What We Do in the Shadows: The Series

emira wrote:A few more portraits by Robby Klein from SXSW

"
I was five, I'd got up, I could hear my parents watching TV and I saw this scene of this bat flying above a tomb dropping blood on a skeleton and it becoming Christopher Lee,"
recalls the Flight of The Conchords star.

"
I'd never seen anything like that. I had nightmares about it for years and it definitely is part of the reason we are doing this now. It's so funny now. It wasn't just scary to me;
it was exciting. When you're that age you're just getting used to the idea of people dying and they'll be dead for ever, and then (it's) 'Ok, well they can come back to life'."

"
When I was doing the film, I was trying to ground my understanding of this ridiculous movie with some sort of real connection to the characters. The audience is going to come and they want to be connected,"
he says.

"
My taking away from that, my thoughts about that (is) vampires actually represent anyone who lives on the margins. Basically like those little subcultures at school that no one really kind of looks at and kind of ignores. Sometimes they're bullied, and pushed around. Basically groups of people who aren't in the mainstream and they basically, as kids, they hide and they're hiding in the shadows of like the classroom."

"
We had joked about having a Housewives kind of thing of different cities, so when the idea of a American show came up it was immediately obvious to do it like that,"
says Clement.

"
What we do in Miami,"
chips in Waititi.

"
I had been working in Staten Island,"
Clement continues. "
There's a lot of old mansions there so it felt like you could sneak a houseful of vampires there without noticing too much."

"
I just read a thing online, I can't remember what country it was from, but it's like if you scatter poppy seeds in the cemetery vampires will be like compelled to pick up every poppy seed. It's a way of like slowing them down,"
said Waititi. "
If you want to get rid of a vampire, you steal his socks and you put some garlic in the sock and then you throw it in the river and he will be forced to go and chase his sock."


Then there's the Chinese hopping vampire.

"
To stop them you have to place a prayer on their forehead. It's very hard though,"
says Clement, who concedes New Zealand comedy is very different to that of America's.

"
New Zealand comedy, at least with our friends, is about emotions. American comedy tends to be about manners so Americans find it quite unusual that we talk about emotions so much,"
he says.

"
I think its something to do with that in New Zealand people don't really express their emotions very much so it's funny for us to watch people doing that, but in America there's no problem with that so it's not something that comes up in their comedy. It's more something that you see in drama."


So is he worried Kiwi humour wont work with American audiences?

"
No because if it doesn't then I don't have to do it any more,"
he says. "
No, we've already done stuff that Americans (like). Before Conchords, I've heard of New Zealand films which were filmed in English but with New Zealand accents being subtitled over here and it doesn't happen any more, they watched Jason Statham so much now..."


"
So they can understand anything,"
says Waititi, who expresses reservations about the advantages of living forever.

"
Our nature is that we are too lazy to do anything with that time and we'd always put stuff off,"
says the Thor director. "
Like, 'I'm going to learn the violin tomorrow' and then it's 'I've got eternity to be a virtuoso' so I'd never actually learn to play the violin because that's that were like. The best thing about having a short life is like, Ok well I've got to do it now."

“When we were making the film, we had joked about making a [Real] Housewives-like series where you could go to different places and do different groups of vampires. As soon as I was on the phone with someone saying, ‘what if we made a TV series of this?,’ that immediately came into my head and I knew it would be different characters in a different place.”

And Clement thinks TV is the ideal format for developing them: “I think people think of TV as being smaller scale but it’s actually larger because you have to have so many different stories.That part of it is hard, but it’s also the fun part, because then next week, we’re doing a different story. I love that.”

Waititi says the team “researched a lot of vampire law and the rules—some are so weird that if you told someone to explain it in the film, people would think it was just over the top.” Everyone cites different vampire movie favorites and sources of inspiration: Simms, for example, is a Bram Stoker’s Dracula guy while Robinson loves vampire movies in general. Clement’s own interest in vampires began when, as a child, he woke up one night and “could hear the TV, and there was this scene of a bat dropping blood on this skeleton which becomes Christopher Lee. And it freaked me out so much. I had nightmares for years after that, and that’s differently related to why I’m still making a vampire thing.”

As Clement tells us, “It’s good to have limitations—makes it harder for them. Vampires have so many powers, they also have to have weaknesses.” But Nandor, Nadia, and Laszlo do retain super strength, powers of hypnosis, anti-aging abilities, and a knack for organizing a vampire orgy (one of which is on the horizon this season). We’ll also see a different take on Colin’s energy-sucking ways as well as the creation of at least one new vampire, and may even have new abilities of their own (though not according to any of the four episodes we’ve seen so far).

The dynamic among the three is frayed—just as in the Metallica documentary that served as partial inspiration, Clement suggests you sometimes just want to rip your partner, roommate, or bandmate’s face off. But it’s all cyclical, like the number of projects spun off from that perfect and vicious parody;
Waititi says vampires, like collaborators, “go through phases… There’s probably a few that, after a hundred years, become real distorted.” They also have a preternatural ability to hold a grudge: “In a relationship that long, there’ll be like an hour where you feel like that: ‘Remember those 10 years when we weren’t talking?’.” But then, the make-up sex is probably way longer, it’s probably a good couple of months.” Clement, seeing the opportunity to set another limit, quips: “As long as it’s a lightproof room.”

Zara wrote:Video| Den of Geek: [url=WWDITS creators discuss the show][/url]

Dove wrote:WWDITS did well in the ratings. :#cheer#:

http://thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2019/ ... 90402fx01/

​Jemaine Clement can't make up his mind.

The New Zealand actor-writer is best known here as one of the hilarious cogs in the comedy series Flight of the Conchords.

While he and co-creator Bret McKenzie starred in the show, Clement is torn, he says.

"
When I'm writing I always want to be acting and when I'm acting I always want to be writing."


The conflict arises from Clement's own personality. Half-timid mouse and half-loquacious lion, he admits he's shy deep down. "
If I say that I'm shy, my friends find that ridiculous,"
he says.

"
They say, 'You're one of the least shy people I've ever met!' But it's how you perceive yourself,"
he says, adding, "
I guess I'm confident in some ways. It doesn't bother me to get in front of hundreds of people unless I don't know what to say, unless I haven't thought of what I'm going to say.

"
I love to write for a while,"
he laughs. "
Acting's way more fun, but there's something satisfying [about] creating characters and when you see them walking around and they improvise and they've got enough from the script to become a person. I still like that."


And that is what he's doing now. He's penning his new comedy series, What We Do in the Shadows, which premieres on Sky TV's SoHo2 channel on March 28. It's the tale of three frustrated vampires living in the nether depths of Staten Island and coping with their misfit problems.

Clement saw himself a misfit growing up.

"
I was pretty quiet, wasn't very good at sports,"
he recalls. "
I remember once having to represent the school in running. That was my worst nightmare. And New Zealand is very sports-oriented. In America people like to watch it, but in New Zealand they play it. Everyone plays a sport, yeah. And I didn't enjoy that,"
says Clement.

"
What I didn't like about sports mainly, ironically, was working with a group. I didn't like that you all had to do the same thing. I really hated that. I see the same in my son. Now I have to work with 100 people on the same thing, but I enjoy it now. But I didn't like what the nerdy kids were supposed to do. I didn't like Dungeons &
Dragons or anything like that."


Always an outlier, he observes, "
Individualism is encouraged in America. All the books you see in the airport are self-help books, how to succeed. And New Zealand is not like that. It's more like blending in. I didn't want to blend in"
.

His mom, who worked in a cheese factory and raised him, was on to him early. "
My mum always used to say to me, she said two things: 'You always want to stand out. And you always want to be like everyone else'. And they were both true."


Clement, 45, landed his first job at 11 as a pin-setter in a bowling alley. He also worked for an uncle assembling computers, was a door-to-door salesman pitching orange juice while in college and began writing commercials for radio stations while still in school.

He met co-writers Taika Waititi and Bret McKenzie at university (though Clement never finished). Fresh out of school, the three of them tried to land some kind of work in show business.

"
We all put in pictures for shows, but we could never get through,"
he says. "
We'd do theatre, but you have to do it a lot to live off. You've got to put on a lot of shows and people have got to come."


At this point, he considered quitting. "
Eventually I was thinking of doing advertising. I was writing for advertising. Then it just all suddenly took off all at once. Bret and I got a live show in America, a special. At the same time, Taika was nominated for an Oscar [for his two short films], and it all happened within a week! We'd all been totally poor – all of a sudden from trying to scrounge for money, suddenly people wanted us to make stuff."


They've been "
making stuff"
ever since. In fact, Clement is concurrently writing two shows, one in New Zealand [the second season of Wellington Paranormal] and What We Do in the Shadows in the US.

He's been married to actress Miranda Manasiadis for 11 years, and they have a 10-year-old son.

Boredom helps feed his creative impulses, he thinks.

"
Have a walk, have a bath, and get bored,"
he says. "
I always think I want a big holiday, that I want a vacation, and two weeks into the vacation, I start emailing people: 'Let's try and make something'."

If you want to be a vampire, you've got to follow the rules. At least, that's the case in Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi's What We Do in the Shadows, an FX series spinning out of the film of the same name. The vampire mockumenatry masterminds were very particular about their characters following "
the rules."


"
If they eat human food, they get sick. But leeches they can chew on or suck on to get the blood out, but the actual leech meat they can't. Jemaine is very particular,"
executive producer Paul Simms explained during a set visit attended by CBR.

"
They burst into flame in sunlight. They're not like uncomfortable by it,"
added writer Stefanie Robinson. "
You know how in some vampire movies, they're just sort of frightened by it."


"
No, they actually will burst into flames,"
Simms agreed. "
The one that I think has impacted the show the most in a frustrating way is the idea that vampires need to be invited in somewhere, because we're always writing scenes like, 'Okay, then they go into the person's house' and Jemaine is like, 'Well, hold it. They need to be invited into the house.' I think he refers to it as The Lost Boys rules, doesn't he? His general rule set is based on the ones established in The Lost Boys."


"
I didn't create them!"
Clement said. "
They've mostly stayed the same from the movie. I mean, all the rules have, but they've got some other powers, these ones, that we didn't see in the movie. We go by basic 70s, 80s vampire movie rules, with a bit of 30s. They can turn into bats. They can't go in the sun. They don't sparkle in the sun. They die. What else? You have to be invited in. In a lot of literature, vampires have to be invited in to private property, but this is a documentary, so these are the actual rules. They have to be invited into any kind of building."


As to why it was so important to follow these rules, he continued, "
It's good to have limitations. It makes it harder for them. Because vampires have so many powers, they also have to have weaknesses."


"
I think most people probably wouldn't care if you broke character or if you made a character go for a swim in the ocean, but they officially aren't allowed to, according to vampire lore,"
Waititi pitched in. "
They're not allowed to go in salt or seawater. They can't swim in seawater.

"
When we have the actors improvising stuff, but if I'm listening, I'll go, 'They can't swim!' If they improvise that. 'They couldn't do that!'"
Clement recalled.

"
Can't blaspheme. Can't eat,"
Kayvan Novak, who plays Nandor the Relentless, added.

"
I've turned 'Oh my god' to 'Oh my goodness' so many times. Gotta watch out for that,"
agreed Nadja actor Natasia Demetriou.

"
Well, with some of the stuff, we've researched a lot of vampire law and the rules and some are so weird that, if you told someone to explain it in the film, people would think that you were just being a bit over-the-top,"
Waititi mused. "
My favorite one is that one way to get rid of a vampire if he's in your village is to seal his socks, fill them with garlic, tie them up and throw them in the river and he's forced to chase his socks, to go get his socks back. Then he'll get the socks, and obviously they'll be filled with garlic, and he's like, 'Aaah!' Stuck there on the banks of the river."


Even though What We Do in the Shadow's characters are "
real"
vampires, they aren't immune from the influence of popular culture. That was certainly the case with Deacon (Jonny Brugh), one of the vampires introduced in the film. "
Like Jonny Brugh's character in the movie, because he wasn't really around when people dressed like that, he's very much kind of rock star, like leather pants and stuff, so it's like a mix of what he used to wear and probably things he saw in The Lost Boys or True Blood,"
Clement recalled.

Clement and vampire pop culture go way back. "
Taika and I were both fans of vampire movies, and when we would get people to improvise the film, we were more surprised that people don't know the vampire rules like we do,"
he explained. "
We thought everyone was a vampire nerd."


"
I think the first one -- I always forget the name of it -- the first one I saw was a Christopher Lee one,"
he continued. "
I think it's called The Scars of Dracula. I mean, I was about four or five and I got up. I think he could hear the TV and there was a scene of this bat dropping blood onto a skeleton that becomes Christopher Lee and that freaked me out so much. I think I had nightmares for years after that and it's definitely related to why I'm still making a vampire thing."


"
I liked some Fright Night, Salem's Lot. Some great newer ones: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Let the Right One In. Lost Boys is a lot of fun. I've seen so many! I don't keep up with them all now, but definitely I'd watch anything that had a vampire in it while I was growing up,"
he added.

"
Jemaine has always sort of been interested in vampires, so he'll always be throwing out references or ones that I've never even heard of. I think he's seen all of them,"
Simms said. "
We did have a variety of vampire encyclopedias and Bram Stoker's Dracula and a lot of extensive debates about do they eat food, do they not eat food and people having different citations for yes they can eat food but they don't like it, no if they do eat food they get sick. Very little of that ended up being relevant to the show, but it took up a lot of our conversational time to get those details right."


"
The one that I keep going back to, or that we go back to or reference a lot, is definitely Interview with a Vampire. I think that that one is sort of always in conversation in some way,"
Robinson mused. "
I was sort of the target demographic for Twilight when that came out. I was in high school when all of that stuff was happening, so I have a pretty extensive Twilight knowledge, I would say. I think we touch on a lot of them, but it's been fun sort of rewatching these movies. Bram Stoker's Dracula."


Robinson wasn't the only member of What We Do in the Shadows that was impacted by Interview With a Vampire. "
I do like Interview With a Vampire,"
Guillermo actor Harvey Guillen shared. "
I just remember watching Kirsten [Dunst] as a little girl, an actress, and I was like, '[gasp] I want to do that! I want to be a kid actor.'"

AUSTIN, Tex. — Some ideas refuse to die.

When Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi wrote and directed the mockumentary “What We Do in the Shadows,” they, along with Jonathan Brugh and Ben Fransham, played centuries-old vampires in Wellington, New Zealand, struggling with their unending lives and the quotidian frustrations of modernity.

It’s a comedic conceit these New Zealand natives had been toying with for ages, long before Waititi (the director of the Marvel blockbuster “Thor: Ragnarok”) and Clement (who, with Bret McKenzie, formed the comic music duo Flight of the Conchords) had any Hollywood standing — going back to the late 1990s, when they became friends at Victoria University of Wellington.

After it opened — in 2014 in most of the world, and in 2015 in the United States — the film received some supportive reviews and gained a cult following. But its modest ticket sales seemed to drive a stake through the heart of any further possibilities for it.

Now Clement and Waititi have a new FX series, also called “What We Do in the Shadows.” It debuts on March 27, and follows a different crew of vampires and their struggles to settle down in Staten Island.

On a March night, surrounded by the decadent revelry of the South by Southwest festival, Clement, who created, wrote and directed on the FX series, and Waititi, who directed several episodes, gathered with Paul Simms (“Atlanta,” “NewsRadio” and “The Larry Sanders Show”), one of their executive producers. They met here in an ornate chamber at the Driskill, a Romanesque-style hotel that opened in 1886.

Amid the spooky atmospheric elements — some intentional, some accidental — they spoke about their affection for the undead and the creation of the new show. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

So FX showed me the first few episodes —— [the lights in the room begin to flicker]

TAIKA WAITITI What happened there?

PAUL SIMMS It’s a vampire room.

JEMAINE CLEMENT I don’t know, because my eyes were closed. I was relaxing.

I was saying —— [lights flicker again]. It seems to happen whenever I talk.

CLEMENT It’s your power.

WAITITI Stop talking.

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I was worried I’d miss your original film characters in the TV version of “What We Do in the Shadows,” but I’m glad to say I didn’t.

CLEMENT You didn’t?

WAITITI It’s a little bit of a Roman dagger in my back.

CLEMENT We thought about that movie for a long time, over years and years. But the actual movie, we only shot for four or five weeks.

WAITITI I really wanted to make a mockumentary thing because I’d just tried to make a short one about police dogs. But the dogs were played by people. This was like 2002, 2003, and I thought that was the easiest way to shoot stuff. Just leave the camera on — you really didn’t have to try.


Where did vampires enter into it?

CLEMENT We had played this thing on stage one time. Taika, Bret and I all went to Calgary, to do a show, where one of us was on stage playing a vampire, doing vampire jokes. The only one I remember is like [exaggerated Slavic accent]: “I just flew from Transylvania, and boy are my arms tired. Because they were wings, and I flew all the way.” I think that was Taika doing that, and then I’d get up from the audience, dressed as a vampire, too, and I’m heckling him.

WAITITI “You’ve been heckling me for 250 years!”

CLEMENT “You heckled me in Vienna in 1563!”

WAITITI “And then I chopped your head off!” “Ah, you have a new head, my friend.”

CLEMENT I forgot that joke. “Yes, I have a different head.”

WAITITI “Ah, but I remember the voice. And the heckles.” When we first met in Wellington, nothing was really open late at night except for video-game parlors. We would hang around, playing air hockey and doing those kinds of characters. “Ah, my old rival.” Just keep the stupid thing going on for ages.

Were vampires part of your cultural upbringings?

CLEMENT I remember waking up at 5 years old, and my parents were watching a horror movie. It was “Scars of Dracula.” There’s a skeleton lying on a stone tomb, a bat flies in and drops blood on it, and it becomes Dracula again. It’s ridiculous, but back then, it was like, whoa. I had nightmares about vampires after that for years.

WAITITI I grew up in a tiny, tiny, tiny, little fishing village on the East Coast of New Zealand. Basically, the place where you’d take marlin to get weighed was in this shed, down on the pier. And they’d turn it into a cinema for three or four months. So when I was 7 or 8, I saw George Hamilton in “Love at First Bite,” in this shed, projected on a sheet.

CLEMENT Working with Paul and the other writers in the writers’ room, not everyone knew about vampires. Taika and I know a lot about vampires.

SIMMS Definitely, none of us knew as much as Jemaine.

CLEMENT A lot of the ideas in the first week, I’m just going, “No. You can’t do that.” [laughs] “Vampires can’t do that.”

SIMMS I wrote a fantastic joke where they were having appetizers that were leeches full of blood.

CLEMENT Well, they can’t eat solid food.

SIMMS That’s my point, still — they could just chew the blood out. The writers’ room was a lot of arguments.

Was it bittersweet for you that the original “Shadows” movie was not more widely seen?

WAITITI How dare you! My mom saw it and she loved it. That’s all I care about.

CLEMENT I had the opposite experience because the idea came from when we weren’t professionals at all, and it’s really us joking around with a bunch of our friends. It surprises me how many people have seen that movie.

WAITITI Our production designer took the discarded green screens from “The Hobbit” and built a house out of it. And they were just going to throw it away and burn it.

CLEMENT If you peel back the old wallpaper, you’d see the green.

The movie generated a previous TV spinoff, “Wellington Paranormal,” which started running in New Zealand last year. When did you start thinking about this series for FX?

CLEMENT We didn’t. Scott Rudin saw the film and then started harassing us until we did it.

WAITITI I was in Hawaii, about to have my second kid. It’d be like three or four in the morning, the phone would ring, and it would be him.

CLEMENT [American producer voice] “Taika. We’ve got to do this show. When is this show happening? We’ve got to get it rolling. I know it can go.”

WAITITI When it’s like three or four in the morning, the only thing you can say to get rid of people is like: “Yeah, yeah, totally, just do it. O.K., we’re doing it. Bye.” And the show happened.

CLEMENT The thing is, in the movie, we were the bosses and we never had to take notes. Now we have to take notes from the network.

WAITITI Take notes on something you created and you know everything about.

CLEMENT And a lot of the notes are like, “In the movie … ” Oh, man. We know. We did the movie.

Did you ever consider reprising your movie roles in the TV show?

WAITITI They encouraged us to do it. “It’d be really cool if you guys were in the show, at least one of you.” Well, I’m not going to do it if he’s not going to do it. Neither of us really wanted to do it.

CLEMENT In TV, there’s just so much to do.

WAITITI It’s hard enough listening to your own voice while you’re editing. And then also listening to your own voice while you’re directing. And acting. Doing a stupid accent and then stopping and giving a note. You’re just talking all day long.

SIMMS I think Jemaine thought that it was going to be easier than it is by not being in it.

WAITITI We were doing night shoots in Toronto — when I say “we,” I had it easy. I came in for like the last three weeks. It was like coming to a battlefield in France in World War I. They were so haggard and tired and half dead.

CLEMENT It took Taika about three days to get that way.

WAITITI When I was outside, I was wearing two Canada Goose jackets. Then I’m hanging out inside this drugstore where we had put the monitors, going: “I’m not going out there to give them direction. They can come in here if they want direction.” I think we wrapped at like 7 a.m. and Jemaine was still going on another set. I turn up and Jemaine is curled up in a ball, half asleep, looking at this monitor, going, “Mmmm. Uhhh.” Like, mumbling.

CLEMENT [weakly] “More energy.”

You’ve worked with Paul, going back to the “Flight of the Conchords” HBO series. How did he fare in these conditions?

CLEMENT You’re quite vampiric yourself.

SIMMS I did not mind the night shoots at all. That’s my natural schedule, anyway.

WAITITI We’d nap all the time. I’d see a couch and be like, “There’s my couch.” Matt Berry is also a huge napper. On the sets, we’d scope out the beds. And I’d be, “Oh, that’s mine.” And then I’d come in and Matt would be in it.

CLEMENT Usually when you have a house set, there’s bedrooms with beds. But there’s no beds on this, because it’s coffins. There’s nowhere to sleep. So everyone’s got to really search: “Ah, now that human character has a bed.”

WAITITI The college bedroom on the pilot, me and Matt were fighting over that bed all the time.

CLEMENT But there was a sign on the door: “No sleeping.”

WAITITI And then in smaller letters: “Unless you’re Taika.”

What, if anything, has the experience of making the show further taught you about vampires?

SIMMS The show is funny and silly, but it is about the sadness of eternal life.

CLEMENT There is a sadness about not letting go.

WAITITI Humans are so [expletive] stupid and boring and lazy, that given the gift of immortality, you’d never get around to doing anything. You’d just put off everything. People that have been alive for 5,000 years, going: “I’ve got forever to learn how to play violin. Why start now?” Humans, they still carry on human nature into being an undead creature. All those hang-ups stay with you.

A quick catch-up with Kiwi musical comedian and actor, Jemaine Clement, on his new TV series, comedy icons and vampires.

Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement is the brains behind FX’s new comedy series, What We Do In the Shadows, based on his eponymous mockumentary of the same name. While the 2014 movie was set in New Zealand about a group of vampires living in Wellington, the backdrop for the much-awaited TV series is New York City which provides endless comedic moments full of obstacles for the blood-sucking creatures.

Where did you get inspiration for these vampire stories?

They are all based on traditional vampire stories.

The movie was a successful mockumentary – there have been so many good ones – what’s your favourite?

There’s a very early mockumentary from New Zealand in the 70s about a character called Fredd Dagg, a farmer, and they follow him around for half an hour. It’s the best TV show that still runs in New Zealand and it’s been on for 40 years.

Are you a binge watcher?

I do binge when I have no discipline in my life. I’m like, ‘Just another one, just another one!’ It’s just like pigging out! And if you do it all at once, it’s slightly disappointing at the end because if you really enjoyed it, you’ve just blown it all.

What TV do you enjoy watching?

I was watching Russian Doll the other day, which was really well done. It’s something that has a logic and sticks to it. I love Game of Thrones. It’s amazing that people have grown up on that show. Some of them were children when they started and now they’re adults.

What’s your biggest energy drainer?

I would say getting notes from the network when I am on a conference call and I’m with all the writers sitting down and the execs are telling us what they think of the scripts.

What do they say?

(imitates American network executive) “I thought this part could be a little more clear.” (laughs)

Who are your comedy icons? What comedies do you enjoy watching?

My favourite TV comedies are the stuff you watched when you were a kid. But the first thing that made me interested in comedy was Black Adder. It was the first time I had laughed watching TV in the same way that you laugh with your friends or your siblings. Until then I didn’t know it was possible from just watching a box.

What is your relationship to social media?

If I was to advise myself now, I would say, ‘Don’t go on Twitter!’ (laughs) It’s my only wipe out. It’s such a horrible place, Twitter. If it was a country, it would be such a horrible country. But you can still learn about some interesting things and follow some interesting people. I was following Yoko Ono, and one of my favourite filmmakers Alejandro Jodorowsky is on there. I have to translate what he says, but I like seeing his Tweets anyway.

Is Twitter a better country than Instagram?

Instagram is a country where you’re all working out together all the time and eating food. Twitter is where everyone is shouting at each other and misunderstanding what each other is saying.

Think your roommates are a pain? Try living in a house full of vampires.

They’re up all night, every night. The leftovers they never bother to throw out are partly blood-sucked bodies. House meetings turn into flying bat-fights. And it all goes on for centuries.

Such are the woes of the housemates in “What We Do in the Shadows ,” a macabre sitcom that premieres Wednesday on FX.

It’s based on the 2014 New Zealand mockumentary movie of the same name that has become a cult, and occult, favorite. And it comes from the film’s makers and stars, Jemaine Clement, best known for “Flight of the Conchords,” and his longtime comedy partner Taika Waititi, who became the unlikely director of Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” after directing the low-budget vampire film.

The two stay behind the camera for the TV show, transferring the action, and the production, to the United States.

“In New Zealand this wouldn’t really be possible, it’s just harder to make TV there,” said Clement, who still lives in Wellington. “And it seems like since it’s an American show, it should be set in America. So we thought it would be a new house, a different house, with a very similar situation.”

The show’s vampires, Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), have origins that span Europe and span centuries. English actors ended up in all three roles.

“We were lucky because Jemaine and Taika, as New Zealanders, their comic sensibilities are almost more similar to a British sense of humor,” Novak said. “So it was quite serendipitous for us. And now we’re all going to go to America, riding their coattails, and become vampires.”

The characters came to the U.S. 200 years ago, when anti-vampire prejudice ran high in Europe.

“They didn’t like the color of our skin,” Laszlo says in the first episode.

“Or the fact that we killed and ate people,” Natasha adds.

They intended to conquer America, but when they learned how huge it was just settled in Staten Island, New York City.

There, they deal with the same household banalities and conflicts as humans, a theme of both film and show.

“Finish a whole victim before moving on to the next one!” Nandor tells the others at a house meeting in the pilot. All agree to write their name and the date on their prey in permanent marker so they know whose responsibility it is to clean it up.

They also get embroiled in local politics — they want a ban on turtlenecks — and go to a Manhattan nightclub where they learn they’re extremely uncool, despite their frequent efforts to be as chic as Hollywood’s vampires. Nandor at one point sprinkles drugstore glitter on himself so he can look “like ‘Twilight.’”

Clement spearheaded the idea of turning the film into a TV show, saying he wanted a project he wouldn’t have to describe in a pitch. He and Paul Simms are the showrunners.

Waititi, who directed and starred in the film, will take a more secondary role as an executive producer. It’s a backseat he’s happy to take, saying the constant night shoots can be “excruciating.”

“Vampires don’t know how to schedule TV shows,” Waititi said.

Even with half-hour episodes, the series allows its creators to go beyond the housemate relationship at its center.

“There’s a marriage that’s been going on for 200 years,” Clement said. “I thought, you know that that might be a metaphor for long-term relationships. Well, not even a metaphor, it’s just it.”

Also, he adds, “I wanted a master and servant relationship. I usually find those funny.”

The servant is Guillermo (Harvey Guillen), an aspiring vampire who is Nandor’s human “familiar,” tasked with luring in victims, cleaning up bloody messes and blocking out windows that let in deadly sun.

The character, whom Guillen says he’s playing as a young Guillermo del Toro, also serves as a quasi-narrator and vampire explainer for the audience.

The show’s final housemate may be the scariest of all.

Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) is an “energy vampire.” That’s just a regular guy whose conversations are so deadly dull that his victims lose all will to live.

Clement and Proksch both say it’s more than a one-note joke, and that Colin will carry whole story lines.

“He’s definitely going to suck even more energy out of this country than we can spare,” Proksch said.

Clement says the idea arose while they were making the movie: “A Housewives of … series, where you could go to different places and do different groups of vampires.”

Says Clement: "
People think of television as smaller scale, but it's actually larger, because you have to have so many different stories. I love that.”

There is also the tantalising prospect of character crossovers. Who knows? Maybe officers Minogue and O’Leary will turn up on Staten Island. “It’s possible.”

Away from Hollywood – 7,000 miles away, actually – Jemaine Clement grew up in obscurity.
That was in rural New Zealand, where he wasn’t much in school. “I became the funny guy,” he said. “I never really applied myself.”

Clement created this notion with Taika Waititi, who visits the extremes of show business. Waititi co-directed the “What We Do in the Shadows” movie, which made less than $7 million worldwide ... then directed “Thor: Ragnarok,” which made $854 million ... then went to this low-budget series.

“What happened to my career?” he said in mock horror. “I was a hotshot Hollywood director.”

Both men are half-Maori, the native people of New Zealand. Clement, 45, grew up with his Maori mother in the Wairarapa region, where his life changed when he “started playing around with a guitar.”

He was in music groups – “we’d always say funny things between songs” – before finding his niche.

[On WWDITS film] “We didn’t show the (other) actors the script at all,” Waititi said. “So we shot a whole movie like that.” There was lots of improvising, leaving them with “about 160 hours of footage that we had to get down to 90 minutes,” Waititi said. “That’s why it took 14 months to edit. It was very exhausting.”

[On new characters in the TV series]
• An ever-hopeful assistant. “My character was 20 years older in the script,” Harvey Guillen. “So when I auditioned, I didn’t think I was right for the part. (I) parted my hair, went in with some fake glasses” and an un-hip sweater vest. He was chosen;
even the sweater-vest stayed.

• A young newcomer – played by young newcomer Beanie Feldsein. “I was like, ‘These are the funniest people I’ve ever seen in my life,’” she said. “(But) I had to keep a straight face.”

• The master stroke, an “energy vampire” who quietly sucks away any energy or enthusiasm. “I’m a relatively boring person in real life,” said Mark Proksch, who plays him.

That character may be the show’s master stroke. “I feel like you meet a lot of those kind of people at parties,” Clement said. “You just get trapped.”

“The lack of sleep makes it difficult,” he admits, “because it’s all vampires and everything [we shoot] outside is at night. And we all go from 5 pm to 5 or 6 am, when the sun rises. That’s the bit that makes you want to cry.” ...
... “It’s freezing here as well,” he adds with a weak laugh. “But it’s still fun.”

“I was watching TV until 4 am,” Waititi says about the night schedule. “Saturday morning we wrapped at 6 am. You go to sleep and then you wake up and it’s dark again – so it’s like being a vampire, yeah.”

Waititi's been dropping in and out to shoot individual episodes, but Clement's been in town since October, working to convert a few Toronto locations into reasonable facsimiles of Staten Island.

“It can be a lot of places, Toronto,” he says. “It’s quite handy. It was definitely easier doing it here than in L.A. [where they shot the pilot];
we had to travel so far to find places that look like the East Coast.”

Why are vampires such fertile ground? They have a few ideas. “It’s the fantasy,” Clement thinks. “It’s like being a superhero, but it’s dark,” he says with an American nerd inflection.

“Vampires represent the kind of tortured artist we all wish we were – when we’re 20,” Waititi offers. “The idea of living forever as a tortured soul, falling in love, you know, and the choice you have to make of whether to bite this person and curse them for eternity, or let them grow old and die.”

Then there’s the downside of being a vampire, which is all the stuff you can’t do.

“Most people wouldn’t care if you had a character go for a swim in the ocean,” Waititi says, “but they officially aren’t allowed to, according to vampire lore. They can’t swim in salt water.”

“We go by basic 70s, 80s vampire movie rules,” Clement says. “They can turn into bats;
they can’t go in the sun. They don’t sparkle in the sun, they die. In a lot of literature, vampires have to be invited into private property, but this is a documentary, so these are the actual rules: they have to be invited into any kind of building. It’s good to have limitations;
it makes it harder for them, because they have so many powers.”

The thing is, keeping track of all the rules has had the weird side effect of turning Clement into a sort of improv cop.“They’ll be talking about swimming and I’ll shout [nasal monotone] ‘They can’t swim!’”

Waititi laughs, clearly glad this isn’t one of his responsibilities. “I researched a lot of vampire lore, and some of the rules are so weird that people would think you were just going over the top. My favourite one is, one way to get rid of a vampire if he’s in your village is to steal his socks, fill them with garlic, tie them up and throw them in the river.”

“He’ll be compelled to retrieve them,” says Clement, not even looking up.“Then he’ll get his socks back,” Waititi continues, “and they’ll be filled with garlic! And he’ll be stuck on the banks of the river.”

“There was one where [the actors] were talking about spilling rice,” Clement says, “and I said [nasal monotone] ‘If a vampire spills rice they have to count it! Every grain!’”

But then there’s the other traditional vampire power: the sexy, sexy sexuality. Which Waititi and Clement both find kind of ridiculous, and encourage their actors to play up for maximum silliness.

“I’ve looked at Interview With A Vampire, and all those films, and I think they’re pretty ridiculous,” Waititi says. “And not that sexy.”

This somehow gets the pair spitballing about the mechanics of a vampire orgy.“Well, the first thing you think about is that they’d all be cold,” Clement declares. “And if someone touches you, you’d be like ‘Eeew, get off! Stop it, go run your hands under the water!’”

Berry’s Laszlo and Demetriou’s Nadja, have been in a relationship for centuries, which adds a perspective that wasn’t available in the original film: what would it be like to really be with someone forever?

“You go through phases,” Clement says. “After a few hundred years the phases become really distorted. There’d be a phase of ‘I just want to kill that person.’ In a normal relationship there’ll be like an hour when you’d feel like that. But for them, it stretches out – ‘Remember those 10 years when we weren’t talking?’ But then the make-up sex is probably way longer, too – like, a couple of months.”

Zara wrote:

Dove wrote:WWDITS did well in the ratings. :#cheer#:

http://thefutoncritic.com/ratings/2019/ ... 90402fx01/

Yes, I'm so proud of them.

I'm loving the show, I think my favourite is Nandor, he seems like a mix of Vladislav and Viago. Does anyone else have a favourite yet?