Simon Pegg And Peter Chelsom On ‘Hector & The Search For Happiness,’ Robin Williams

SIMON PEGG: He is in a place of calm dissatisfaction. He's sort of, I mean really it looks like he has everything, cause he's really got quite a nice life and he's pretty ok off. And he's got a very beautiful partner in Rosamund Pike's character Clara, but all those things don't amount to his happiness, which kind of goes to show that you know, that kind of malaise can affect anybody really. So, yeah, he's just a bit confused. He's a psychiatrist, and he should be making people happy, but he's unhappy so he decides to remedy that with a gigantic trip.

SP: I think it gives him, it gives him, some context for his happiness, because initially, he just doesn't know if he's happy or not because his life is so sort of comfortable, and you know, without bumps or color that he has to go out there and find some context for his happiness. So, actually, it teaches him, without giving anything away, spoiler wise, that maybe he was happy but he just didn't know it.

PETER CHELSOM: We filmed in so many places- Vancouver, Los Angeles, London, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Tibet, L.A....

SP: L.A.

PC: L.A., Austria, Bavaria. I mean, it was ridiculous. I have to say that, one of my favorite memories was in the mountains of Bavaria when the snow fell literally that much [gestures] the night before, a record snowfall in October, and it gave us this incredible snowscape that I had been looking for and waking up that following morning and being told we couldn't go up the mountain which was another disaster, and then we got up the mountain and there was just this — the film just opened up to another limit, and it was, you know, it was an unbelievable moment.

SP: Every territory kind of had a specialness to it, you know, right from just being in Vancouver, which is a town I really love to going to new places I've never been to like Johannesburg and Shanghai which is extraordinary. This sort of you know... Tibet which was educational and and, yeah, these extra little shots we did in the Bavarian, do you remember the town we went to in Bavaria? I woke up and it was like waking up in a Christmas card... It snowed so much as Peter said, the town was all like chocolate blocks beautiful anyway and we woke up and it snowed and I felt like I had lived in a Christmas cake.

PC: Chocolate blocks?

Simon Pegg: Chocolate blocks.

PC: Definitely.

SP: Yeah, I think it's condition of modern living in a way, that, and I'm not in, it's a tough thing to sympathize with when you're not fighting for survival everyday. There are people in the world who have a far harder time then sort of, the middle classes but, I think that the key thing in this story was to pick a seemingly ok person, you know someone who should be ok, cause it teaches us I think that everyone is susceptible to not being happy, and yeah, I felt that a little bit. The trouble is we've got so much choice these days, we've got... it sounds so esoteric, it's what Twitter calls a first world problem. We have so much choice, and there's so much comfort we have no idea what's what. We're kind of like, numb, and a bit dead, a bit zombie like. We saw in South Africa, where we saw areas that were extremely poor, there were people there who had a much better idea of what happiness was — their lives weren't easier and they might have been happy as much- but when they were happy, they really, really were happy, like smiling, beaming

PC: Many more smiles then say, Beverly Hills on a Saturday morning.

SP: Which is a strange paradox.

SP: It's, it's such a tragedy, and, for me as a huge fan of his and someone whose been totally inspired by him, it's a great loss. To everyone it's a great loss, but, if it can teach us one thing it's that fame and money don't mean a damn thing, you know. People are often, in this current society, in this sort of celebrity obsessed, aspirational society, think, oh yeah, that's the key. If I can just get that or if I can look at these people that have that and envy them or, and, you know, and really it doesn't matter that much. It can, it can I guess money can put a salve on things, it can help you distract yourself from being depressed with various self-medications like, money and clothes or whatever, but ultimately, you know happiness comes from somewhere deeper and is more pervasive and more complex, and I think it is such a shame. I loved him dearly, and it's a terrible thing.