Hot Fuzz does for cop movies what Shaun of the Dead did for both zombie movies and romantic comedies. But that spread the wealth between two genres. Hot Fuzz is pure cop action fun. Officers Nick Angel and Danny Butterman find themselves living Point Break and Bad Boys II. Writer/director Edgar Wright knows his action. I may have finally met my match in this interview.
CraveOnline: Are there more deleted paperwork scenes?
Edgar Wright: No, all the paperwork is in there. There's quite a lot of deleted scenes on the DVD but all of the paperwork stuff is in there.
CraveOnline: That all made the cut.
Edgar Wright: Absolutely. We were very thorough.
CraveOnline: The sound design of this movie is so intense, how many hours did you spend in the sound mix?
Edgar Wright: It was very intense doing the sound mix. There's a lot of stuff that we do in the edits as well. Whilst we're editing we do a lot of work because within the style of the genre, I'm a big fan of sound. It's funny, actually, on the DVD for this, I'm going to put on the cop film that I made when I was 18. What's funny looking back at is, apart from all the obvious things, the thing that it's really, really lacking is sound. There's hardly any sound effects in it and it's amazing just what sound adds. And I just really, both on Shaun of the Dead and on this, kind of like making the sound mix really vivid. And because it was a cop film as well, we set out to make the loudest British film of all time. I think we succeeded. Calendar Girls is a close second.
CraveOnline: It's probably loudest film of all time period.
Edgar Wright: I would hope so. If we don't get an Oscar nomination for sound effects editing, I'm going to cry.
CraveOnline: You have to campaign for that. I've never seen a foreign film beat out a big American action movie for sound.
Edgar Wright: Maybe this is the one to buck the trend. Listen, if Under Siege can win a sound effects editing Oscar, we can.
CraveOnline: Did it?
Edgar Wright: Yeah because I remember the next year, Steven Seagal presented an Oscar and made some comment about the fact that he was pissed that Under Siege 2 did not get any Oscar nominations. I like to point out for the record as well that my favorite film title of all time is Half Past Dead. What an amazing title that is. Yeah, we want to do a sequel called Quarter to Wound. 10 Past F*cked.
CraveOnline: My favorite title is Hard Rain.
Edgar Wright: Hard Rain is pretty good. The other ones are good, there's one that I saw, I never seen it but there's one called Cold Heat. I think that's a pretty amazing title. What other good ones, I like Maximum Risk! Executive Decision is a good one. What a title that is.
CraveOnline: That was actually a good movie too.
Edgar Wright: On the DVD for Hot Fuzz, we've called all of the chapter headings a different two word titles. So it's like the first chapter is Administrative Decision. Second one is Excellent Force, Man Heat, Avian Breakout, Maximum Bullets, Total Screech.
CraveOnline: So we have to read all the titles in the scene selection screen.
Edgar Wright: Totally, you have to read all of it. And also, if we have had any criticism with this film, it's that it has too many endings, to which my answer is, "Have you never seen an action film in your life?" Every single action film has too many endings and the last three chapters on the Hot Fuzz DVD are Final Chapter, Final Chapter II and Final Chapter: The Final Chapter. If anybody has any issue with the length of Hot Fuzz and it having too many endings, my answer would be that Hot Fuzz is half an hour shorter than Bad Boys II. And 20 minute shorter than Miami Vice.
CraveOnline: Don't you remember when all movies were two hours long and they were a good two hours?
Edgar Wright: Yeah. We wanted to make sure that it was a full meal. And also, because the cop genre, there's so much to cover, we wanted to cover all bases. So I want people to go and see the film thinking, "I got a lot of movie for my $10. I've never seen so many edits or seen a British film that is that loud in my life." That's what I want people to come out.
CraveOnline: Did you top the number of cuts in Natural Born Killers?
Edgar Wright: You know, there is like 6,500 cuts in the film, in mine. Maybe. Somebody said it was the most edits they've seen since Requiem for a Dream. What's NBK, I wonder how many it is?
CraveOnline: I don't remember but that had a record for negative cutting.
Edgar Wright: Well, somebody said that the negative cutters on Hot Fuzz went a bit ape sh*t. They said our film had more cuts in it than Casino Royale four times over.
CraveOnline: The style was so intense throughout the whole movie even in the paperwork scenes. How hard was it to maintain that?
Edgar Wright: Well, all the stuff I'd done before like has been like from Spaced to Shaun of the Dead has been visually very dense and 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.
CraveOnline: No, I know someone.
Edgar Wright: Oh, another one. Me and you against the world.
CraveOnline: It's not me, it's someone I know.
Edgar Wright: Oh, someone you know? Jerry Bruckheimer?
CraveOnline: I have a friend who loves Domino, but you explain your passion for it.
Edgar Wright: 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*cking 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. So it was fun doing this because say the paperwork thing you mentioned, the idea for that was taking the most boring aspect of like cop work and making it so amped up and so it was funny doing those scenes and that was exactly the intention.
CraveOnline: I love action movies. Did you make this movie for me personally?
Edgar Wright: If you want us to do a personalized film, we do that as a service. Sort of like wedding videos. It costs maybe like $500, but for you personally, we will go out tomorrow with like a Hi-8 Camera and shoot Quarter to F*cked. Starring… whoever's in the Four Seasons lobby, we'll grab. Get Kirsten Dunst or like Molly Shannon. Who else is here today?
CraveOnline: A lot of people are doing press here today. You've got the Shrek voices, Halle Berry and Giovanni Ribisi for Perfect Stranger…
Edgar Wright: Giovani Ribisi in Quarter to F*cked. There you go. We'll shoot it outside on the lawn.
CraveOnline: What is the approach to, instead of combining two genres, immersing yourself in one?
Edgar Wright: We're both fans of action films and I've been obsessed with cop films at such an early age. Really, what we try to do is along with doing some serious research, like we did interview a lot of police officers which was like the kind of the proper hardware, although it was fun. It's fascinating. But we watched 138 films and really the key to that was just immersing ourselves in the genre. Because we were slightly outside our comfort zone of slackerdom, because both Spaced and Shaun of the Dead have been kind of about slackers and we can draw on our own life experiences, neither of us to our knowledge have been cops. I can't remember a single day that I've been a cop. So basically, we watched so many films, it was like taking a long hot bath in cop. It was like dropping a cop bath bomb in there. And we wanted to watch so many films, it's sort of that thing like if you have enough monkeys and enough typewriters, you can produce Shakespeare. We wanted to have enough monkeys and typewriters to produce Out for Justice. And what was your favorite title again, Hard Rain?
CraveOnline: Yeah, and it was great because they came out with one trailer for The Flood. Then it went away and a few months later, the same trailer came back and it was suddenly called Hard Rain.
Edgar Wright: In the UK, it had a different title. It was called Scattered Showers. "Scattered Showers with Minnie Driver." They cut Christian Slater and Morgan Freeman out completely. They made it into a romantic film.
CraveOnline: The killings in Hot Fuzz are so gory. Do you love violence?
Edgar Wright: I think in the '80s and '90s, I don't know quite what it started with but obviously the cliché of the villain having a spectacular death, usually to be impaled. Like the end of Sudden Impact features Clint shooting a man off the top of a roller coaster and him landing on a unicorn on the carousel and being impaled. That's a good way to go. The Last Boy Scout, Taylor Negron gets pushed off a gang plank and lands in a helicopter's blades. That is a good way to go out. So there's a good precedent for spectacular deaths in cop and action films and we wanted to really go all out on them. And also, going back, like I said earlier, the Agatha Christie films, they have a high body count. They were actually really bloodthirsty.
CraveOnline: Was there anything where you said, "That's too much?"
Edgar Wright: No. It was fun doing the murder scenes. I suppose the idea of the 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 80's used to have. Even Beverly Hills Cop was more violent than you would remember and I think so because 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 sort of try to recapture he illicit thrill of watching Die Hard or Lethal Weapon or Robocop or The Last Boy Scout, 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 and I like having an otherwise pleasant comedy having a kind of brief outbursts of swearing and ultra-violence.
CraveOnline: What draws you specifically to genre pieces?
Edgar Wright: I think it's just because they don't make enough films like this in the UK. Both Shaun and Hot Fuzz are both genre pictures of which there have been a distinct lack of in British cinema. You tend to make a different type of film and we wanted to rectify that.
CraveOnline: I know you're planning one more but why stop at three? Just do every genre.
Edgar Wright: I'd do a musical. I'd do a car chase film. I'd do a film about pro-life. I don't know why I said that. Pro choice actually. What else would we do? What about one of those Disney films like Incredible Journey with three animals on the run, animals voiced by Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Michael J. Fox? I'd go for that. Like an at the earth's core type of film. The kind of film that would have Doug McClure in it where they'd drill a hole in the earth. It's amazing that like in prehistoric films that the cave women always had amazing jugs. Was it like that? Everybody looked like Elke Summer. Not Elke Summer. Julie Ege and Raquel Welsh, and Caroline Munro. I'd like to make a film like Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. I think that's a genre that's been lacking. I'd like to see an extremely violent version of Solarbabies. Basically something in the skating genre, something like Prayer for the Roller Boys, or Gleaming the Cube. Like Can't Stop the Music where Steve Guttenberg's going down New York, "You can't stop the music." Write that down.
CraveOnline: How much of this is the British take on the genre and how much is just specifically doing movies like Bad Boys II?
Edgar Wright: Oh, the whole thing is that basically. In a way Hot Fuzz is on one hand very British and the other hand trying to be very American and that’s kind of the joke. The film kind of mutates half the way through and it's that point half way though were they watch Point Break and Bad Boys II. After that it starts to go off the scale. That's the idea really is that's kind of like the turning point in the film. Our idea was that they fall asleep during Bad Boys II which is quite amazing. I had this idea that Bad Boys II was the loudest film ever but Danny and Angel fell asleep during it. I had the idea like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, like this Nicholas Angel is asleep but Bad Boys II is filtered into his brain. You know if you fall asleep with the TV on and you start dreaming about what's on TV, is the idea is that he didn't see the last half of the film but he heard it. He woke up and now he knows Kung Fu.
CraveOnline: Are you thinking of expanding Don't, your trailer from Grindhouse, into a feature film?
Edgar Wright: I don’t know. If anyone wanted me to, I'd happily do it. The thing about my trailer, unlike maybe the other ones, is that the whole point of it is that there's no plot. Sometimes you see some of those trailers for European films and you're thinking, "I have no idea what the f*ck that is about." My idea to make it look like it was a 90 minute film condensed is to have a different actor in every single shot so it seems like its a new cast every [scene]. Nobody ever reoccurs. So in like 90 seconds there's like 30 actors in it which is crazy.
CraveOnline: Do you have a plot if you expand it?
Edgar Wright: Don't? I like the fact that it's turned into the Don't conference. I'd rather talk about that than Hot Fuzz. If it was into a feature it'd have to be like I've always really admired Dario Argento and Suspiria is one of my favorite films. Suspiria is I think one of the few films that feels like a dream you've had when you've had too much cheese. It's just like the weirdest bad dream you've ever had. I love those films that have the nightmare logic and don't really have any plots or story. It's just like horrible bad dream after bad dream.
CraveOnline: What are your thoughts on cake flushing?
Edgar Wright: This is a thing that's going to come up. Nick Frost's birthday was like a week ago, we'd been on this tour and this is our 11th city we've been to. It was Nick Frost's birthday and he got in the space of like 24 hours 2 big birthday cakes. His theory was he didn't want to add to his girth so the only thing to do to give it ceremony was to flush it down the toilet and film it. Nick is very impressed by America's toilet flushing. Very powerful flushing in the UK we don't always have those. It was a great way to see kind of like a birthday cake go down in flames. Now, we have all of this on tape. We've done 3 so far.
