Paul

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost wrote the screenplay, with Greg Mottola directing. They described the project to Spielberg while working with him on Tintin; he joked about a cameo, so they wrote the scene and held him to it. In the film Paul suggests healing powers to Spielberg over a speakerphone in 1980, and Spielberg recorded the line himself at an ADR stage in Los Angeles, riffing with Seth Rogen. On set Rogen did not play Paul at all. His motion capture was recorded separately, in an Xsens suit at a Culver City stage in May 2009, while on location Joe Lo Truglio wore kneepads, hid behind a chair or a bush and read the lines back. Double Negative also built a full size rubber Paul puppet and a headless, armless version for Nick Frost to carry, and delivered 750 shots with a crew of almost three hundred. It is a British and American co-production shot mainly in the New Mexico desert and at the Albuquerque Convention Center, where the San Diego crowd of the opening comes from. A good fit if you want the alien himself to be the foul mouthed one and the references left unexplained. Not for anyone bothered by a long running joke at creationism’s expense; Kristen Wiig’s character carries that thread across the whole film.