Talking to Collider, Pegg says the film, directed by Superbad's Greg Mottola, will be a great "coming together" of the two comedy communities, in the U.S. and the U.K., including some faces we'll recognize from American comedy classics. "It's exciting. We're coming down to figuring out how we're going to do it, and how we're going to make Paul work." And he gives another synopsis of the geek odyssey:

The film is a story of two comic-book geek, fanboy types, who go to Comic Con. It's their trip of a lifetime across the United States. They're going to go to Comic Con, they're going to visit some geeky spots where they want to go. And when they visit Area 51 they happen upon an alien, who's out there, and he enlists them to help him get to a point where they need to meet his pickup ship. So these two guys end up getting involved in the craziest adventure you could imagine, and so it's basically myself, Nick [Frost] and Paul.

And Pegg says Paul, the alien, will be a mixture of practical effects and CG animation. The film should begin shooting in Santa Fe, NM around June 8. The film shoot will take around 10 weeks, but it's such a logistical nightmare, because of clearance issues, to film at Comic Con that he may not actually get to film there. He also says he and Pegg been working on the screenplay for years, since they pitched the idea, in an random, offhand way, to the Shaun Of The Dead producer. And by now, they've honed it and honed it, until it's the script he's proudest of in his career. [Collider]

Chow, the man behind Shaolin Soccer and CJ7, signed onto the project in September to both direct and star as Rogen's kung-fu sidekick Kato (A role made famous by Bruce Lee in the 1960s TV series), but news broke late last night that he was stepping down from the director's role due to "creative differences," although he will still be acting in the movie.

Producers are, apparently, confident that they'll have a replacement director by the end of the year, but all I have to say is this: When the creative differences are between the man who wrote Superbad and the man who made Shaolin Soccer, and the man who wrote Superbad won, then that's never a good thing.

Chow no longer to direct 'Hornet' [Variety]