What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

blondesnotbombs wrote:Jemaine did an [url=Ask Me Anything for Funny or Die][/url]. No new information, really, none of the questions were all that good. But he had some pretty sharp responses if you'd like to read them.

blondesnotbombs wrote:I thought I saw your name pop up when I was scrolling! You asked one of the questions about What We Do in the Shadows, right? Either the Wellington one or the music one? Both of those were good questions. :#happyyes#:

There were a few good ones, and a few lovely answers, but it was hard to find them amidst the "
Who?/Is Murray in this movie?/Will you marry me?/Is it business time?/What an ugly wall..."
etc. type shit.

And I was ridiculously tickled by this exchange:



First of all, the declaration of Bret's continued existence as "
Great news!"
delighted me. :#love3#: And I love the idea of the Conchords as a volcano that could erupt at any minute. :#excited2#:

he attended the world premiere of What We Do In The Shadows at Sundance. It is the latest film from director Taika Waititi and features Darby and Conchords friend Jemaine Clement, as well as a host of other familiar Kiwi faces.

The cast and crew rented a house in Utah for the week to celebrate.

"
It was very much sort of a seventh-form rugby team going to Hamilton or on a school trip,"
Darby said.

"
There were, like, 18 of us in the house. Some of us had beds;
some had blow-up mattresses.

"
It was quite a luxury house with a sauna and a games room, but the Kiwis were just sleeping on top of the pool table. Some were sleeping in the sauna. I got a bed."


Adventures included various film festival parties and bumping into One Direction's Harry Styles.

"
The other fun bit was getting all the free stuff on press day,"
Darby said.

"
The PR person takes you, the cast and whoever, and you just turn up in the shops on the main street and go, 'Hey, I'm with this film', and they go, 'Hey, what do you want?'

"
And you go: 'Why do I deserve this? I'm in the film for 30 seconds, and then I am going home.'

"
I mean, back in New Zealand, you'd be lucky to get a complimentary Frisbee from a radio station."

[size=150:2bfy9l8z]The Paste Podcast - Episode 1
By Shane Ryan and Josh Jackson
March 26, 2014

Paste editor-in-chief Josh Jackson and staff writer Shane Ryan re-launch the Paste Podcast. Episode 1 features the duo discussing The Walking Dead and Shane’s first SXSW. Josh interviews Jemaine Clement of Flight of the Conchords about his two new films, What We Do In the Shadows and Muppets Most Wanted, and his new project with Jared Hess. The episode also includes a song from Lucius, “How Loud Your Heart Gets.”

Stream [url=here][/url] or [url=download for later][/url].

[size=150:q3ksq7b0]Trailer: Taika Waititi's fang-tastic new film (+video)
4:15 AM Thursday May 1, 2014

[url=http:
//www.
nzherald.
co.
nz/entertainment/news/article.
cfm?c_id=1501119&
objectid=11246915:q3ksq7b0][size=200:q3ksq7b0]TRAILER[/url:q3ksq7b0]

Want to see a bit of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's new vampire comedy What We Do in The Shadows?

You can today with nzherald.co.nz hosting an exclusive online premiere of the film's trailer.

We've seen it and so far it looks like a brilliantly sly romp through the lives of Wellington's vampire, werewolf, and zombie populations, pulled off with Hollywood style, and typically dry Waititi-Clement humour.

So, are all the best bits of the movie in the trailer, as is sometimes the case?

TimeOut asked Waititi that very thing.

"
We tried to put people off seeing this movie by filling the trailer with all the worst bits - the most depressing, boring stuff we could find,"
he said.

"
It's not our fault if people watch it and think the film is going to be the most hilarious, awesomest film of the year."


The film, which is Waititi's first feature since local mega-hit Boy, releases in New Zealand cinemas on June 12.

blondesnotbombs wrote:This actually looks really fun. I'm not into vampires (like, at all) so it was really only the combination of Jemaine &
Taika that was holding my interest. The trailer looks really promising though, and early reviews have been good. I'm very much looking forward to this now.

chrissycubana wrote:I can't wait to see the film :#excited#: :#excited#: :#excited#: - and, perhaps someday, I might even show it to students who take my Gothic course. :#excited2#:

[size=200:crb0yjvv]Out of the shadows

[size=150:crb0yjvv]After nearly a decade, 150 pages of script and 130 hours of footage, Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s vampire mockumentary reaches the screen.

By David Larsen In Film
12th June, 2014

“It’s ridiculous.” Taika Waititi is outraged. “I mean this was all planned!” Planned for years. Before Eagle vs Shark, before Flight of the Conchords, half a decade before Boy, he and Jemaine Clement had a vampire mockumentary in mind. Finally, in 2012, they found themselves sitting down in the editing suite with the raw footage for what is about to be released as the feature film What We Do in the Shadows. “We were like, ‘This is going to be so easy, it’s going to be so quick.’ Cut to a year later and we’re still battling away.”

Documentaries are written in the editing suite. Documentary makers learn to expect a long haul figuring out which tiny percentage of the footage they’ve collected will jigsaw together into a film. When the documentary is about the private lives of a group of Wellington vampires, the need to impose structure on untidy reality would seem less pressing. Waititi is laughing. He can only agree. “The thing is, we had a script! It was all scripted. It had taken us six years, but we had 150 pages of script in the end. I was off making other films, Jemaine was doing Conchord stuff, but every now and then we’d email or we’d write a scene or have an idea. It got cobbled together, until in 2012 we finally said, ‘Look, we’ve missed the boat on making a vampire film before anyone else – if we don’t do it this year it’s never going to happen.’”

Waititi and Clement met at Victoria University in the 1990s and became friends and collaborators in the burgeoning Wellington comedy scene. They wrote plays, acted together, bounced ideas around. “There were a lot of comedy evenings around town at various pubs and bars and clubs.”

By the end of the decade, Waititi was helping run the Wellington Artists’ Charitable Trust in a warehouse in Cable St and working primarily in visual art. “Painting, photography, a little bit of comedy on the side. I don’t know if I’d have kept being an actor, I was getting a bit sick of it. But film was something I hadn’t really explored yet, so I tried my hand.”

Waititi’s short film Two Cars, One Night was shortlisted for an Academy Award and subsequently formed the kernel of Boy. (“Making the transition from short to feature is very difficult and I think people have often rushed it … luckily I got to make other shorts and experiment with Eagle vs Shark, which could handle being a clumsy first film-maker’s film. If I’d made Boy first, it wouldn’t have been as good.”)

But Two Cars, One Night was the second short film he made;
the first, John &
Pogo, which played at the New Zealand International Film Festival in 2002, was an improv-driven mockumentary about a cop and his dog. “The great thing about improvising, and also the great thing about the mockumentary form, is it gives people the opportunity to play. To think on their feet, not just regurgitate lines. The actors become scriptwriters, really.”

This was the process he and Clement used in 2005 to make a short vampire film – a film that has remained unreleased, but which gave them the characters and sensibility for What We Do in the Shadows.

The characters came easily: three old- world immortals, roaming Wellington streets after dark and bickering over the dishes. Waititi’s sweet-natured Viago emerged fully formed the moment the camera started rolling. “I really liked the idea of a vampire who’s obsessed with cleanliness and sick of his vampire flatmates being untidy.”

Jonathan Brugh was ill the weekend they were filming. “So we filmed him lying down on the couch. And that’s where Deacon came from. Very low energy, too cool for school. And because those two stereotypes were taken, Jemaine went a bit more Dracula.”

These characters were clearly rich enough to sustain a feature – and together with a bunch of well-intentioned, slightly pathetic werewolves, to generate another skewed look at the idiosyncratic idiocies of the New Zealand male. “It’s an ongoing theme throughout my stuff. I think because New Zealand is so desperate to appear masculine. In everything we do, there’s this underlying desperation to look tough. I always think of a farmer standing in the rain. That’s our image of ourselves. A sheep under one arm, a rifle in the other. And, I don’t know, a wide-brimmed hat with water dripping down the brim, and he’s like ‘she’ll be right’. It’s a very cinematic myth. I think it’s very cool. I also think it’s really funny. Because, you know, everybody in life trips over. Everyone is an idiot. There are just no cool people.”

The problem with the 150-page script Waititi and Clement eventually created was twofold: it was too long and they both ended up feeling characters created through improv should not be scripted at all. “So we cut 50 pages and then we didn’t show the actors the script. We did pitch this film in the States to a few studios, and we had offers to go and make it over there, but they wanted to put celebrities in it. We would still have made a good film, but we would have probably had to make it according to studio rules. We wouldn’t have had this kind of process, improvising the entire thing.

“We’d very loosely block a scene and we’d just feel it out. Every take was very different, it was very liberating. It was one of the best experiences shooting that I’ve had.” And it meant going into the editing room with something very similar to the raw materials of a documentary: 130 hours of unscripted footage, out of which an 86-minute film emerged. Eventually.

“I think usually a director’s cut would take about three months. When I cut my other two films, it took about five. All up, this took about 14. We always said that some day we’ll release the film as a 10-disc DVD set. With everything. And then maybe put the editing software in there. If you think you can do better, go ahead! Good luck! I’d love to see other people’s versions of this film.”

WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, released June 19.

New Zealand writer-director Taika Waititi is an extremely busy man. His new, Sam Neill-starring adventure-comedy Hunt for the The Wilderpeople opens June 24, and he is currently prepping the Marvel superhero film, Thor: Ragnarok. So, where does that leave We’re Wolves, the sequel to the much-loved vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, which Waititi codirected with Flight of the Conchords member Jemaine Clement?

“We want to do it, and we’re coming up with story ideas,” Waititi, who also starred in Shadows, told EW last week. “The first film took us about seven years to make, and we don’t want to do that again. It’s a lot easier now that we have all the characters, and we know how we want to do it, and we know that we can do it. The first time we were doing it, we had no idea what we were trying to do, really. It’s not like we were inventing the mockumentary genre, but doing it with special effects, and trying to figure that all out, and make it funny, was a really, really long process.”

Waititi also revealed that We’re Wolves will concern a power battle between lycanthropes played by What We Do in the Shadows stars Rhys Darby and Stuart Rutherford. “The same werewolf actors would come back,” said Waititi. ”It would basically be Rhys and Stu vying for position as the alpha male in the werewolf gang.”

Can’t wait for We’re Wolves to see Darby in another Taika Waititi project? Good news: The comic actor plays a survivalist type living in the New Zealand bush in Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

“It’s basically Rhys playing himself in 40 years,” says Waititi. “Because he’s into all this s—. He’s into UFOs and X-Files and all that.

onlyalways wrote:I think it's been out for a while now that a sequel might be in the works, but it's nice to get some confirmation. Considering how amazing What We Do In The Shadows is, I won't mind having to wait seven years for the sequel if that's what it takes.

I also want to cut some time out in the next couple weekends to go see Hunt For The Wilderpeople. It has a 100% on RT.

emira wrote:

onlyalways wrote:I think it's been out for a while now that a sequel might be in the works, but it's nice to get some confirmation. Considering how amazing What We Do In The Shadows is, I won't mind having to wait seven years for the sequel if that's what it takes.

Recently, Jemaine tweeted that [url=he was writing a script][/url], so I wonder if this is THE script for the Shadows sequel.

emira wrote:Have you read the book it's based on?

blondesnotbombs wrote:

emira wrote:Recently, Jemaine tweeted that [url=he was writing a script][/url], so I wonder if this is THE script for the Shadows sequel.

:#pray#: :#excited2#:

emira wrote:

I also want to cut some time out in the next couple weekends to go see Hunt For The Wilderpeople. It has a 100% on RT.

I have to wait over a month to finally see it in a cinema! And I've heard some previews of the soundtrack and it's beautiful :#redlove#: :#music#: :#redlove#:
Of course I'm biased!

Have you read the book it's based on?

Oh, I shouldn't start derailing this thread. :#shy#:

blondesnotbombs wrote:

emira wrote:Have you read the book it's based on?

Now I'm debating whether or not I should read the book before I see the movie (still not playing here :#fit#: ) or if I should wait.

onlyalways wrote:I haven't read the book. The movie just opened where I live last weekend. I'm going to see it this weekend. :#excited2#: Won't have time to read the book in time, have you read it?

[size=150:1993mzlm]NZOA sends Taika and Jemaine back into the 'Shadows'
Friday, 30 September 2016



By Karl Puschmann

Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement will return to our television screens - and the shadows - next year thanks to NZ On Air.

The filmmaker and comic actor have just been awarded funding for Paranormal Event Response Unit, a brand new, six-part comedy series that will screen on TVNZ 2 in 2017.

The show is a spin-off from the pair's hugely funny, hit film What We Do In the Shadows, a mockumentary that came out in 2014 about a group of vampires flatting together in Wellington.

PERU will follow the movie's mock-reality format and follow two police officers, Karen and Mike, as they work to 'keep us safe from supernatural phenomena'.

"
Comedy is serious business and notoriously hard to get right,"
NZ On Air Chief Executive Jane Wrightson said in a statement. "
We are delighted that Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi are bringing their talents to smaller screens."