Nerd Do Well (42 page)

Chapter 8

¹⁴
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
is a particularly juicy text for the film theorist, since the principal terroriser is Leatherface, a hilariously stroppy matriarch dispensing his/her punishments like a flustered fifties ‘mom’. ‘Hacked off’ probably being the most suitable description of his/her mood.

Chapter 9

¹⁵
Brilliant if short-lived eighties indie music satirists responsible for such gems as ‘I Left My Heart in Papworth General’, ‘All I Want for Christmas Is a Dukla Prague Away Kit’ and ‘Trumpton Riots’.

¹⁶
ADR
(automatic dialogue replacement) is the name for dialogue added to a film or TV show in post-production.

Chapter 10

¹⁷
I remained hooked on
Northern Exposure
almost until the show ended for good, drifting away from it after the actor Rob Morrow left to pursue other things. The show became a major influence on my own writing and figured as an example of the magical realism we wanted to convey in
Spaced
when we pitched it to the execs. In 2009, Maureen, then heavily pregnant, Minnie and myself moved into a house in Santa Monica, California, to live while I shot the movie
Paul
. Much to my extreme shock and delight, I discovered my neighbour was none other than Rob Morrow. We became friendly and as a gift to us after the birth of our daughter, Rob and his wife Debbon made us a compilation CD of nursery rhymes, which we still play at bedtime a year later. A trip in the
ESTB
back to
Northern Exposure
nights in Bristol or to the pitch meeting for
Spaced
with news of this strange coincidence would have surely blown my mind. How the hell did I end up living next door to Dr Fleischman?

Chapter 11

¹⁸
A ‘Gooner’ is a term for a supporter of Arsenal Football Club and is derived from the club’s nickname, ‘the Gunners’, itself derived from the team emblem of a cannon. Presumably the term started off as an insult but was appropriated by the Arsenal fans in much the same way that rappers hijacked the word ‘nigger’ as a means of disempowering its negative effect. I might be wrong. I don’t like football.

¹⁹
Stuart’s work can be purchased from Crouch End and at www.stuartjfree.co.uk.

²⁰
Hamlet
, Act
III
, Scene 1. Thought I’d temper the nerdy shit with a classical reference. Shakespeare fans can be nerds too and vice versa.

²¹
Our adventure in Toronto was filmed by our long-time friend and collaborator Dan Mudford, and can be found as a short film called
When Shaun Met George
among the extra features on the
Land of the Dead
DVD
.

²²
I actually wrote a little fan fiction about this inconsistency for my MySpace blog, which I dabbled with for a while. I’ll stick it in the appendix in case you fancy reading it. The blog was moderated by Harmony Carrigan who founded and continues to preside over Peggster.net, a website about me, which is far better than anything I would hope to produce myself. I made contact with Harmony shortly after I came across the site and we have since become friends. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee, in the US and I’d be lost without her.

²³
Performance capture is quite a hard concept to grasp, let alone to explain. Basically, performers wearing special motion-capture suits and headgear act out scenes in a marked-off studio area called the
volume
. The
volume
is defined by the maximum amount of space that can be
captured
and rendered as a three-dimensional environment inside the computers. The scenes are stored as a 3-D event and can then be viewed and manipulated using the performance-capture camera. This means that you only ever need one good take of any scene, which you can then ‘shoot’ again and again inside the camera from any number of view-points. When shooting a live-action scene, the director will usually, at the very least, shoot a master or wide shot, a medium close-up and singles on all the actors, requiring the scene to be performed several times, with complex lighting turnarounds between set-ups. Performance capture eliminates the need for this as once the scene is complete it can be shot from any angle. This means that despite the complexity of the technology, performance-capture filming moves quickly. The average low-budget film will have a principal photography period of about forty days. The principal photography on
Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn
took about thirty days, although the entire process will take more like three years in the end.

²⁴
There are actually three Oscar winners in
Hot Fuzz
, two of whom are heavily disguised and seldom recognised. Jim Broadbent is on clear display as Inspector Frank Butterman but tucked away in the cameo drawer is Peter’s murderous Santa and Cate Blanchett as Angel’s estranged girlfriend Janine, concealed under full
CSI
protective clothing.

²⁵
Clerks
, 1994.