NZ magazine " 1972" Winter 2013

Amily wrote:I neeeeed it! :#fit#:

Jairyanna wrote:Incidentally, I was thinking 'wow, they're really on the ball with getting their winter edition sorted, it's at least 6 months away' and then I remembered winter in NZ is now. Fail :8-):

blondesnotbombs wrote:That's a really good picture of him. :#loveeyes#:

[size=150:2pyd77ku]THE CONCHORD FLIES HOME: on set with Jemaine Clement as he directs his old friend Rhys Darby in a brand new television comedy. Story by David Farrier.



“I came up with ‘It’s a hair past a freckle,’” says Jemaine Clement. He’s deadpan like always and utterly serious. “This is the freckle.” He points to a small brown freckle on his wrist, surrounded by a few hairs. “This is the hair.”

I’m on the set of Rhys Darby’s new comedy, Short Poppies. Jemaine is directing two episodes. People walking past the set look twice when they see him. The ones that ignore him are either painfully unobservant or don’t own a television.

Jemaine’s addressing Rhys, cameraman Bevan Crothers and an assortment of other types you find on sets: the runner, make-up artist, assistant director, the ever-silent soundie. “This is the first time I’ve made that claim since primary. My mate reckoned he came up with ‘get amongst it’. He started saying it on the radio.” No one is quite sure if he’s serious. I check later: he is, and holds his arm out as proof.

**

It’s 10am at the Maraetai surf life-saving club, and the beach is littered with middle-aged women walking dogs. Most of them are holding those long, plastic ball-throwing devices. Jemaine takes a moment to take them all in before saying he doesn’t like being interviewed. “I can certainly talk about myself, but I find it all boring.” He lets out a cackle: a staccato laugh;
a bleating goat. “And then I try and be more interesting, but then be even more boring.” You get the feeling he’s dreadfully self-aware of everything he’s saying. And he is.

To the outsider, life seems reasonably exciting for Jemaine Clement. It may have started slow in Masterton – a place known for its warm temperatures and unemployment – but eventually Jemaine departed down the road for Victoria University, where he met Taika Waititi and Bret McKenzie. Study turned to comedy and they went on to form groups like So You’re A Man and The Humourbeasts. Eventually Flight of the Conchords was born, morphing from band, to BBC2 radio show, to a 22-episode series on that bastion of quality, HBO. Through all that, they remained a band: they released albums and toured the world. It made household names of Jemaine and Bret, and they took Murray (Rhys Darby, of course, “Present!”) with them. For Jemaine, that meant playing himself on Simpsons and hideous bearded freak Boris in Men In Black 3.

After all that, still obliging. When I e-mail him saying an interview for a menswear magazine is fully optional, he writes back: “Honestly it’s no problem. It’d be my pleasure. Guys who wear fancy track pants need to know what I am up to.”

**

He’s been up to plenty, just wrapping a shoot on a vampire comedy with Taika Waititi in Wellington. The privately funded project has been shot documentary-style: two cameras catching about 150 hours of action each. The film’s scripted, but they didn’t show the script to the actors. “We describe the scene and get them to make it.”

With those 300 hours now in an editing booth, he’s directing several episodes Rhys’ Short Poppies on his own. They’re his solo directorial debut. “I know Rhys is really good at this, so that gives me a lot of confidence. If you set up the environment for him and the material, he can just go on that. I know that from working with him for years. So that made me worry about this less. But I was really chicken of doing it at first. Then within ten minutes it was, ‘This is fine!’ It was okay.”

His forehead furrows. Big lines form between his eyebrows. Everything on his face is large: lips, nose, ears, hair – his whole skull. “I really want to turn that tap off.” A boy has left a tap running outside the surf club. Jemaine turns it off.

**

He openly admits he doesn’t understand cameras and shots and frames: he leaves all that to Bevan – a short, enthusiastic man with soft hair like a devon rex cat. For Jemaine, it’s all about the actor’s performance, and after each take he approaches Rhys. “Good job, that was really funny. Let’s try this.” The script quickly becomes a guide, as topics and emotions change. Through all of it, he’s calm and direct.

“Different directors work very differently. Some don’t really talk to actors at all, and just make sure they get really good actors, and then just make sure it looks beautiful. Some do both. I’m not really worried about how it looks… hopefully it’s fine.”

He laughs like a goat again (others say it’s more like a sheep, or a zebra) and I ask what directors he’s learnt from. “I think you learn from everyone. When they’re shit, you probably learn the most. I think probably Jay Roach [Dinner For Schmucks] is the person who just treats everyone so nicely, and is so respectful to everyone. You know, “Do you want another take?” He’s so nice. “Oh, that was – I couldn’t believe how funny it was,” you know? He’s just the nicest guy that you can imagine. And you know, often on commercials - not always - but I’ve seen people on commercials be quite horrible. To make actors feel bad, to make them do things right.”

Jemaine makes an annoyed noise. One of the actors in the show is notoriously buff and has spent most of the morning with his shirt off. Jemaine’s forgotten to notice what he ate for lunch.

**

He says the thing he’s most proud of when it comes to Conchords was playing the Hollywood Bowl. “It was the biggest comedy gig there since Monty Python”. Jemaine should be proud: the Bowl fits 16,000 people. “And then it’s over, that big gig, and you forget, and Vector seems huge again.”

Last year, Flight of the Conchords embarked on a 10-date tour around New Zealand. It went on to be the biggest selling tour by a New Zealand band here, ever. “Like, ‘Oh my God I can’t believe we’re about to do this’, and you see people doing it and go, ‘I can’t believe they’re doing it’, and then when I’m on stage it’s absolutely fine, I’m absolutely at home. I think probably the anxiety that most people would get – I a get a slither of that, until I’m doing it – then I’m fine.”

Growing up, Jemaine idolised Billy Connelly. Thanks to Connelly’s part in The Hobbit, he was now sitting in the Wellington audience, watching Jemaine perform. “He’s really tall and he’s got this long, I guess sort of wizardly white hair, and just a couple of times I’d see him and think, ‘I grew up with him’, and ‘Oh God, what if he didn’t like that,’ and he’d make me suddenly worried. I don’t know how many people this place fits, 1000 or something, but I was worried about this one guy. Having a childhood hero - it’s happened a couple of times. Don McGlashen was another one, when we played one of our first times in Auckland. That was worrying for us.” He does his other laugh – it’s the hiss of a snake;
air escaping from a tire. His lips part and it’s all teeth, air rushing from the gaps.

**

It’s another day, and we’re at another beach. This time we’re in Te Atatu where it’s more mangroves than surf. Middle-aged women are still walking their dogs. It’s a big day with lots of extras: they mill around the catering table like they do in that show named after them.

Jemaine frowns. “What’s that man doing?” he asks no one in particular. A man is walking along the beach with a desk and two guitars. 30 minutes later, and an entire wedding is taking place in the back of shot. There isn’t a wedding written into the script, but some kind of compromise is reached after Jemaine and Rhys agree to have their photo taken with the bride and groom. The groom’s tie is done up too tight. He’s red-faced and a bit sweaty on the forehead. “This is crazy, just crazy,” he says, sweating. “I loved your show. Loved it. You know what all my friends call me? Murray! This is just a dream.” The bride is beautiful and blushing. The wedding photographer looks pleased with himself.

All throughout the shoot, people approach Jemaine for photos. They’re all lovely, and mostly shy. You can see it coming: a stunned look from 20 meters away and then - as we tend to do down here - the stare. A fumbling for a phone and giggles with friends. And eventually, the approach. I ask how he deals with it. Always calm, always polite.

“Honestly, I forget. I mean I’ve been making this movie that people haven’t seen yet, for the last year, and doing this, I forget that. I think, ‘That’s a person I used to be on TV’ – I forget about it. Because about a week after Men in Black people were going, ‘Oh, you’re Boris the Animal’ and I was, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right, I was,’ because it was a long time ago. I’ll go to a place, and everyone is treating me weird, and I will be, “Why is everyone treating me weird?”

“When we are doing stuff together, Bret often walks ahead because it can be just too much if we’re together. And also, sometimes you get, “You look like that guy”, but if you’re with a guy that looks like that other guy, it’s definitely those two guys!” I wonder if all the photo taking and conversations with strangers are too much. He says a man in a bar spotted him once and kept shouting, “Wellington that way!” He thought he was hilarious. Eventually the man approached. “He wanted a photo. Then he said, ‘Would you like to see me with other celebrities?’ Then he wanted to show me photos of him with other celebrities. I had no idea who any of them were.” He chuckles and tells me his TV doesn’t get TV reception. He just uses it to watch DVDs: Portlandia, Tim &
Eric and Danger 5 are current obsessions. They’re all comedies are that break the genre down and build it up again into something gorgeously subversive.

“What I find funny is that someone will come up to me and say a compliment like, “I love your stuff,” and then someone else will go, ‘Oh, you must hate that.’ I don’t hate that! It’s nice. What I find weird is someone going ‘You must hate that!’”

**

At some point during the shoot Jemaine and myself, along with the series director Michelle Walshe and executive producer Leon Kirkbeck (married, four children, possibly the sweetest people you’ll meet) are at a bar. Jemaine doesn’t drink alcohol, opting for water. He puts his fingers into the glass and sloshes around for an ice cube to suck on and occasionally chew. He tells me: “I can’t wait to get home. I have an article open about how they are looking for a surrogate mother to give birth to a Neanderthal child”.

The night goes on. Strangers come up and talk to Jemaine like he’s their property. A woman comments on his dance moves from another night. She uses the work “dorky”. Jemaine tells us that returning to New Zealand after Conchords was “good”. New Zealand was a FOTC dead-zone. He could breath. Then Prime grabbed it and the billboards went up. Massive billboards. Some nights he just couldn’t bear the thought of going to the supermarket because he couldn’t deal with all the people. He chose hunger over late night conversation in the produce department.

Back at my house, I check my inbox. An e-mail from Jemaine: “By the time I got home and sat to read that article, this one had appeared: HARVARD PROFESSOR BLASTS WEB RUMOR”.

**

Despite success both at home and abroad, getting money for creating TV back home is still an issue. “I still go for funding. And don’t get it,” says Jemaine, smiling with those big lips. “It’s just a thing I do every year. I go for funding for something. I was trying to get funding for this thing we do called Two Sheep – have you heard of that? It’s two Claymation sheep, Robert and Sheepy. Not many people have seen it. And we try and get funding for that every year. And I thought we would stop, but we just keep going.”

He says the system in New Zealand is oddly disconnected. When they first started talking to people in the UK about Flight of the Conchords, he and Bret would be taken out to dinner. They’d be asked what their ideas were, and they’d tell them. “In New Zealand you write. It’s basically like an essay, and you send it off, with the things you’ve done before, and you just hear back.” He pauses. “Well I’ve only heard back, ‘No’. I guess you hear back ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ in theory.”

I tell him it’s a bit shit he can’t get funding. That surely, if he can’t, who can? “I think it could be better. And also I think it has improved so much though since we left. I like to think that our shaming New Zealand’s television system could be part of it. There’s lots of new types of comedy shows now, and I think it had a part in giving people confidence. And they didn’t want to miss out again. We were very sure on Conchords to make sure there were some episodes that were New Zealand-written and directed. So they couldn’t say, ‘Just because they got a British director’, we made sure we got Taika.”

**

Eventually it’s been two weeks and it’s time for Jemaine to leave Auckland and go back to life in Wellington. “Psychologically, even when I’m gone and been working, psychologically I think of it as my home. I just say I’m always here. Even though my family will say I’m lying.” He wanders around thanking all the crew. They seemed universally disappointed. “You and Rhys work so well together,” says one of the camera assistants. “Yes, it’s like we’ve worked together before,” says Jemaine, deadpan. Always deadpan.

I give him a lift back to Ponsonby, asking if he wants windows down or air conditioning. “Windows I think. Oh, this is all for the interview - that’s the sort of stuff you’ll use - ‘He prefers windows over air-con.’” He laughs knowing he’s right and strums a little red guitar. It might be a ukulele. He says he doesn’t read or watch interviews he’s done. Sometimes he doesn’t even like looking at himself on screen during an edit.

It’s possibly something to do with his family as he was growing up. “Yeah, ah – there’s a few funny buggers. They are very much like me in that they’ll come up with funny things occasionally but they’re too shy to do it in a public place. I find it very hard to joke with strangers. I’m sure what I’m saying applies for anyone. You know how to make your friends laugh, and how to make yourself laugh, and that’s it. And you just hope when you make a comedy thing – whatever it is – you hope someone watching it is similar to your friends, or to you, I suppose.”

I ask that overarching, dumb question about the biggest key decision in his career. “I’m glad we did that TV show – all those things, because we did consider not doing the TV show because we knew we would be famous. “You want that, and you don’t want it. It’s a hard balance because people think you want any attention you can get, which isn’t true: you want very specific adulation and not anything else! And respect, which I’m afraid is just not possible.”

**

Fame remains a bit of a mystery to Jemaine, an unwanted by-product of writing words and songs that make people laugh. For him, turning up to red carpets and movie premieres is simply odd. “I didn’t realise I had to go to things. I thought it was a perk. So I’d just go, ‘No thanks’. But it’s part of the job. I was told once that Steven Spielberg had asked me to be there. He probably hadn’t, but that’s what they told me.”

Jemaine spots a woman at the lights with a dog. She has one of the ball-throwing devices gripped tightly in her left hand. “Look at that, another one. Wish I’d come up with that.” He bleats like a goat and strums his guitar.



**