5 Things We Just Learned About 'Napoleon Dynamite'

Forget Spider-Man and Jason Bourne; the biggest hero of summer 2004 was a liger-drawing, Jamiroquai-dancing Idahoan high-schooler named Napoleon Dynamite. The brainchild of then 25-year-old, fresh-out-of film-school grad Jared Hess, the $400,000-budgeted Napoleon Dynamite went from Sundance darling to mainstream success story, grossing almost $50 million in its theatrical run. Rolling Stone brought together Hess and the film’s cast, including star Jon Heder, for an oral history about the making of the indie-comedy hit. Here are five things we learned from their walk down memory lane.

1. Jon Heder Was Napoleon II, not Napoleon I.  Before he acquired his historical name, Napoleon Dynamite was simply known as Seth, the star of Peluca, a black-and-white short film that Hess made for a Brigham Young University film class. The young director, having already found his Seth/Napoleon, approached Heder — also enrolled in the BYU film program — to play the school bully, Randy. But with a week to go before the two-day shoot began, Hess decided to make his classmate the star instead. Heder later met the guy he replaced, and found him to be “kind of the real deal; he was a weirdo. If you met him, you wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, this is [Napoleon],’ but he had similar mannerisms. By the time [Heder] 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.’”

2. Efren Ramirez Gave Up a Potential Role in a Big-Budget Movie Starring Billy Bob Thornton. In between guest-star stints on TV shows like Boston Public and the Shia LaBeouf-led Disney Channel hit, Even Stevens, the man-who-would-be-Pedro scored a potentially career-altering audition for a part in John Lee Hancock’s star-laden historical drama, The Alamo, which had already snagged Billy Bob Thornton to play Davy Crockett. As he pondered accepting that job, the script for Napoleon Dynamite — whose total budget probably equaled one day of craft services on The Alamo set — landed on his desk. “As an actor, you want to move up and build a big name for yourself. But here was this independent film about these two cats who don’t really know each other, but become best friends and help each other get through life. It reminded me of Midnight Cowboy. It was a big risk…[but] when I met Jon Heder and all of the guys, I thought, ‘Maybe this is my home for a while.’ Don’t get me wrong; I really would like to work with Billy Bob Thornton, he’s a brilliant actor. But to play a big role as a character actor? How can you say no to something like this?” (The fact that The Alamo received mixed reviews and made less than half of Napoleon Dynamite’s total box office, further confirms that Ramirez made the right decision.)

3. The Local Hotel was no Chateau Marmont. Napoleon Dynamite shot for 23 days in Preston, Idaho — during a brutally hot summer. For L.A -based actors like Ramirez, Haylie Duff and Tina Majorino, there was no small degree of culture shock in spending a three-week “working vacation” in a small town where the population barely exceeds 5,000. “There was one motel in town, and there was a hole in the bathroom floor; you had to jump over it to take a shower,” Majorino remembers. “But it felt like that was just part of the adventure [laughs]. I don’t think that I’ve ever been on a set with such organization, though. We were busting out probably eight to 10 pages a day, and we would wrap every day at 6:30 pm.” Plenty of time to take advantage of Preston’s nightlife.

4. Hair Care Was a Major Issue. After handing him the role of Seth/Napoleon for the short, one of Hess’s first pieces of direction to Heder was to get his long hair permed at a nearby hair academy. When it came time for him to reprise the role in the feature, Heder went back to get the exact same ‘do, but the results were significantly different. “He showed up the night before shooting and he looked like Shirley Temple! The curls were huge," recalls Hess. "My wife’s cousin was a hairdresser and said that if we re-permed his hair it would break off. And the hair was everything. So my wife and her cousin spent the whole night re-perming his hair, until maybe two or three in the morning, just doing a water perm.” That quick fix worked, but it turned out to be the last rinse Heder’s hair enjoyed for the duration of the shoot, as daily or even weekly showers would have a disastrous effect on his pompadour. “He had this stinky ‘do in the Idaho heat for three weeks. We were shooting near dairy farms and there were tons of flies; they were all flying in and out of his hair.”

5. Napoleon Almost Got His Groove on to the Music of…Michael Jackson. Heder had three takes to nail Napoleon’s big dance number at the end of the movie, so he had Hess pull three different songs to play while he made up his moves. For the first take, the actor remembers freestyling along to a Michael Jackson tune, before moving on to the Jamiroquai number, “Canned Heat,” that’s heard in the finished film. “We were both kind of obsessed with Jamiroquai at the time and really wanted it to be that, so we were so glad to get that song,” Heder says now. In order to make his leading man more comfortable, Hess also closed the set during the dance number, so that fewer people could witness Heder making a spectacular dancing fool of himself. Heder helped him enforce that rule: “I was kicking everyone out. 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. The two questions I get asked the most are ‘Will there ever be a sequel?’ and ‘Can you still do the dance?’ And no, I can’t do the dance, because I never memorized it. But I can do a similar dance.”