Hot Fuzz (2007) Script Review [BONUS]
Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg successfully import the cop film tradition to an English setting, packed with cleverness and exciting results.
Logline: An overachieving London police sergeant is transferred to a charming village where he gets the easygoing officers object to his fervor for regulations, all while a string of grisly murders take place.
Written by: Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright
Pages: 147
Act 1: 1-32
Act 2: 33-126
Act 3: 126-147
Imagine an Agatha Christie mystery filtered through the lens of Bad Boys and the Hot Fuzz screenplay is your uncle! A love letter to the cop film genre with its own unique flavor, moving briskly through its 147 pages1, it is the answer to the question, “What if a cop film was made in England?”
Here’s the premise: Police constable Nicholas Angel is a rising cop in the London Metropolitan police service. He’s efficient, he’s incorruptible, and is fastidious in enforcing the law. To reward him— and get rid of him at the same time— his superiors promote him to sergeant… in a little village called Sanford in Gloucestershire. Angel struggles to adjust to the unassuming pace of life in Sanford— there’s nothing for him to do. He also endures the disdain of his new colleagues— that is, except for PC Danny Butterman. The son of Sanford Inspector Frank Butterman, Danny hero-worships Angel as the ultimate real-life bad-ass cop. That’s why when people suddenly begin dying in mysterious and gruesome ways, Danny is the only person to believe Angel that the deaths are connected; they are murders.
Hot Fuzz is crammed with as many clichés in the cop film genre as possible. Angel is the lone wolf police officer who doesn’t play well with others and is consequently sidelined; the killer grabs an innocent bystander to use as a human shield in a confrontation; and the main villain turns out to be the mild-mannered superior officer. Although Frank Butterman is the mastermind, Hot Fuzz takes a page out of the plot twist in Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express— the murders are being committed by Sanford’s most upstanding citizens, all belonging to the local Neighbourhood Watch Alliance (NWA). Their reason? To ensure that nothing would mar their chances of winning the Village of the Year award. A solicitor and his mistress are decapitated for being terrible in a local production of Romeo and Juliet; a land developer is blown up for building a garish mansion that sticks out against the village aesthetic; an editor for the local paper gets his head smashed in by a falling stone for terrible puns and spelling mistakes; and a florist for opting to move to a rival village. Other victims include a gold-painted mime, a shoplifter, and a bunch of underage children that Angel arrested on the eve of starting work. All to keep the crime rate in Sanford a low if non-existent statistic.
The clichés, however, are deliberate. When Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright wrote the Hot Fuzz screenplay, they would frequently consult Roger Ebert’s Big Book of Hollywood Clichés to see how many entries they could cram into it. They also watched a lot of action films (about 138, more or less) to immerse themselves in the genre. Yet Hot Fuzz is not sneering at these tropes; nor is it a parody. It’s a love letter. Cop films are plentiful around the world, but Wright and Pegg saw that there weren’t any real equivalents set in England. And so, they set out to correct it. The result is uproarious.
Something that took me by surprise is how the Hot Fuzz script has little stage direction. This was deliberate— Pegg and Wright had to fit in a lot of dialogue to keep it within a reasonable page count. Just as Wes Anderson doesn’t spell out his visual flourishes, transitions, or imagery in his screenplays, Pegg and Wright avoid going into detail. For instance, the opening scene in Hot Fuzz introduces us to Nicholas Angel in a highly visual and distinctive manner that sets the tone for everything about to follow.
Compare the way it was written with the way it was filmed.
It only adds up to two pages, using ‘INSERT’ to indicate the cutaways and the images in the briefest possible description.
The same goes for how Pegg and Wright write the montage for Angel traveling from London to Sanford2.
As well as with using ‘Later’ to show when a scene cuts to a new scene instead of using several sluglines, thereby saving space.
Lesson: Keep stage directions simple and barebones; it’ll keep you within the typical 120-page script count and make it easier to read.
Additionally, the action is also quite brief. That helps to make it a fast read.
Something that the two writers excel at is in the art of foreshadowing. Just as Pegg and Wright did with Shaun of the Dead (#77 on the WGA List of 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century), it teases several of the outcomes but almost innocuously, as if they were throwaway lines. For instance, when Angel protests to the London Chief Inspector that he can’t make people disappear, it directly sets up the revelation that that is precisely what Frank Butterman is doing in Sanford.
The same goes for a scene at the local fair, almost halfway through the screenplay, that foreshadows how events will play out.
(In case it wasn’t clear, the “little people” refers to the NWA and the “cuddly monkey” refers to Danny).
And this joke about a character who is fated to die:
As well as this reference to Tim Messenger about to die:
So that by the time the big reveal happens, there’s a nice sense of satisfaction.
Lesson: Use subtle foreshadowing to set up stakes (and incentivize viewers to return for multiple viewings).
Partly for laughs, largely to get a point across as simply as possible, Pegg and Wright use commentary, such as when Angel is researching in the library…
… or when Angel explains his over-elaborate theory to Skinner in a confrontation…
Incidentally, the above is one scene that doesn’t even begin to describe the level of visual detail that would go into it when it was assembled in the editing room; here, it’s just one big block of dialogue prefaced by a humorous comment.
The same goes for character introductions. Unless absolutely vital, the writers avoid detailed character descriptions; take, for instance, how the village people are introduced:
Lesson: Brevity is a screenwriter’s most valuable tool.
In order for Hot Fuzz to work—or any screenplay, really— it needs an emotional core. Here, that core is the friendship that blossoms between Angel and Danny, in the vein of a buddy cop movie. Early on, we are told that all Angel thinks about is the job; this line of dedication ultimately costs him a relationship. His ex, Janine, insists that until Angel meets someone he cares about more than his work, he won’t be able to switch off. This “someone” becomes Danny, although it remains mostly platonic. An early draft had a romantic interest for Angel but she was removed in order to keep the focus on the two men; however, some of her dialogue was given to Danny. When Angel goes to get a Peace Lily plant as a birthday present for his new friend, it was initially supposed to be for the love interest, allegedly named Victoria.
In order to create a believable world of the British police, both in the cities and villages, Pegg and Wright interviewed at least 50 police officers while taking tours around several police stations in the country. Their diligence yielded some memorable material for the script. Angel’s line “I prefer to think my office is out on the street” was directly inspired by the many interviews, while the scenes of amped up paperwork was the result of officers complaining that cop movies and TV shows always skipped over that part of the job; incidentally, these scenes were also written with brief description.
Additionally, other moments such as the escaped swan, buying cake as punishment, and taking a translator to talk to a farmer was also based on real anecdotes.
Lesson: Research can deliver some great material moments for your screenplay.
But Hot Fuzz is more than about its two main characters. Sanford feels like a real village because it is populated with memorable characters. Even with few scenes, their personalities are so distinct that they stick in your brain. Take Angel’s colleagues, for instance. Detectives Wainwright and Cartwright are depicted as twin-like characters with sardonic wit…
PC Walker mumbles his lines (and he’s always with Saxon the dog)…
PC Fisher is mild and dim (though he later turns out not to be dim after all)…
And PC Doris Thatcher, the only female working in the station, uses innuendos.
Outside the station, Sanford gives us personalities such as Joyce Cooper who is introduced to us in a humorous interaction…
Simon Skinner, the richest man in town with obvious villain vibes…
Tom Weaver, the civilian liaison for the NWA who lords over the CCTV cameras in the village…
And Reverend Shooter, who has one of my favorite lines in the entire screenplay.
Lesson: Give your characters a distinctive personality trait to make them instantly memorable in a crowded screenplay.
The Hot Fuzz screenplay contains a thread cut in the editing room revolving around Weaver’s grandson, Gabriel, who turns out to be the leader of a hoodie gang that eventually comes to Angel’s aid in the third act. Although it adds a nice little touch of irony, it doesn’t really lead anywhere, making sense for its removal.
Writing a screenplay can take a lot of time. This is no exception. It took Pegg and Wright eight months to write the Hot Fuzz first draft. After this, they spent 18 months conducting research (which also consisted of watching a lot of movies!). Armed with this material, another nine months were spent refining and revising the screenplay. It become the second installment in the unplanned Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, which kicked off with Shaun of the Dead. Like that script, Hot Fuzz3 is light on its feet, full of fun, and unmistakably British. From start to finish, it puts the pedal to the metal, and the results are fantastic.
Notes:
Murray, Gary - Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost talk HOT FUZZ | Bigfanboy.com
When transcribed from an interactive version that doesn’t have a page count.
This scene was used particularly memorably in the video essay, “Edgar Wright - How to Film Visual Comedy” by Every Frame a Painting.
The title has no meaning— it follows the style of two-word titles of action movies from the 80s and 90s, where seemingly unrelated adjectives and nouns were paired up, like Lethal Weapon or Die Hard.