Here There Be Ligers: An Oral History of ‘Napoleon Dynamite’
What a difference a year makes. In 2003, Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess, and Jon Heder — students at Brigham Young University’s film school — were just another trio of independent filmmakers working the festival circuit in Park City. Their short film “Peluca,” about a fanny pack-wearing teen named Seth, was selected to screen at the Slamdance Film Festival. If the protagonist sounds slightly familiar, it’s because he was the prototype for the titular geek hero of Napoleon Dynamite, the micro-budget indie that would become the toast of that city’s other film fest — Sundance — and catapult the classmates to the top of Hollywood’s rising stars list by the end of January 2004.
On the occasion of Napoleon Dynamite’s 10th anniversary, the director, its star and a handful of their collaborators and supporters retrace the little-film-that-could’s steps from student project to pop culture phenomenon.
“Give me some of your tots!”
Jared Hess (Co-Writer, Director): Everything in the film is so autobiographical. I grew up in a family of six boys in Preston, Idaho [where the film was shot] and the character of Napoleon was a hybrid of all the most nerdy and awkward parts of me and my brothers growing up. Jerusha (Hess, his wife) really was like Deb growing up. Her mom made her a dress when she was going to a middle school dance and she said, “I hadn’t really developed yet, so my mom overcompensated and made some very large, fluffy shoulders.” Some guy dancing with her patted the sleeves and actually said, “I like your sleeves…they’re real big.”
Jon Heder (“Napoleon”): We were both students in the film program at BYU and had been in a few classes together. He approached me about doing the role of Randy, who’s kind of a bully, in this short film he was making, “Peluca.” Maybe a week or so after he had first talked to me about it, Jared gave me the script and said, “Actually, look at the lead role.”
Hess: I had auditioned some other people for the role in the short film and nothing worked in the way that I imagined the character. I heard the voice so specifically — and when I met Jon he nailed it. He came from a large family of boys as well, so he totally keyed into who this guy was.
Heder: When I was younger, if I got pissed at something, I’d definitely say something like, “Shut your mouth, you idiot!” So this was just an exaggeration of that — and not even that much of an exaggeration. Napoleon always has that scowling, mouth-breather look where he’s kind of upset. I wasn’t quite that upset all the time, but I did like some the things he liked. I went to Scout camp and I made homemade nunchucks out of carved wood. There’s a lot of me in Napoleon.
Heder: We took a trip to the local thrift store and scoured the racks looking for the type of clothes that would make you say, “Oh yeah, this is totally that guy.” Jared had the idea for the moon boots, and then Jerusha had the idea for the perm.
Hess: Jon had long hair, and is a handsome-looking dude, so my wife decided we should perm his hair. She thought he’d look really good with a perm. Then we gave him some glasses and did some costume design with the moon boots.
Heder: The glasses were actual prescription glasses that almost made me go blind — but man, they looked great [laughs]. While we were trying stuff on, Jared would give me his version of how Napoleon talked and then I’d do my interpretation of it.
Hess: We went up to Preston and shot the short film over two days in black and white. We knew that we wanted to do a feature — we’d already started writing a script for what would become Napoleon at that point — but we wanted to do a short film on the character to bring him to life. It was for a class assignment, and we were still trying to figure out the best way to end it. One day Jon was dressed up in the moon boots and everything, and I had about a minute of film left — stock is an expensive thing when you’re a student — so I’m like, “Man I’m not just going to waste this minute of black-and-white film that I have in the camera.”
I had heard that Jon was a dancer; he has a twin brother and they would go out to dance clubs and do these synchronized dance routines. The dynamic of a guy who looks like this, is dressed like this and is throwing down some pretty impressive dance moves is just something that’s still kind of shocking [laughs]. So I had Jon stand down at the end of a dirt road, I turned on the radio in the car and that Jamiroquai song just happened to be playing. I just told him to start dancing and realized: This is how we’ve got to end the film! You don’t anticipate those kinds of things. They’re just part of the creative process.
Heder: Jared introduced me to the kid who he was originally going to have play Napoleon in “Peluca,” who was kind of the real deal; he was a weirdo. If you met him, you wouldn’t think, “Oh, this is him,” but he had similar mannerisms. That was all toward the end of 2001, when we shot the short. But by the time we gave me the script for the feature, I’d pretty much made Napoleon my own. I read it and thought, “Yeah, it all makes sense. I can see this.”