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Jemaine Clement is being Jemaine Clement. When I find him at 10am, he’s leaping over the fountains of London’s Somerset House courtyard, grinning like a buffoon for his mate’s phone camera. Inside, a few minutes later, remembering the first thing he did at his university’s drama club, he’s robot-dancing around the room. The dancing is reliably shonky. He hasn’t done it since that first time, he says (for good reason). I should have videoed it. “No, it’s probably best you didn’t,” he says sitting back down, with a dryness we’ve come to expect from the more sardonic half of Flight of the Conchords.
This is what Jemaine does. The world first met him via the Conchords, the show of the group he formed with Bret McKenzie at university in Wellington in the late 1990s. Concerning a hapless band attempting to find success with both music and women, it was Perrier-nominated at Edinburgh, found a home on Radio 2, then crossed the Atlantic to settle very nicely on HBO. Since the last episode of the Conchords’ two seasons aired in 2009, they’ve performed a few live shows but have been non-committal about a full-blown reunion, instead pursuing separate film careers. McKenzie has opted for the musical side of things, writing the songs for two Muppet movies, while Clement has become the arch lord of deadpan, appearing as delusional despots in films such as Gentlemen Broncos and Men In Black 3 and contributing his unmistakable tones to animations Despicable Me and Rio.
It turns out though that Clement has another long-term comic partner, Taika Waititi, with whom he’s in London to promote the film they wrote and directed together: the very funny and, yes, dry as hell mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. Part Spinal Tap, part The Only Way Is Transylvania, What We Do… concerns the lives of four vampires cohabiting in an appropriately gothic house, arguing over rotting corpses and bickering over dirty dishes. Clement is Vladislav, an 862-year-old ladykiller, Waititi is Viago, a 379-year-old people-pleaser, and they’re joined by Petyr (Ben Fransham), an 8,000-year-old Nosferatu-like misanthropist and Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), an ex-Nazi vampire who, at just 183 years of age, is a bit gauche.
Rather than make the most of their unending time, these bored bloodsuckers are stuck in complacent ruts. Shacked up together to hide from the sunlight, they get on each other’s wicks, as you would if you lived with three other men for eternity. It’s like a bizarre university dorm, in part inspired by Clement, McKenzie and Waititi’s own student experiences. “The flat I lived in with Bret was the filthiest ever, man,” says Clement. “I could hear rats running around in the loft. It was actually like The Young Ones.”
The reference is deliberate, as it was over British comedy that Clement and Waititi first bonded at university: Blackadder, The Comic Strip, Fawlty Towers. “Kenny Everett was big for me,” says Waititi, which is a surprise, but apparently the late British comedian was a hit in New Zealand, and had an even bigger impact on Clement. “When he died of Aids, to me that changed everything,” he says. “Because the worst thing you could be called in New Zealand in the 80s was a homo. And when we found out he was gay, that made me think it was OK to be gay. Because he was one of my heroes. Not that I became gay. I didn’t take it that far.”
Acerbic as Clement is in all his guises, there’s a difference between what he does with McKenzie and what he does with Waititi. “Me and Bret usually talk about music,” he says. “Me and Taika would always do theatrical stuff, running around, miming, putting on voices. Me and Bret would just sit there.” What We Do In The Shadows is certainly very silly, to the point of being playful with things others might be delicate about. Deacon, it turns out, was once part of Hitler’s secret vampire army. Did the pair not have any trepidation about mining the Nazis for jokes? “No,” says Clement. “But other people were concerned, especially Americans. When we tested it in New Zealand it got a big laugh … with our friends. But we had one American editor and an American producer who both said, ‘That’s not funny.’ We were going, ‘Yeah, but the joke is he’s assuming people haven’t heard of World War II,’ and both Americans said: ‘But we do know the Nazis lost World War II.’”
“What’s cool about it,” says Waititi, “is that Deacon’s talking about the Holocaust as if it’s just one of those things that humans do. ‘That one in the 40s, don’t know if you heard about that one.’ Because for a vampire you see that shit all the time.” Clement continues: “It’s interesting that people go, ‘Vampires kill people but they’re still kind of lovable,’ but if it’s racially motivated it’s worse than killing. Really it’s just about being a monster. It’s just a joke. It used to be OK to make fun of Nazis, but people have become very sensitive about it.”
Talk turns unexpectedly to a new subject: hair. Specifically mine: “I notice you have a mullet,” says Clement. I don’t, I say; granted, it could do with a trim at the back, but I don’t particularly care if it gets called a mullet. “I think you do,” he says. He had a mullet himself a few years ago, he says, and he got quite attached to it. Waititi remembers bleaching his own hair as a student, to unpleasant effect. “I did that as well,” says Clement. “I had orange hair. A lot of discussion about hair here. We obviously all care about our hair!”
Another unexpected gamble; they tell me about their friend Stu, an IT guy. They asked him if he’d do some tech work for the production, and said they’d shoot a few scenes with him, too – as an IT guy called Stu. He ended up as a major character, although he didn’t know it until he saw the film. Most of the dialogue was improvised and Clement and Waititi shot 125 hours of footage, riffing all over the place, so nobody quite knew what they’d end up with. “Stu thought we were just making fun of him,” says Clement. “We didn’t tell him how central his role was, we didn’t want to make him nervous.”
It’s notable that after gallivanting around the globe for centuries, Clement and Waititi’s vampires have settled in Wellington, New Zealand. For ever.
“I always liked the idea that vampires were a metaphor for marginalised groups; immigrants, homosexuals, anyone who’s had to live in the shadows of society,” says Waititi. Is that how he views New Zealand? “Fuck yeah. It’s full of people who are really nervous about coming out into the open.” Clement takes up the theme: “There’s lots of stories about women in the 1800s who’d lived in Paris and Florence and had come to New Zealand and not been able to handle it because it was such basic living. I wouldn’t say it’s like that now. Maybe in some ways…”
While What We Do in the Shadows is silly and fun, here and there a profound melancholy underscores the horseplay, with immortal angst, romantic longings and murderous guilt popping up and giving the film some existential weight. “We want people to see it like that, but no one’s really mentioned that before,” says Clement. “We did intend to have parts that are sad, to have it about something. I think this film is a lot about middle age. Reflecting on regret, on your life, on not being able to get over things that you thought you’d be able to move past. The studenty stuff was from when we came up with the idea, and the stuff about seeing sad things in your life comes from us being older.”
We’re about to wrap up when a lady comes in with a trolley and some water. I hold the door open so she can wheel out when she’s done. Waititi makes some small talk. Clement inspects a bottle. “‘Perfectly Still,’” he reads, then comments: “So English.” After two minutes and some uncomfortable silence, the water’s still being served. “Why are you standing by the door for so long?” asks Clement, laughing as I tell the lady I’m not trying to make her leave, which she finally does. “Well, collectively we all made that really awkward,” says Waititi. They wouldn’t have it any other way.
What We Do In The Shadows is out in UK cinemas from 21 Nov