With just six days to go until Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s action comedy Hot Fuzz finally opens in the UK (most explosive Valentine’s Day ever, we’re saying), you’d probably be thinking that your excitement levels couldn’t be raised any higher.
Well, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Because Empire is delighted to present, exclusively for your edification and entertainment (at least until some sneaky bugger sticks it up on YouTube), the very last Hot Fuzz trailer, guaranteed to get your blood pumping like a sawn-off shotgun.
For this isn’t just any old trailer. Oh no. This little beauty – in our opinion, the funniest and fuzziest HF promo yet – has been personally edited by Mr. Edgar Wright, and features a musical score by one Mr. Robert Rodriguez. And it’s a rollercoaster ride that will blow you away!
We spoke to Edgar not more than ten minutes ago for his take on how the trailer came about:
“All the other trailers have been for mainstream audiences,” he said, “and we wanted to make a really geeky one. And when Robert’s score came in, I loved it, it sounded like something from [kickass ‘80s Powers Boothe movie] Extreme Prejudice, and I thought, ‘this is like trailer music’. He thought the same thing!”
A bit of background, in case you weren’t aware: David Arnold composed the music for Hot Fuzz, for all save two scenes, which Wright requested Rodriguez score. “This shows you how prodigious Robert is,” laughs Wright. “I asked him to do it, and I got the music back within 72 hours. The funny thing is, for those sequences the temp music I had been using was a cue from Terminator 2 called ‘Trust Me’, a big bombastic Brad Fiedel piece of music, and Robert said, ‘I’ve been using the same piece on Grindhouse!’”
We don’t want to say too much about the trailer before you watch it, so the following paragraph will be in spoiler text. Come back after you’ve seen the trailer to highlight this paragraph:
Wright hit upon the idea of captioning everything in the trailer, from the stars to the weapons to the swan and doughnuts, after hearing Rodriguez’ music. “Because it just keeps amping up, it’s perfect for that,” he laughed. “And because it has such a large cast, we thought it would be funny to flick through the cast really quickly. It’s really built for the internet crowd, and people who like to go through trailers frame by frame.”
The trailer also represents the last piece of scripting for Wright and Pegg, when they had to come up with names for the many guns featured in the trailer. “Nick helped out as well,” reveals Wright. “We had a lot of fun. My favourite’s Judge Bullets… I’m surprised that there hasn’t been a character called Judge Bullets in 2000AD yet. And I love that we have doughnuts in there, too. We’re the only trailer in cop movie history to include doughnuts – and proper doughnuts too, not Krispy Kremes.”
Click below to see the trailer in glorious Quicktime. And don’t forget that tickets are still available for the Wright-curated Hot Fuzztival at London’s ICA. Tomorrow night should be a belter with the double bill of Point Break and Bad Boys II, influenced directly by the cinematic tastes of Nick Frost’s Hot Fuzz character, Constable Danny Butterman.
Go to the ICA’s website, **www.ica.org.uk **for more information, but we can confirm that the screening will be introduced by Wright, so why not pop along? As an added bonus/deterrent, there’ll be some members of the Empire staff there, too, so you can harangue us about whatever.