Nick Frost is all too familiar with the feeling of being an unwanted tourist. The comedian’s latest film “Get Away,” which he wrote and stars in, tells the story of a bumbling British nuclear family who takes a summer vacation to the fictional Swedish island of Svälta. The insular island is best known for staging an annual pageant that depicts the cannibalistic murder of four English soldiers — and believe it or not, the locals who stage this play aren’t thrilled to see four English guests in their town.
In a recent conversation with IndieWire, Frost explained that the genesis of the project emerged from his own family vacations to a similar Swedish island that never seemed particularly happy to see him.
“I spent a lot of time on a really small, very beautiful Swedish island over the last kind of 25 years. We have family who have a house on a tiny island,” Frost said. “It’s got 40 houses, no roads, no cars, no shop. In the summer there’s a shop and a restaurant. And I was always fascinated about how insular it was as a community. And how even after 20 years of me getting off that ferry, maybe sometimes two or three times a year, they never, ever got any warmer toward me. And I really like that. I kind of respected it.”
While the real island Frost visits stages no such play, that annual feeling of discomfort provided him a framework to riff on films like “The Wicker Man” and “Midsommar” that feature outsiders stumbling into unexpectedly deadly rituals.
“I love those kinds of historic traditions where every 10 years a village or a town will put on a huge play with thousands of extras. And I think it’s just incredible and fascinating,” Frost said, noting that his ambitions to stage a grand spectacle were somewhat thwarted by budget constraints. “And I think obviously when I wrote it, I imagined it to be in terms of scale a bit bigger. But then obviously you get to a point in budgets and as the film gets nearer to shoot it and it’s ‘Okay, so we’ve now lost this amount of money. So the 1000 extras we needed are now 40.’ You’re like ‘Oh, okay, well, this is what it’s going to be.’”
At the end of the day, “Get Away” is still a Nick Frost movie in every sense of the word. It’s filled with dry British comedy and over-the-top action sequences set to classic rock tracks. The film has drawn obvious comparisons to the movies that Frost made with frequent collaborators Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, particularly “Shaun of the Dead.” Frost doesn’t shy away from those parallels, noting that he continues to see horror and comedy as complimentary forces that can each make the other stronger when paired in the same film.
“I’m hard-pressed to tell them apart if I’m honest, it’s all the same thing,” he said when asked about his approach to combining horror and comedy. “I like undercutting horror with comedy. I think it gives the audience time to breathe. But it has to hit as a comedy and it has to hit as a horror film too. Because if the horror is not on par and the comedy’s weak, then you got fuck all. I think just to be honest, don’t try and please everyone. Essentially I made a film that Simon and Edgar might like to enjoy.”
An IFC Films release, “Get Away” is now playing in theaters.
