Information about the production process:
Pre-Production:
Research & script:
The script was written for 18 months which the first draft took 8 months to develop, then after watching about 138 police/crime films (while Nick Frost only watched one movie that was Bad Boys 2) and having about 50 interviews with police officers for research and for more ideas, they managed to complete the script after another nine months.They were looking for a title with 2 words just like the action movies from the 80's and 90's. Shaun of the dead is the first film of 'Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy', to which Hot fuzz is the second film and lastly The World's End as the third one.
Location Search:
Working Title went to search for several towns in South West England looking for the right filming location around 2005. The reason why they only searched around the that area was because Pegg and Wright are both from West Country to which Pegg explained that "...It seemed like it was the perfect and logical thing to drag those kind of ideas and those genres and those clichés back to our beginnings to where we grew up...".They found a location called Stow-on-the-Wold however they got rejected to film there so they decided on filming in Wright's hometown which is Wells in Somerset. Wright wanted the Church of St.Cuthbert to be the centre building for the 'town' of Sandford while the Wells Cathedral was digitally painted out of every shot of the village. The filming location was not lawyas in the same place as some also took place at the Hendon Police College, a driving school skid pan and a athletic track. The Filming started on 19 March 2006 and continued for 11 weeks.
Casting:
First off, Hot Fuzz includes many cameos from Edgar Wright as a shelf-stacker at the Somerfield’s supermarket (since he used to be one at the same supermarket as the film for five years when he was younger), to Director Garth Jennings being a crack dealer that got shot in the opening montage when showing Angel’s career but in the opening we also see Peter Jackson as Father Christmas that stabs Angel in the hand with a knife. We also get to see Cate Blanchett eyes while she’s in a mask and playing Angel’s girlfriend called Janine.
Jim Broadbent had the role of Frank Butterman made just for him because he approached Wright and peg at the BAFTA’s in 2004 to ask for a role in one of their films. Nick Frost was the one who named his own character because while Wright and Pegg were writing the script, they wanted to include Frost in the film but if they wanted him to be in it then they would have to let him name his own character since that was his condition.
Most of the casting are NWA that are respected British actors who have already played a as villain before so that the audience would already suspect who they are however it wasn’t noticed by people that were unfamiliar to them like the Americans. Bill Bailey played two characters which were the Sergeants Turner but to show a difference, one of their police uniform said lain Banks and the other said lain M. Banks however this joke was also unnoticed by some Americans.
Post-Production:
Editing:
The dramatized scene of Nicholas doing a lot of paper was inspire by the editing style Tony Scott used in Domino since the interviewed police officers mentioned that paperwork isn’t seen in films even when it’s one of the jobs that police officers tend to have. Wright also used a hand-cranked camera that is also similar to what Tony Scott uses, to shoot-out the courtyard so that it gives a quick-pace timing with an unexpected speed. When Ann Reid is on her monologue before she’s murdered, Wrights uses a zoom instead of a dolly push-in to make the scene seem more un-modern and also like a film from the 70’s. After test audiences disliking the fact that Danny would be getting killed, Wright used the scene at the graveyard as a principle photography that was shot in a way to make it like a reshoot dropped in. The film would have been longer for about half of an hour but they had to cut the film because the film was already long.
Effects:
Blood and gore was present a lot throughout the film like Shaun of the Dead and the reason why it was used in a huge amount was because the visual effects supervisor Richard Briscoe explained that "…the more extreme you make it, the more people know it is stylised and enjoy the humour inherent in how ridiculous it is…”. The most long-drawn-out gore was around when Tim messenger’s head had been crushed by a falling part of the church.
Special Effects:
Wright planned the movie to have the glass at the deli counter (during the super market shoo-out) to shatter but then decided not to since it was curved glass so he decided to put sounds of bullets ricocheting off of bulletproof glass so Skinner had it all prepared and made his deli out of bulletproof glass so that it will be helpful when the fuzz would arrive but because the cops rammed the shopping carts into it (which happens at the end of the scene), they were able to break the glass. He also wanted more broken windows in the scene of the car chase but the budget wouldn’t allow doing so.
Audio Effects:
Hot Fuzz’s soundtrack album was released on 19th February 2007 in the UK (which includes 22 tracks), 17 April 2007 in the USA & also Canada (that includes 14 tracks). It was called ‘Hot Fuzz: Music from the Motion Picture’. Arnold’s score has a compilation soundtrack called “Hot Fuzz Suit” alongside Robert Rodriguez’s score called ‘Avenging Angel’ (he hardly watched the movie when he wrote it). One of Jon Spencer’s tracks are called “Caught by the Fuzz” and the other one is called “Here come the Fuzz” (both were composed purposely just for this movie). The film has a mixture of British rock from the 60’s & 70’s including songs from T.Rex, Arthur Brown, Cloud 69, The Kinks, The Move, The Troggs and much more. The film also includes different police sirens that were used in the past.
Production:
The filming started on 19 March 2006 in Wells in Somerset. They had some difficulties upon choosing the location of the film because since Pegg and Wright are both from West Country, Working Title were looking at some towns around South West England. The first location they found rejected them so they finalised the decision that it would be filmed in Wells in Somerset (Wright’s hometown). Some things that they were forced to change because of the concerns about their budget were Wright’s idea of the glass at the deli counter to shatter during the supermarket shooting scene (but it shattered anyway) and another change was that Wright also wanted more windows to break during the car chase scene.
Purpose-The reason why Hot Fuzz was produced:
The main reason why Hot Fuzz is centred around cops is because Edgar Wright was wanting to write and direct a cop film since he thought that in the UK, there isn’t any tradition of cop films & himself and Simon Pegg felt that other countries had its own way of brilliant cop action films so they decided to provide a slight ‘traditional’ cop movie for the UK.
As mentioned before, Pegg and Wright interviewed about 50 police officers and many lines in the film are actually from what the police officers had mentioned to them for example when Nicholas Angels exclaims “I prefer to think my office is out on the street”. The scenes of where Nick was doing paperwork was also mentioned by the police officers to which they commented that it’s a huge part of the job that isn’t shown on any television shows of films that involves cops. When they visited Brixton Police Station to get more information, all of the officers refused to speak to them even when they offered to take them to a pub and the reason was because the liaison officer mistakenly told the other officers that they were journalists.