Napoleon Dynamite

Jared Hess grew the feature out of Peluca, a 9 minute black and white short he made as a class project at Brigham Young University with Jon Heder. Jeremy Coon talked him into leaving school for it. The budget was $400,000. Shooting ran 23 days in Preston, Idaho in the summer of 2003, with townspeople housing and feeding the crew. Heder was paid $1,000 for the lead and renegotiated once it took off. The closing dance was shot on the last roll of film, after the money ran out. Heder improvised, danced it three times, and the best pieces were cut together; it was staged to three tracks, the rights not yet settled. The titles came later: test audiences could not tell what year the story was set in, so the opening sequence was shot eight months later in the cinematographer’s basement. Napoleon’s student card reads 2004 while the clothes and the music point at the 1980s. At the 2005 MTV Movie Awards the film took Best Movie, and Heder took Breakthrough Male and Best Musical Sequence. A good fit if you are happy for the year’s largest event to be a school assembly dance, and for the period markers to stay mixed. Not for anyone after a high joke rate; the comedy leans on long silences.