Interview HTF Exclusive Interview with Jemaine Clement (What We Do in the Shadows) (1 Viewer)

Jemaine Clement, one-half of HBO’s talented and very funny duo, Flight of the Conchords, has provided his unique comedic voice in projects as varied as Gentlemen Broncos, Men in Black III, and the upcoming Steven Spielberg film, The BFG, and in voicing characters in Rio and Despicable Me, taking his inviting shyness and off-center and outsider sensibilities to projects where he can be a menace, a jerk, or a simple, awkward and unassuming guy trying to make it in life and love.


Working with his long-time friend and frequent collaborator, Taika Waititi, Clement and a small group of actors sought to twist the tales of vampires and other assorted creatures of the night with the hilarious and critically praised mockumentary, What We do in the Shadows, mining the banality of vampire domesticity in New Zealand. Concerned as much with chore wheels and the failures of a night clubbing as it is with feeding on humans and avoiding sunlight, What We Do in the Shadows features a superb cast riffing on ideas of how absurd – and unromantic – the life of vampires in the modern world must be.


Jemaine spoke with Home Theater Forum about the film he co-wrote and directed with Taika Waititi, and offered a tease of some ambitious plans they have to further explore the world they created.


What We Do in the Shadows arrives on Blu-ray and DVD on July 21 from Paramount Home Entertainment. It is also available through digital retailers.



HTF: Good afternoon, Jemaine, how are you today?


Jemaine Clement: I'm well. How are you?


HTF: I'm very well, thank you. I appreciate you taking some time to talk to Home Theater Forum today about What We Do in the Shadows, which is very funny.


Jemaine Clement: Thanks


HTF: The film is slow-burn funny and I guess what I mean by that is it doesn't shoot for timed or structured laughs, but rather builds a sort of absurd little world that accumulates the funny the longer that you spend in it. How challenging was it for you as performer, writer, and director to distill the many hours of footage that you had down into an 85 minute or so film that captures everything that you wanted to say in that world?


Jemaine Clement: Yeah, that was the worst part, editing. We took over a year to finish it, the edit. The night that we finished it, our last shot on the last night of shoot, we all said, "Let's do one of these a year," because it was really fun to film. And 14 months later we were still editing it, so we realized that that's actually not possible to do it that way.


HTF: You seem to play characters that vibrate just outside of the world that you're living in. Is that something that comes from how you feel as you go through this life, or is that just where you find the funny?


Jemaine Clement: Yeah, I guess I do feel like that. I'm not sure. It seems universal to me because all my friends are also interested in that. But it's not as funny to have a successful character usually, you know? They have to be an outsider somehow, even if they're made an outsider by how successful they are.



HTF: Yeah, that makes sense. And I love the look of What We Do In The Shadows - the colors, the textures, and the shadows. It's superbly conceived. How hard was it to achieve that look on the set, given the relatively limited resources that you had?


Jemaine Clement: We had really great people. Our DOP, and we had a couple of DOPs, but one of them had just come off The Hobbit, and our set designer had come off The Hobbit as well. Yes, they're working with much bigger budgets, but our set is actually made of the old green screens off The Hobbit, which our set designer got out of the bin and painted them to look like they're a Victorian house.


HTF: So the film was grassroots in how it came to be, and how you were able to get it in front of audiences, particularly United States audiences. I first heard about the film through my Facebook feed, where people had uncovered the film and were talking generously about it, so even the word of mouth was very grassroots. Was that a hard route to take to get your creative work out there, or is there something inspiring or invigorating about having to clasp and grasp your way to get it noticed, and then finally find a welcoming and well-receiving audience?



Jemaine Clement: Very much both of those [chuckles]. It was very hard, gratifying, but I'm not sure I want to go that way again. I'm not sure. Luckily this film was unusual enough that people would talk about it, so that made it easier. But yeah, I'm not sure I want to do that again. It's much harder to go that route to put it out.


HTF: Do you find that audiences respond pretty much the same way across the world - New Zealand, UK, US - or do you find people respond to different things out of the film, depending on which side of the globe you're on?


Jemaine Clement: There are subtle differences. Some jokes play bigger in other countries. In America, for instance, one of the characters used to be a Nazi, and in America that's not a popular thing to say [chuckles]. In New Zealand, it's quite funny but it's [not so much] in America.



HTF: I remember the scene - it's mentioned nonchalantly, but it's hilarious in just how unassuming the character is about that as he rattles it off to the documentary crew…


Jemaine Clement: So it's not hilarious in every country, that, but other than that it's hard to tell [if audiences are responding differently].


HTF: You have a loyal following. You have very affectionate fans.


Jemaine Clement: They're small. They're small, but affectionate (laughs)


HTF: Yes, small, loud, and affectionate and what else can you ask for!


Jemaine Clement: (Laughs)



HTF: Let me ask you about one of my favorite scenes, where Deacon and Nick are fighting, and they run into a hallway, and fight up the wall, across the ceiling, and back down the wall. I have a sense of how that was achieved, but I wanted to ask you if you had wanted to do that kind of shot ahead of time, or did that evolve as you were making the film?


Jemaine Clement: That's in a gimbal. It's like a hamster wheel sort of thing with a hallway in it, so we had to have that made [ahead of time.] That was one of the first things that was made, and we knew that those two characters were going to fight. But most of the action in all of the scenes are in a script. We had a script, we just didn't show it to everyone (laughs.) So we had to be very annoyingly specific with the actors - "You can't just do that. You chase each other. You chase each other here, and then you go around this corner, and then we've got to go on this set, and then you have to run in special effects, and be thrown around for an hour."


HTF: So was it fun to shoot


Jemaine Clement: It was very dizzy getting in that thing that's spinning round and round, and you get kind of discombobulated. And then they’d have to come up with funny puns while they're running around and we could see that if they would run out, we could suggest things to say. We tried that thing, we tested it out. Taika and I tested it out before the actors who ended up being in there, and you end up with a lot of bruises. You're just kind of rolling around. It's like being in a tumble dryer [chuckles].


HTF: So, let me ask you, do you have plans to revisit these characters, this world? And in addition to that, what else have you got coming up that we can expect to see and laugh at you in?



Jemaine Clement: The [inaudible] spin-off sort of for What We Did in the Shadows. One's a TV show made about the cops - the male and female police team who investigate the house. We've pitched a TV show with those characters, and we're also thinking about a werewolf film with Rhys Darby.



HTF: That would be exciting. Thanks for speaking with Home Theater Forum today - longtime fan and a great pleasure for me. And I wish you all the best in the future


Jemaine Clement: Thank you, it was good to talk to you.

Nice interview, Neil. I think Mr. Clement is very funny and I watched the blu-ray of What We Do in the Shadows today and really thought it was hilarious.

I was trying to decide on which movie to rent from Redbox last night and this movie had the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating . I thought it was pretty funny, but my wife is not into this kind of humor so she didn't like it as much.

Watched Men in Black III again, loved Clement as Boris the Animal.

This Is Spinal Tap. With vampires. And it's ridiculously awesome.

How refreshing to find a horror spoof that is actually clever and funny! Many thanks to the film-makers...one of a handful of this year's releases I expect to come back to more than a few times.