Early TV fright at heart of Clement’s best idea
Jemaine Clement had nightmares for years after watching the scene that led to the hit movie What We Do in the Shadows. Julie Eley reports.
Jemaine Clement says a frightening childhood experience led to the creation of the hit Kiwi movie What We Do in the Shadows and its new American TV series spin-off of the same name.
‘‘I was 5, I’d got up, I could hear my parents watching TV and I saw this scene of this bat flying above a tomb dropping blood on a skeleton and it becoming Christopher Lee,’’ recalls the Flight of The Conchords star.
‘‘I’d never seen anything like that. I had nightmares about it for years and it definitely is part of the reason we are doing this now. It’s so funny now.
‘‘It wasn’t just scary to me; it was exciting. When you’re that age you’re just getting used to the idea of people dying and they’ll be dead for ever, and then it’s, ‘OK, well they can come back to life’.’’
The TV series, which was developed for the FX Network by Clement and his Shadows co-creator Taika Waititi, is another mockumentary-style look at the daily, or rather nightly, goings on of a group of vampires, but shifts the action from Wellington to New York’s Staten Island.
Clement wrote the pilot, Waititi directs and both men are executive producers on the series, in which Toast of London’s Matt Berry takes on the role of British vampire Laszlo, Four Lions actor Kayvan Novak plays Nandor the Restless, and standup comedian Natasia Demetriou completes the trio as the seductress, Nadja.
For Waititi, it was important to anchor the genre to some semblance of reality.
‘‘When I was doing the film, I was trying to ground my understanding of this ridiculous movie with some sort of real connection to the characters. The audience is going to come and they want to be connected,’’ he says.
‘‘My taking away from that, my thoughts about that, is vampires actually represent anyone who lives on the margins. Basically, like those little subcultures at school that no-one really kind of looks at and kind of ignores.
‘‘Sometimes they’re bullied and pushed around. Basically, groups of people who aren’t in the mainstream, and they basically, as kids, hide. They’re hiding in the shadows of the classroom.’’
The idea for the series was first mooted during the making of the 2014 film.
‘‘We had joked about having a Housewives kind of thing of different cities, so when the idea of an American show came up it was immediately obvious to do it like that,’’ says Clement. ‘‘What we do in Miami,’’ chips in Waititi.
‘‘I had been working in Staten Island,’’ Clement continues. ‘‘There’s a lot of old mansions there so it felt like you could sneak a houseful of vampires there without noticing too much.’’
‘‘I had been working in Staten Island. There’s a lot of old mansions there so it felt like you could sneak a houseful of vampires there without noticing too much.’’ Jemaine Clement
The series will remain true to the basic rules governing vampire movies – no going out in daylight, feasting only on human blood – with Clement and Waititi throwing in more obscure supernatural lore and advice on how to stop a vampire in its tracks.
‘‘I just read a thing online – I can’t remember what country it was from – but it’s like if you scatter poppy seeds in the cemetery, vampires will be compelled to pick up every poppy seed. It’s a way of slowing them down,’’ said Waititi.
‘‘If you want to get rid of a vampire, you steal his socks and you put some garlic in the sock and then you throw it in the river and he will be forced to go and chase his sock.’’
Then there’s the Chinese hopping vampire. ‘‘To stop them you have to place a prayer on their forehead. It’s very hard though,’’ says Clement, who concedes New Zealand comedy is very different from that of America.
‘‘New Zealand comedy, at least with our friends, is about emotions. American comedy tends to be about manners, so Americans find it quite unusual that we talk about emotions so much,’’ he says.
‘‘I think it’s something to do with that, in New Zealand, people don’t really express their emotions very much. So it’s funny for us to watch people doing that, but in America there’s no problem with that. So it’s not something that comes up in their comedy. It’s more something that you see in drama.’’
Is he worried Kiwi humour won’t work with American audiences?
‘‘No, because if it doesn’t then I don’t have to do it any more,’’ he says. ‘‘ We’ve already done stuff that Americans like. Before Conchords, I’ve heard of New Zealand films that were filmed in English but with New Zealand accents being subtitled over. That doesn’t happen any more – they watch [English actor] Jason Statham so much now... so they can understand anything,’’ says Waititi.
He expresses reservations about the advantages of living forever.
‘‘Our nature is that we are too lazy to do anything with that time and we’d always put stuff off,’’ says the Thor director.
‘‘Like, ‘I’m going to learn the violin tomorrow’ and then it’s, ‘I’ve got eternity to be a virtuoso’ so I’d never actually learn to play the violin. The best thing about having a short life is like, OK, well I’ve got to do it now.’’
What We Do In The Shadows, Thursday, March 28, 7.30pm, SoHo2