To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Napoleon Dynamite, I wrote a “listicle” for the cinefile internet-zine Cinema Sugar. Here’s a taste. 👇
- “Six dollars. That’s like a dollar an hour!”
Napoleon Dynamite was made for $400,000, which in Hollywoodland is a miniscule amount of money for a feature film. Like, if you, right now, went and told a Hollywood producer you had $400,000 lined up for them to make a feature film, they’d say “That’s fantastic. Here’s my card, text me when you’ve raised the rest.” But Jared and Jerusha Hess wrote, directed, and finished Napoleon Dynamite for that tiny amount of money. And you know how movie stars get paid “millions of dollars”? Jon Heder, the actor who played Napoleon, was paid $1,000 to be in the movie.