Vampire film “What We Do in the Shadows” opens Friday.
A small, hidden community of vampires living the undead life in Wellington, New Zealand, takes the spotlight in “What We Do in the Shadows,” and filmmakers Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi want Sundance Film Festival audiences to know that there were challenges and sacrifice involved in capturing the truth about the immortal bloodsuckers — particularly for the crew.
Nightmarish shoot
In taking on the guise of cinema verite documentarians, the pair sound completely on the level as they describe a nightmarish shoot. Waititi seems so earnest as he describes bathing himself in holy water to keep the vampires at bay. This low-key, hilarious intro is perfect, a dead-on match to the deadpan tone of a film that establishes its own reality.
“Our idea was that it’s not a world where there are vampires and everyone knows there are vampires,” says Clement. “It’s the actual world we live in.”
Waititi, 39, stars as Viago, an 18th century fop obsessed with household chores, while Clement, 41, is Vlad, several centuries older and a would-be ladykiller — in every sense of the word. They share their flat with Deacon ( Jonathan Brugh), a relative youth at nearly 200 years old and loath to wash dishes, and Petyr (Ben Fran- sham), a cranky, 8,000year-old nosferatu who resides in the bonestrewn basement. How this quartet maintains its happy household is as much a part of the mockumentary as the foursome’s dealings with an outside world populated by familiars, rivals and a human race that they look on as food.
“The Flight of the Conchords” star Clement and Waititi, writer and director of the autobiographical dramedy “Boy,” are longtime friends whose last feature collaboration was “Eagle vs Shark” (2007), a romantic comedy written and directed by Waititi and starring Clement. When it came to writing “What We Do in the Shadows,” each brought his own relationship with vampire mythology, which did not begin with Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” novel, but with the movies of their youth.
“My favorite was ‘The Lost Boys,’ ” says Waititi. “Corey Haim wore this trench coat and I made my mum buy me a trench coat. I wore it to school, to primary school. The boys (ribbed me). It looked like a ladies’ trench coat. It probably was a ladies’ trench coat.”
Bad dreams
“(My fascination) started when I was about 5 years old,” Clement says. “I woke up and wandered into the living room and on TV was this old black-and-white vampire movie. I’d never seen anything like it. I can’t remember what the movie was, but it was a sequel. A bat comes and drops a drop of blood onto the skeleton of the vampire who had been killed in the last movie and it re-forms. After seeing that, I had vampire nightmares all through my childhood. ‘Salem’s Lot’ was another big one, the scene where the kid’s friend comes to the window and asks to be let in. That freaked me out.
“When I was about 9 or 10, I started a gang at school called the Vampires,” he adds. “It was most of the boys in my class. We’d ride around on our bikes wearing little plastic vampire teeth and scaring girls.”
As part of their preparation for writing their script, the pair made a weekend getaway to an island. But instead of spending their time lolling on the beach, they watched background material that included vampire films, History Channel documentaries and mockumentaries, including “This Is Spinal Tap.”
“It was a mishmash of things,” says Clement. “We didn’t really watch any reality shows, but then the movie kind of turned out like a reality show, in a way.
“We have really quite different senses of humor. We like different movies. This is a kind of fun intersection of what we both like.”
By the time, they were finished writing, Waititi and Clement had a screenplay that was 150 pages, far too long for a comedy and far too long to actually shoot on their budget — not that they didn’t try.
“The script was full of jokes that we liked,” says Waititi. “Our idea was to shoot everything, as much as possible, and we kind of didn’t tell the crew. We gave the crew a script that was 100 pages and we had our secret (version).
“There would be scenes down at the bottom of the call sheet, ‘If there’s time, can we just do four more scenes?’ ”
Road map
In any case, the screenplay was only a road map. The other actors never saw it. The cast is filled with performers who also write and whom Waititi and Clement already knew to be funny. Every scene would be an improvisation.
“We liked our script, but because we were doing a documentary, you can tell when people are doing a script in a documentary,” Clement says. “You can tell when people are remembering and trying to sound candid. Not many people can carry that off. It’s better to just be making it up.”
For their characters, the partners leaned toward the romanticism of vampires, with Clement smoldering as Vlad and Waititi the dandy as Viago. But “What We Do in the Shadows” is a comedy, and those traits became skewed.
“I thought of my vampire as very cool and crazy, and then I realized quite far through it that he’s just crazy,” Clement says. “He’s quite a loser. We made it that he used to be very powerful and he lost his power. But it only came from seeing, ‘I’m not as cool as I thought I was.’ ”
‘Dapper gentleman’
“I always wanted to play a dapper gentleman and I also always wanted to play my mum,” Waititi says. “I just mixed them together. ‘Boy’ was about my dad. This one’s about my mum.”
In a way, “What We Do in the Shadows” is the happy fulfillment of a long-cherished idea that goes back to the early days of Waititi and Clem- ent’s friendship and collaboration, when their childhood memories of vampire movies past would make their way into working daydreams.
“We did a lot of theme shows together, and what we would always do on our first day of writing was make a list of things we’d want to be or do,” says Clement. “We’d write, ‘ ’80s dance movie, Jules Verne story, vampires’ — we might have even written ‘glam-pires.’ That would be the first thing ... a fun thing to pretend to be.”