Development Director
Edgar Wright wanted to write and direct a cop film because "there isn't really any tradition of cop films in the UK... We felt that every other country in the world had its own tradition of great cop action films and we had none." Wright and Pegg spent eighteen months writing the script. The first draft took eight months to develop, and after watching 138 cop-related films for dialogue and plot ideas and conducting over fifty interviews with police officers for research, the script was completed after another nine months. The title was based on the various two-word titles of action films in the 1980s and 1990s. In one interview Wright declared that he "wanted to make a title that really had very little meaning... like
Lethal Weapon and
Point Break and
Executive Decision." In the same interview, Pegg joked that many action films' titles "seem to be generated from two hats filled with adjectives and nouns and you just, 'Okay, that'll do.
Preparation and filming . During the latter half of 2005,
Working Title Films approached several towns in
South West England looking for an appropriate filming location. Pegg commented, "We're both [Pegg and Wright] from the
West Country so it just 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, so you could see high-octane balls-to-the-wall action in
Frome".
Stow-on-the-Wold was considered amongst others, but after being turned away, the company settled upon
Wells in
Somerset, Wright's hometown, of which he has said "I love it but I also want to trash it".
Wells Cathedral was digitally painted out of every shot of the
cathedral city, as Wright wanted the
Church of St Cuthbert to be the centre building for the fictional town of Sandford; however, the
Bishop's Palace is identifiable in some shots (and was itself used as the setting for some scenes). While shooting scenes in their uniforms, Pegg and Frost were often mistaken for genuine police officers and asked for directions by passers-by. Filming also took place at the
Hendon Police College, including the driving school skid pan and athletic track and at the
Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre at
Gravesend. Next to Hendon is
Mill Hill where Finchley Nurseries is located which is where the flower shop scene was filmed. The final scenes were filmed at the surviving ruins of
Waverley Abbey. Filming commenced on 19 March 2006 and lasted for eleven weeks. After editing, Wright ended up cutting half-an-hour of footage from the film.
Outside references Self-references Wright has said that
Hot Fuzz takes elements from his final amateur film,
Dead Right, which he described as both "
Lethal Weapon set in Somerset" and "a
Dirty Harry film in Somerset". Pegg and Wright have referred to
Hot Fuzz as being the second film in the "
Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy", with
Shaun of the Dead being the first and ''
The World's End'' being the third.
Other films Various scenes in
Hot Fuzz feature a variety of action film DVDs such as
Supercop and scenes from
Point Break and
Bad Boys II. Wright revealed that he had to get permission from every actor in each video clip, including stunt men, to use the clips and for the use of the DVD covers had to pay for the rights from the respective studios. The film parodies clichés used in other action movies. On the topic of perceived gun fetishes in these movies, Pegg has said, "Men can't do that thing, which is the greatest achievement of humankind, which is to make another human, so we make metal versions of our own penises and fire more bits of metal out of the end into people's heads... It's our turn to grab the gun by the hilt and fire it into your face." The film also includes various references to
The Wicker Man, in which
Edward Woodward had played a policeman tough on law and order.
Pop culture In 2020, Wright indicated on social media that the title of the film was an apparent reference to the 2004 debut studio album
Hot Fuss by
the Killers. However, he has also said that the title of the film "means nothing."
Special effects To illustrate the destruction of the mansion as a result of the gas explosion, gas mortars were placed in front of the building to create large-scale fireballs. The wave of fire engulfs the camera, and to achieve that effect, gas mortars were used again but were fired upwards into a black ceiling piece that sloped up towards the camera. When the sequence was shot at a high speed, the flames appeared to surge across the ground. For one of the final scenes of the film, the Sandford police station is destroyed by an explosion. Part of the explosion was created by using a set model that showed its windows being blown out, while the building remained intact. The actual destruction of the building was depicted by exploding a miniature model of the station. Similar to the work in
Shaun of the Dead, blood and gore was prevalent throughout the film.
Visual effects supervisor Richard Briscoe revealed the rationale for using the large amounts of blood: "In many ways, the more extreme you make it, the more people know it is stylised and enjoy the humour inherent in how ridiculous it is. It's rather like the (eventually) limbless
Black Knight in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail." The most time-consuming gore sequence involved a character's head being crushed by a section of a church. A dummy was used against a
green screen and the head was detonated at the point when the object was about to impact the body. Throughout the film, over seventy gunfight shots were digitally augmented; Briscoe's rationale for adding the additional effects was that "The town square shootout, for example, is full of extra little hits scattered throughout, so that it feels like our hero characters really do have it all going off, all around them. It was a great demonstration of [how] seemingly very trivial enhancements can make a difference when combined across a sequence." ==Promotion==