When I speak with Taika Waititi he is worried that I won’t be able to hear him. It’s a common concern for international calls, but this time it has nothing to do with phone reception – he has just popped down to the pub. As if to emphasise this, in the background comes the sound of smashing glass and a woman cackling. Rather a fitting soundtrack to a horror-comedy mockumentary, really. Co-directed by Waititi andFlight Of The Conchords’ Jemaine Clement,What We Do In The Shadowsis a kind of undeadHe Died With A Felafel In His Hand, complete with vampires, werewolves, zombies and New Zealand.
“We scripted the entire film, but when it came time to shoot it we improvised the whole thing,” Waititi admits. “The script was really dense, about 150 pages long, and there was no way we were ever going to have a chance of shooting the entire thing. We realised because we wanted it to feel as real as possible for a fake documentary, the performances had to seem natural. People pausing, thinking about what they were about to say, talking over the top of each other, things like that. Now and then we’d have to include scripted moments when it was important to the story, but for the most part, it’s 95 per cent made up. One day, I’ll find the guts to go back and look at the footage again. We ended up shooting around 130 hours, and trying to get 86 minutes out of that, it’s hard, man. Eventually we’ll release the 18-disc DVD.”
Now, I don’t want to say that What We Do In The Shadows is a mockumentary with bite, because puns are a hard habit to break and should not be encouraged. But this unlikely study of four vampires sharing a house in modern-day Wellington is outright hilarious. Even the house itself is a cluttered, archaic delight (“It’s actually Peter Jackson’s old office,” Waititi reveals. “It made perfect sense that he just happened to have this big old spooky house as an office”). After seeing the film so many times, Waititi himself still finds it entertaining.
“There are still jokes that make me laugh. Anything with the werewolves, I loved that. There’s lots in the film that I still enjoy, and I’ll always stay and watch the first ten or 15 minutes whenever we’re doing a screening. I really enjoy the opening, and that seems to be a common response as well. We’d written in some ghosts into the masquerade [scene] but didn’t end up using them, which is funny given that they would have been the easiest thing to do. Just tie some fishing line around something and make it move.”
What is perhaps the film’s great appeal is that despite the blood-letting immortality of its subjects, these vampires suffer through the same well-intentioned awkwardness as the rest of us mortals. Waititi’s character, Viago, is amiable to the point of frustration, like a fresh-faced intern you just want to drop out of a high window by the end of the day.
“I just wanted to play a sort of vampire mum, really. A character who looks after everyone, just the nicest vampire you could possibly meet. Very polite, who sadly has to feast on human blood to survive. But he’s well-intentioned, well-dressed. He’s based on a guy I once knew in Germany, the way he talks and sees the world. Very innocent with this high-pitched, camp voice. So I tried to project that guy, mixed it in with a bit of my mum. Jemaine was keen on doing a character more like the Gary Oldman-type of Dracula vampire, and then by default Jonny [Brugh] became the weird Venice Beach vampire. We wanted them all to contrast, and I liked that it was the complete opposite to anything else we’ve really seen of onscreen vampires.”
What We Do In The Shadows (dir. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement) is in cinemas Thursday September 4.
