Notes from the Cutting Room Floor: Hot Fuzz

I’m Danny Boyd, this is Hot Fuzz, and these are the Notes from the Cutting Room Floor: the bits from the script that didn’t make the final cut.

// Before Hot Fuzz, there were detective shows in the UK. There were gangster crime films. But there weren’t cop action films like the US had. A gap in the market as Simon Pegg put it. 

// Pretty big deal then. So for some audiences it was a new precedent. For others it was just a really fantastic addition to a genre.

// As Nick Frost has said, Bond doesn’t count as a British action film because barely any of the action takes place in Britain and it’s shot with Sony money.

// Pegg’s part in Shaun of the Dead wasn’t unlike himself. The characters were roughly modeled off Pegg and Frost’s own friendship and lives. 

// This was a change, with Pegg playing supercop.

// This was a proper action film with stunt training and all. Pegg did basically all his own stunts.

// I love the movie because I love seeing Pegg play against type and be the most capable character, while still going through a massive character arc. He’d done MI3 with Tom Cruise by now. He’d done Hollywood action. But he wasn’t in the field yet. As Pegg says, he wanted to be on the other side of the action fence.

// One of the things that made Shaun of the Dead so great was the way it crossed genres. And I don’t just mean horror and comedy. We’ve seen plenty of that. I really mean subgenres. Rom Com meets Zombie horror.

// Just like Hot Fuzz isn’t simply action/comedy. It’s buddy cop 80s/90s American action flick meets Miss Marple British countryside whodunnit.

// The real humor is in the juxtaposition of the seriousness of the characters to the action and the setting. The same way the humor of Shaun was the full-on apocalypse with these every day people going about their lives.

Quote from Simon Pegg: I want people to be whooping, ya know? And cheering and feeling for all the characters and getting involved with it. Enjoying the kind of Ms. Marple Agatha Christie side to it as well as the John Woo all guns blazing side, you know? In the same way that Shaun of the Dead was like a date film, and there was something for everyone in it, I would like Hot Fuzz to be the same thing.

// Compared to Shaun of the Dead, this was a very hard movie to do. Wright is so capable of anything now, but you aren’t just born able to do this stuff. Big leap from Shaun in terms of scale.

// Just in terms of camera equipment, Hot Fuzz was more sophisticated compared to Shaun.

// It’s also worth remembering that this is Wright’s second feature film (third if you count Fistful of Fingers). And yeah, he’d developed a lot of his style and expertise on Spaced with Pegg and Frost. But his sophistication and all that he had previously learned, he really brought to Hot Fuzz.

// The number of VFX shots also grew from Shaun, which had some great ones. Like Fincher, Wright also uses a fair amount of invisible CG in his films. Using the tool to simplify production, without calling attention to itself. The blown up police station, for example.

// But it’s often the combination of cg and practical that sells it. Particularly with the use of real blood elements superimposed over green screen and other composites, like the death at the fair.

One more thing:

// Rain is one of the many reasons not a lot of action films are shot in the UK.

Quote from Wright: There’s a good reason not many action films are made in the UK, and we’re going to discover every single one of them… If you remember on blog number I said that there was a reason… (Referring to all the rain).

Watch Next:

• Man on Fire (2004)

• The Wickerman (1973)

• Dirty Harry (1971)