Simon Pegg jumped at the chance to make a movie in six days after spending five years making two Mission: Impossible movies.

Due to delays caused by the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes, the British actor spent five years shooting Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning back to back.

So when he was offered a role in a small indie film that would take only six days to make, Pegg jumped at the chance to return to his filmmaking roots.

“I came off finally promoting that film and got home and an offer came in from a Welsh filmmaker called Jamie Adams and he said he was going to make a feature film in six days. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I want to do that!'” Pegg recalled on the Dish podcast.

The Shaun of the Dead actor explained that he and his co-stars, including Sofia Boutella, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Quentin Tarantino, improvised all their dialogue from Adams’s story outline and successfully made Only What We Carry in six days.

Reflecting on the experience, he continued, “It was so freeing and nice to be right back in the kind of basic sort of area of filmmaking where the crew’s quite small, you’re working every hour that you get during the day.

“It just reminded me of why I love making films and reminded me of back in the day with (Spaced and Shaun of the Dead collaborators) Edgar (Wright) and Nick (Frost) when we were making our movies, when you just work, work, work as a family, and it’s great.”

Highlighting the vast difference between making an action-packed blockbuster like Mission: Impossible and an indie like Only What We Carry, he added, “I’d spent more time in my trailer on Mission: Impossible than it took to make that film.”

Only What We Carry debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last month. It does not yet have a general release date.

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