Heder: We made it a closed set. People kept coming up with excuses as to why they needed to be there. There were people hiding out in the stands and up in the projector room. I was kind of self-conscious at first and then I thought, whatever. And really, physically, I was just dying after each take. Because I was going at it full blast, just sort of freestyling it. But I can do a similar dance. Dance, Sundance, Revolution Hess: We had a bunch of extras who were just local high school kids.
We had just shot the scene where Napoleon was talking about how girls only want guys who have great skills. When we broke for lunch, there were a group of about 10 or 15 kids and they were quoting what we had just shot amongst themselves. I thought that was a good sign — that maybe people will understand and enjoy this film. Heder: When we shot the film, I had no idea of what the plans were.
But the producers were talking about Sundance, and I knew that was kind of a big deal. But Jeremy did it anyway; I was pretty upset with him at the time. Much of the genius of the film is in the details, and I wanted to make sure I truly absorbed and savored its magnificence. Plus I was laughing so hard I missed hearing some lines. I have family from Preston, Idaho, where they made the film, so it was especially great to see the film made with such heart. We were all sitting in the last row and as we were watching it you could really just feel the audience getting into it.
I thought that was the coolest moment. Heder: Just going to Sundance is still one of the most memorable moments of my life. A lot of us had our friends and family there, but then there were people like Faye Dunaway and I think Daryl Hannah might have been there?
Duff: Seeing the film at Sundance was pretty surreal. It was also sort of when Sundance was different, too; people were still making really tiny movies and they were really getting a chance to have people see their films. So it was special to sit there and see people laughing at it and enjoying it, the way we enjoyed making it.
Hess: I was so nervous about Sundance. I was convinced that people would either totally get it and enjoy the film, or I would hear crickets. But we got there and people started laughing at the first image of Napoleon, it was just an amazing experience. During the slow motion shot of Napoleon walking down the street in the brand-new suit that he just got to go to the dance, there was a moment where I looked over at Jerusha and got a little choked up that people were enjoying it the way they were.
People were cheering and clapping. I think the film is going to have a little bit of a life. Groth: I felt really strongly that this was a great film but with any comedy, especially one this unique, you never know how people will react. Utley: Like many people, I thought the movie was absolutely hilarious. And that catches your eye right away.
Every film student reads those books. I had read a bunch of them going into the festival, but I had no expectations at all. Just getting into Sundance for me was such a dream come true.
I lived so close to the festival growing up and had attended it as a teenager and while I was in college, just to experience it.
But to be there and have people wanting to buy your film… it was very surreal. Utley: I think its celebration of the underdog is a perfect analogy to independent films, which are the scrappy, misfit, idiosyncratic cousins to the glossier, big studio films.
And the big studio, tentpole films are more akin to the character of Summer, with her perfect costumes and her choreography and her pretty hair. Napoleon Fever Heder: I knew that there was something there, especially when I started getting cards from agents and managers and publicists.
Right away, there was a bidding war for Napoleon Dynamite, but that was in January. Yes, it was popular at Sundance.
It got purchased; I got an agent. Utley: It was somewhat surprising how quickly it caught on. And then we came back and showed it on the lot and it got another big response, so we started to feel like we were onto something. Heder: The biggest thing for this film was that they had this Web site that created this fan club. They were making talking plush dolls. We struck a chord and people really got who this character was and what this film was all about.
It also had iconic imagery between the ligers and the side pony and the llamas and the moon boots. Preston, Idaho itself held a Napoleon Dynamite Festival for a few years. It was very surreal. Hess said the film so closely mirrored his life that his mother came up to him after seeing the completed movie for the first time at Sundance and said, "Well, that was a lot of embarrassing family material.
He noted that many scenes and most of those quotable lines are essentially transcripts of discussions he and his brothers had growing. In fact, the only thing he identifies as specifically not being pulled from his childhood is the aggressive karate instructor who teaches Rex Kwon Do. Though less specific than it was for the filmmaker, Heder -- and much of the cast and crew -- was intimate with that lifestyle and character.
The year-old actor clarified that this was not so much a trait of Mormons as much of the cast, crew and BYU student body is , but the idea of a simple lifestyle.
Heder equated it most closely with "living life as a scout," and explained that he spent much of his youth with a local troupe. Though most of the film is most precisely Hess' story, ultimately, "everybody knew a guy like Napoleon growing up. Hess originally played around with very cartoonish versions of the characters, and relied on his cast to tone things down. Rather than workshopping through Napoleon's development, Heder and Hess mostly just hung out together.
Heder recalled how they would play around with the character, when they'd shop for Napoleon's various outfits at local thrift stores. Of those outfits: Hess had the moon boots in mind because he would frequently wear them, even in the spring time, while growing up , but much of the other mythical t-shirts and tight jeans were found from scrounging. During the retail excursions, the two would work on voices and, of course, mouth breathing.
While these traits certainly help characterize Napoleon as an outsider, it's notable how "Napoleon Dynamite" differs from what we've come to know as the typical nerd film. There's a certain power to the character that goes beyond the archetype of the weird dude who gets left out.
He doesn't know how much of an outcast he is, and that's what gives him that confidence. He's trying to be cool sometimes, but mostly he just goes for it and does it. He thinks, 'Why wouldn't you want to play tether ball? Tether ball is the sweetest thing in the world. There are cues to certain generational trends like maybe those moon boots, for example but Hess' film transcends that.
Maybe the only real thing that seems dated is the talent show dance, but that wasn't inspired by any specific decade, so much as Heder's own free-style. It was actually Hess' wife, Jerusha Hess the pair married a year before making the film , a co-writer on "Napoleon Dynamite," who just so happened to know that Heder could dance. From talent shows or just goofing around, word got out, and she told Hess, who turned around and told Heder, "Dude, we're going to write it into the end of the film.
Hess remembered seeing Heder dance for the first time. With just one minute of film left in his camera, Hess and Heder rode out to a dirt road in the town where they were shooting in Idaho at the time. As for where he sat in his own high school cafeteria, Heder has a story for that too. Describing the sort of comfortability that is not completely dissimilar from Napoleon's own mentality, Heder talked about how he and his brother were in their own little world during high school.
But that is exactly what Napoleon Dynamite — starring Supa-Star Jon Heder — managed to do when it made its way into the streaming world. See, in the earlier years of Netflix, the streaming platform ran into a pretty big problem, all thanks to the film.
Mean Girls would lead to Clueless and Gossip Girl etc. But what is it exactly about Napoleon Dynamite that makes it so hard to categorise? And could that abnormality also be the key to making a film everyone can enjoy, regardless of their usual tastes?
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