Writer/director Edgar Wright follows up his twisted zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead with Rogue Pictures' Hot Fuzz, an equally funny take on cop movies. Hot Fuzz follows overachieving police sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) as he makes the transition from patroling London to keeping the citizens of the tiny town of Sandford safe. But Sergeant Angel soon discovers there's something not quite right about the seemingly peaceful community.
In your grizzlier set ups, where there any ideas you had to toss out because you thought they might have gone too far?
“No. It was fun doing the murder scenes. The idea for those was to really, on one hand, do an amped up Agatha Christie because the Hercule Poirot films have a high body count let’s not forget. I suppose the idea with the violence in the film was to kind of recapture the kind of the spirit of the hard R’s that cop films in the ‘80s used to have, even Beverly Hills Cop was more violent than you would remember.
I think because [I'm] of an age where most of those films I saw on VHS - usually I was watching them when I was too young to see them, rather at a brother's friend's house, and to sort of try to recapture the illicit thrill of watching Die Hard or Lethal Weapon or Robocop or The Last Boy Scout... You know, films that got increasingly kind of spectacularly violent in terms of people's demises and stuff. That was definitely the vibe we were going for of ‘R meaning R.’ I like having an otherwise pleasant comedy having a kind of brief outbursts of swearing and ultra-violence, scattered showers.”
Was filming the big shootout scenes a challenge for you?
“Yes, absolutely. The film cost like twice as much as Shaun of the Dead, but the ambition in the script is probably 5 times that in terms of the amount of characters and the plot and the action. It was really tough and a real challenge. I came out of it with even more respect for the action directors that I love. Doing that stuff is really tough, and doing it in the UK with the terrible weather was even worse.
What's funny is in that end shootout in the town square is that we never really had the roads closed off. We didn't really have the money to close down. It's kind of like the center of that town. So what's funny is that if you imagine every shot where you see if you can imagine behind the camera 50 school children and old ladies watching. It's really, really surreal. You have lots of French exchange students coming through all the time. It's really crazy.”
The style was so intense throughout the whole movie, even in the paperwork scene. How hard was it to maintain that?
“Well, all the stuff I'd done before has been, like from Spaced to Shaun of the Dead, has been visually very dense. I kind of like things being really snappy and having lots of transitions and stuff. Given that this was in the sort of cop/action genre and given the way that cinema has gone with Tony Scott and Michael Bay in the last 10 years, it was gift to go completely over the top. I'm probably the sole member of the Domino fan club.
Can you explain your passion for that Tony Scott film?
“With the recent Tony Scott films, I just like the fact that a 60 year old director is directing like a 20 year old. Man on Fire, the direction of it is absolutely crazy. I think it's too easy to dismiss him as an MTV sort of director. I think it does him a disservice. It is like style over content sometimes, but the style is f**king amazing. I'm just a big film fan and I don't get snooty about different films, because I appreciate different films for what they are. You can have something with long held steady cam shots and you can have Domino. There's room for both.
It was fun doing this because, say the paperwork thing you mentioned, the idea for that was taking the most boring aspect of cop work and making it so amped up. It was funny doing those scenes and that was exactly the intention of.... When we conceived the idea, there's a show in the UK called Heartbeats which is kind of like a really boring cop show about a cop in the country, and it's sort of like Sunday afternoon TV. Our thing was what if Tony Scott had to direct Heartbeat? So it was to take a really sleepy mundane end of the cop work and amp it up.
We did research with real police officers whilst we were writing. We interviewed lots and lots of police officers, both over the phone and in person. We went around London to some of the rougher neighborhoods and we went down to the country as well. We had this questionnaire for all of them and one of the questions was, ‘Which part of the job have you never seen dramatized on the screen?’ Every single one of them said that paperwork is 50% of the job. It's like being a teacher. Actually teaching the kids is like half of it. The rest of it is going [starts scribbling away]. I remember vividly we went to one rural station and there was this tiny room…with like 8 police officers who were all like hunched over their things, kind of going like that. There were all in their star vests and stuff and it was just this forlorn image of these officers doing their paperwork. So that's was the idea of that. ‘Let's make the paperwork the most exciting bit in the film to really amp it up.’”
Page 2: Edgar Wright on Budgets and Cate Blanchett's & Peter Jackson's Cameos
