laughs.
“Hare is the schemer with the plan; I see them as a bumbling duo who constantly get themselves into scrapes,” adds Landis.
Much like an evil Laurel and Hardy then, I ask Pegg. The English actor, who got married in Glasgow in 2005, smiles. “Yes, just like Laurel and Hardy except the scrapes these guys get themselves into involve killing people. They aren’t that clever. Hare is fairly smart in that he is able to happen upon the plan, but both are very simple guys who are living hand to mouth and who find a way to make a lot of money.”
As Pegg leaves the table I stay put, awaiting the arrival of his co-star, Serkis, who’s loitering outside in the yard with the geese and other assorted fowl. As he arrives I offer a lame joke about fowl play. Serkis smiles politely. He joined the cast relatively late, taking on the role vacated by the former Doctor Who, David Tennant. “William Hare is pretty amoral,” Serkis begins. “There is no kind of maliciousness intended. It is a way of making a buck.”
Serkis says his and Pegg’s main challenge is persuading the audience to care for their rather rum characters, something that might prove slightly easier for his co-star. “You have to be invested in these guys to be able to care about what happens to them in the sad scenes at the end,” says Serkis.
History records an unfortunate end for the two men. “And Simon’s character he has done it for love, really. He martyrs himself because he has this relationship, and Hare has a very happy relationship with his wife as well, although she is an alcoholic. He adores her and it is devoted to her and it is a charming and quite innocent sort of relationship.
“So I hope you do side with them; they are working class and in many ways the villains of the piece are the doctors who are orchestrating them and using them.
“William Hare is always saying, ‘Life’s short. We all know we are going to die as soon as we are born so might as well help them along a bit and make a bit of money on the side while we are doing it.’”
The film’s comedy, he says, is very wide ranging, “all the way from the broad slapstick side to gags to silly stuff to something more sophisticated with wordplay. The delivery of the subtext is important, too.
“It is not a gag-laden film. It is not about jokes; the situations are darkly comic and the characters’ reactions to it are too. It is interesting in that respect. It is not cheap comedy. When John Landis and me talked about it when I first met him, we talked about [the 1940 Howard Hawks comedy] His Girl Friday and how we go from quite serious social comment to broad comedy.”
As our conversation winds up, Landis’s thundering voice rumbles across the set. The extras loitering in the barn start to readjust themselves, making sure they’re not “too clean” or “too healthy”. Serkis notices a smile spread across my face.
“That’s the weird thing,” he whispers. “It is this strange spoof comedy and yet it also feels like a historical drama. I guess that’s John Landis for you.”
Burke And Hare (15) is in cinemas on Friday.
