FilmInk: Jemaine Clement: Big And Mean In The BFG - Jun, 29

[size=150:2wxcw166]Jemaine Clement: Big And Mean In The BFG
June 29, 2016

New Zealand funny man, Jemaine Clement, plays a big but not so friendly giant in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much loved novel, The BFG.

“I had a teacher who was a big fan of Roald Dahl, and each new book that came out was a big deal, and certainly this book was a big deal,” says Jemaine Clement at The Cannes Film Festival of his connection to his latest film, The BFG. [b]“I’m not sure when I discovered Dahl, but I remember that by the time this book came out, I was excited about it."
In Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Dahl’s 1982 kids’ classic, Clement plays Fleshlumpeater, one of the gigantic brutes who makes life hell for Mark Rylance’s eponymous behemoth, who brings on the collective scorn of his giant brethren because he refuses to eat children. It’s another amusingly broad turn for the New Zealander, who found international fame with the cult TV series, Flight Of The Conchords, and has since appeared in a number of fascinatingly bizarre performances in films as diverse as Gentleman Broncos, Dinner For Schmucks, Muppets Most Wanted, Men In Black 3, and What We Do In The Shadows.

In The BFG, however, Clement’s freakish, bellowing turn as the low-on-charm Fleshlumpeater has been aided and abetted by motion capture technology. “I try and put funny things in, and Steven takes out what he needs,” the actor explains. “I’m trying to be funny and scary, and they can choose later what they want to concentrate on in the performance.” How does it feel to see such a different iteration of himself? “I recognise the movement,” Clement says of watching the final result, in which he is pretty much unrecognisable. “We’re in the special suits being captured, every movement. I recognise things about myself by how I hold my hands or, you know, when I’m tied up and my legs are flailing, I recognise myself in that. But I have to look for it. It’s hard to tell if I would actually recognise myself from it. I doubt it. You can see a performance and not yourself.”

But despite being encased in metaphoric layers of CGI, the actual process of acting wasn’t that much different for Clement. “For us as actors, we could perform with each other in the same room, so it’s helpful in terms of performance,” he explains. “With some movies, they talk about acting to a green puppet or something like that, but we were in the same room together. And with this technology, you can also improvise, and Steven encourages that. Because we are together, we can do that. If I say something, like my replies, it can be used and incorporated. There’s this little bit in the movie where we’re saying, ‘That’s what I said’, and we just did that. It’s not in the script, but because we’re being captured, we’re free to do things like that.”

But despite his increasingly busy big screen schedule, Clement still finds time to return to his roots, and is currently touring the US with Bret McKenzie, his musical comedy partner in crime in Flight Of The Conchords. “That’s the most fun,” he says. “Performing live is great. We’ve been writing a few new songs too.”