Paul

Paul is a 2011 science-fiction road comedy directed by Greg Mottola and written by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who also star as two British comic-book and sci-fi fans travelling across the American Southwest after attending Comic-Con. Their trip changes completely when they encounter Paul, a wisecracking alien voiced by Seth Rogen, who is on the run from federal agents and trying to get home. The film works both as a road movie and as an affectionate parody of UFO mythology, Spielberg-style wonder and wider science-fiction fandom, with much of its humour coming from the clash between desert paranoia, pop-culture obsession and Paul’s completely unromantic attitude to his own extraterrestrial identity.

Although the story begins with Comic-Con and moves through famous UFO-country landmarks, the production was based largely in New Mexico, where principal photography spent extensive time in the desert and surrounding roads, with additional work at the Albuquerque Convention Center, which was dressed to resemble San Diego Comic-Con. The film also ties itself to very specific real-world stops along its road-trip route, including Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos, Las Vegas in New Mexico, and other desert and roadside locations across the Southwest. That gives the film a strong sense of movement through open highways, UFO folklore territory and isolated landscapes, so even when it plays things for comedy, it still feels rooted in the mythology of the American alien-road-trip imagination.