MPAA Rating: R (for violent content including some graphic images, and language)
Running Time: 121 minutes
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent
Directed by: Edgar Wright
Screenplay by: Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg
Produced by: Nira Park, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner
Executive Producer: Natascha Wharton
The biggest smash of the year in the U.K. (where it had the sixth-biggest opening of all time for a comedy), Hot Fuzz is the action-packed new comedy from the makers of the hit movie Shaun of the Dead.
Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the finest cop London has to offer, with an arrest record 400% higher than any other officer on the force. He’s so good, he makes everyone else look bad. As a result, Angel’s superiors send him to a place where his talents won’t be quite so embarrassing -- the sleepy and seemingly crime-free village of Sandford.
Once there, he is partnered with the well-meaning but overeager police officer Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). The son of amiable police chief Frank Butterman (Jim Broadbent), Danny is a huge action movie fan and believes his new big-city partner might just be a real-life "bad boy," and his chance to experience the life of gunfights and car chases he so longs for. Angel is quick to dismiss this as childish fantasy and Danny’s puppy-like enthusiasm only adds to Angel’s growing frustration.
However, as a series of grisly accidents rocks the village, Angel is convinced that Sandford is not what it seems and as the intrigue deepens, Danny’s dreams of explosive, high-octane, car-chasing, gunfighting, all-out action seem more and more like a reality.
It's time for these small-town cops to break out some big-city justice.
Written by Pegg and director Edgar Wright, Hot Fuzz reteams Pegg and Frost alongside a killer cast. In addition to Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, the stellar lineup of talent includes Paddy Considine (In America), Timothy Dalton (The Living Daylights), Martin Freeman (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Paul Freeman (Raiders of the Lost Ark), Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest), Lucy Punch (The Class), Anne Reid (The Mother), Billie Whitelaw (The Omen), Stuart Wilson (The Mask of Zorro), Edward Woodward (The Equalizer), and plenty of surprises!
Growing up in the small U.K. city of Wells in Somerset, Edgar Wright was an inveterate watcher of cop movies. The young man often stayed up through the night to catch an action-packed “fuzz” picture, because, Wright now admits, “I didn't have a video recorder until I was 17. I did have a particular fixation with the cop films; the Dirty Harry films – particularly the first one – and other gritty ‘60s and ‘70s films, as well all those ‘80s films like Lethal Weapon and Die Hard.”
The then-amateur filmmaker parlayed all his appreciation and knowledge into a cop movie called Dead Right, made when he was just 18. Over a dozen years later, the long arm of the celluloid law once again grabbed hold of the now-professional director’s creative impulses.
At the time, Shaun of the Dead, the 2004 “rom zom com” [i.e., “romantic zombie comedy”] that Wright and Simon Pegg co-created, following up their award-winning collaboration on the U.K. sitcom Spaced, had become a worldwide sleeper hit (including in the U.S., as the inaugural release of the then-newly formed Rogue Pictures). Accolades (including BAFTA Award nominations) and a wealth of U.K. and U.S. fan support made the movie’s success all the sweeter. “The enthusiasm was overwhelming,” Pegg recalls.
But Wright and Pegg wondered what they and the rest of the movie’s creative team should do for their next move – and their next movie. A number of ideas came up before Wright realized that he could now put on-screen his “boyhood fantasy of the kind of excitement and action that I never saw, as a child in a town where that s—t never happens. Simon and I both grew up in the West Country; I’m from Somerset and he’s from Gloucester. After making Shaun of the Dead in North London, where we live now, it seemed appropriate that we make a British movie in the area where we grew up.” So it was that the duo set out to do for the Action Movie what Shaun of the Dead had done for the Zombie Movie. That is, to filter a particularly American genre through a distinctly British perspective – and with equal parts humor, mayhem, and affection.
“There’s a great tradition of British crime films, with gangsters – but hardly any British cop movies, so that’s what we wanted to address,” elaborates Wright. “So few of what British cop movies there are actually use the iconography of the uniformed policeman. People from other countries say, ‘Oh, they’re so cute with their helmets and isn’t it funny; they haven’t got any guns.’ So we thought, how do we a) make a big British genre movie about British bobbies [i.e., uniformed policemen] kicking some ass, and b) get lots of guns into the picture?”
Pegg adds, “We wanted to combine ‘bobby’ and ‘cool’ – not just in the same sentence, but in the same movie.”
The script for Hot Fuzz ultimately called for some 50 speaking – and several non-speaking – roles to be cast. But for the buddy-cop duo of Nicholas Angel and Danny Butterman, there was never any doubt who would fill those shoes – Simon Pegg and his real-life best friend (and best man) Nick Frost, together again after Shaun of the Dead. And why not? “They’re just a brilliant pair on-screen,” marvels Wright. “Their chemistry is at the center of Hot Fuzz, even more so than in Shaun. In cop movie tradition, they’re not buddies all the way through; Nick’s character likes Simon’s from the beginning, but it isn’t initially reciprocated…”
Frost notes, “You know, now that Simon is married, I don’t get to see him as often. So when someone says, ‘Do you want to spend four months with your best mate,’ it’s always going to be a ‘yes.’
”Pegg enthuses, “Nick was always a part of the equation, always always. He’s our secret weapon. It’s very easy to write for Nick. I always thought he was the funniest guy I knew. He’s a very natural talent, and we have a really good on-screen relationship in that we are best friends and can bounce off each other so well.”
Although Frost wasn’t directly involved in the scriptwriting process, he was kept in the loop by Pegg and Wright throughout, and was able to make key contributions. “Simon and Edgar are quite happy for me to come in with suggestions. I came up with the name Danny Butterman,” reveals Frost. “I said I would only do the movie if I could call him Danny Butterman. It was a name I’d been thinking of; I wrote it down a while ago. It has a nice Hobbit feel to it.”
The son of genial Sandford police chief Inspector Frank Butterman (played by Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent), Danny is a likable but naïve young officer, a huge action movie buff who has never seen real-life action but would like to. “Jim Broadbent said that he’d never seen a more enthusiastic man than Danny; he’s enthusiastic about being alive,” laughs Frost. “He loves his dad and his village, and there’s no crime so he doesn’t have to work hard, and he gets to wear a uniform. When Nicholas Angel comes to Sandford, Danny sees in Angel everything he always wanted to be.”
Other actors from Shaun of the Dead were invited to join up for the new movie; there are also surprises in the roll call of the cast, and not all of them are credited – including an Oscar-winning filmmaker. Most gratifyingly, the filmmakers realized their dreams to cast venerable U.K. actors as prominent Sandford villagers. Happily, their first choices for each role were up for the project. And what first choices they were; “icons we adore,” as Wright says. “I’m proud of our ensemble in this movie.”
Timothy Dalton, whose Prince Barin portrayal in Flash Gordon is a personal favorite of Wright’s, remarks, “When I read the script, I realized that I’d never read anything like it before; I jumped at it. I said to Edgar during filming of this one sequence, ‘This is more fun than anything I ever did on a Bond movie.’”
Accordingly, the actor, who plays supermarket manager Simon Skinner in Hot Fuzz, performed his own stunts for that sequence, a car chase which Wright calls “the most fun part of the shoot by far; I’m lying in the back of a police car with its door off, watching a tiny TV monitor of what was being filmed, going down a road at eighty miles an hour, with grit and mud going all over my face because the door is open!”
Dalton adds, “Making this movie was also a thrill because of the people I was working with; even if we’d not worked together before, we are all part of our British industry.”
Paul Freeman, cast as Sandford’s reverend, says, “It grew more amazing every time anyone was added to the cast list. Edgar and Simon could quote lines from everything we’d all done.
“Weeks into the shoot, Edgar sidled up to me and said, ‘Paul, I want to ask you a question about Raiders of the Lost Ark…’ I said, ‘It’s [about] the fly, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Yes, how did you know?’ And I said, ‘Because everybody always asks about the fly [crawling into his mouth, while he remained in-character, on-screen].’”
Pegg marvels, “I remember one day in the green room just looking around and going, ‘There’s Mrs. Baylock from The Omen [actress Billie Whitelaw], Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark [Freeman], and The Equalizer [Edward Woodward]’ – I was in geek heaven!”
Frost adds, “With Jim Broadbent in particular, I kind of behaved around him how you would behave around an attractive girl that you fancy; I couldn’t really look at or talk to him at first. But the rehearsal period did let us see these people as other actors; you’d see them looking over their sides [i.e., script pages] and think, ‘oh I do that too.’”
The filmmakers’ modus operandi for Hot Fuzz was to plunder genre conventions – and then upend them. This is established at the beginning of the movie, when Simon Pegg’s character Nicholas Angel gets transferred to Sandford because he is just too good at his job. Edgar Wright says, “In many seminal cop movies, an officer gets demoted or sent away because they f--ked up or killed somebody. So we wrote this cop character whose arrest record is 400% higher than any of his other officers in the Met[ropolitan London Police] and, rather than being commended for his efforts, he’s sidelined.”
Similarly, instead of the usual three-act structure employed by most action movies, Wright and Pegg split Hot Fuzz into two very distinct sections; the first features deliberate restraint and focuses on inactivity, as Angel is forced to deal with missing swans, church fairs, and a village in which nothing of any note seems to happen...save for a few suspicious deaths. The second half of the film, in which Angel takes arms against a sea of troubles, shifts into top gear with car chases, explosions and John Woo-esque gunplay.
Also amped up in this telling are the most ordinary aspects of police work. “When we interviewed police officers and asked what the one part of the job is that you never see dramatized on film, they all said ‘the paperwork!’” laughs Wright. “When you go into these stations, for any offense – be it major or minor – you see policemen hunched over desks, filling out endless forms. So there is a lot of paperwork depicted in Hot Fuzz, but it’s done Man on Fire-style! In terms of the visuals, the idea was to take the quite mundane aspects of police work and try to make them look really flashy and muscular.”
Also thinking in muscular terms, what with the movie’s action sequences of car chases, fistfights, gunplay, horse-riding, and general athleticism, Pegg knew that Hot Fuzz would present something of a physical challenge for him. Not that this realization necessarily occurred to him while writing it with Wright; “when you write, you’re just writing specifically from the point of view of a particular character,” Pegg explains. “Later, when I was doubled up in agony because I’d strained my quad muscles running down the street, I was thinking, ‘You f--king bastard! Why did you write this ten-mile chase sequence for Angel!’”
So as not to be completely incapacitated by the scripted action, Pegg did get into shape for filming; he embarked upon a regimen that required the attention of no fewer than three personal trainers and went on a strict diet that forbade him from eating after 8 P.M. during production.
“I actually had it written into his contract,” confides Nira Park. “But Simon got completely obsessed, and during the course of filming he lost weight; his costumes kept having to be taken in.”
During location shooting in Wells, Pegg also decided to run, every morning, the two miles from the rented cottage he shared with Frost to production headquarters. Frost, on the other hand, decided that for his character, a strict physical regimen was not a necessity, and made the daily commute by car. “I would wave to Simon as we drove past,” he recalls. “And I never once stopped to give him a lift!”
Frost’s minimized preparation also found him disregarding a list of movies that Wright and Pegg had given him to watch; “I saw Bad Boys II – and that was it,” he admits. “I did talk to Somerset policemen about crime there; they told me about a low-speed tractor chase.”
For Pegg, playing Angel posed the biggest challenge of his career – and not just because of the physical demands. He notes, “I couldn’t rely on any of my tricks with him, because Angel’s not goofy; he’s absolutely focused all the time. You don’t see him smile until halfway through the film; he’s like a robot. You could argue that in Shaun I was just doing a different version of Tim [from Spaced], or more accurately a version of myself, whereas with Hot Fuzz it’s a total change.”
Jim Broadbent offers, “Simon set the tone for the acting for the rest of us. It’s very funny the way Angel takes everything so seriously, and Simon played it straight down the line.”
When it came time for the serious business of learning to handle guns, Pegg and Frost both knuckled up. “I love rough-and-tumble,” Frost says. “I’ve been practicing being an action hero for 25 years, so this felt great. I always try to take things in stride, but having two handguns, wearing a flak jacket, and having your best mate beside you – well, you can’t help but walk with a swagger.” Frost and Pegg grew fond enough of their guns to christen them Emma and Sarah.
The movie itself was christened Hot Fuzz early on. Pegg laughs, “It’s Edgar’s title; he wanted it to sound a ‘70s movie. Fuzz and Super Fuzz had already been taken decades earlier, so...”
Wright adds, “It’s also a tribute to the two-word titles of the ‘80s and ‘90s that often detailed the spirit of the film, if not the plot; Sudden Impact, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard – all brilliant examples. But the further you dive into the bargain bin, there’s Double Team, Cold Heat…I will be proud to add Hot Fuzz to the top of that pile!”
The bargain bin will have to wait a while, as Hot Fuzz opened at #1 in the U.K. and Ireland in February 2007 to the biggest numbers of the year so far. The opening weekend numbers were the sixth-biggest ever for a comedy in the U.K. and Ireland.
Wright says, “I hope that people in other countries enjoy our attempt to take the Yanks on at their own game. Having worked in this genre now, I’ve come out of it with even more respect for directors like Michael Bay who can marshal enormous action scenes. Also, I would love it if police recruitment went up because of our movie.”
Pegg adds, “Hopefully, we’ve done even more for cops with Hot Fuzz than we did for zombies with Shaun of the Dead, and given audiences a two-hour romp.”
Park notes, “One audience member said, ‘It’s like a fantastic U.S. action movie and a very funny English comedy had a great baby together!’ Well, I suppose that’s the response we were hoping for.”
Frost reports, “After I watched the movie for the first time, I spent about half an hour on the phone babbling about our high-octane cop-athon!”
