REMAIN IN LIGHT PRESENTEERT WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS EEN FILM VAN JEMAINE CLEMENT & TAIKA WAITITI PRAKTISCH Publieksprijs, Toronto International Film Festival 2014 (Midnight Madness) Publieksprijs & eervolle vermelding, Sitges International Film Festival 2014 RELEASEDATUM BELGIE: TBC DISTRIBUTIE BENELUX REMAIN IN LIGHT Lange Winkelhaakstraat 26 2060 Antwerpen 03 485 54 45 BOEKINGEN Olivier Van den Broeck [email protected] 0473 56 83 88 PERS Kay Doms [email protected] 0499 93 46 22 2 SYNOPSIS Vampier zijn in de 21e eeuw is geen gemakkelijke opdracht. Dit ontdekken de documentairemakers die een trio bloeddorstige huisgenoten volgen tijdens hun alledaagse bezigheden in Wellington, Nieuw-Zeeland. Maar wanneer ze hipster Nick in een vampier veranderen, worden de rollen omgedraaid. Het is niet de nieuweling die de knepen van het vak moet aanleren, maar de onsterfelijken die worden ingewijd in de moderne wereld van modetrends, Facebook en technologie. Integreren in de samenleving is nooit zo moeilijk geweest voor een bloedzuiger. De hilarische mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, geschreven en geregisseerd door Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords) en Taika Waititi (Eagle vs Shark), won de publieksprijs op het Toronto International Film Festival, de publieksprijs en eervolle vermelding op het Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival. 3 SPECIFICATIES LAND: Nieuw-Zeeland JAAR: 2014 DUUR: 86 minuten BIOSCOOPFORMAAT: 2.35 : 1 GELUID: Dolby Digital ORIGINELE VERSIE: Engels ONDERTITELING: Nederlands & Frans 4 CAST VLADISLAV Jemaine Clement VIAGO Taika Waititi DEACON Jonathan Brugh PETYR Ben Fransham NICK Cori Gonzalez-Macuer STU Stuart Rutherford JACKIE Jackie van Beek 5 CREW REGIE & SCENARIO Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi PRODUCER Taika Waititi Emanuel Michael Chelsea Winstanley CO-PRODUCERS Pamela Harvey-White EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Jemaine Clement CINEMATOGRAFIE Richard Bluck D.J. Stipsen PRODUCTION DESIGN Ra Vincent GELUID Plan 9 KOSTUUMS Samantha Morley MONTAGE Tom Eagles Yana Gorskaya Jonathan Woodford-Robinson CASTING Tina Cleary MAKE-UP Amy McLennan 6 AN INTERVIEW WITH SOME VAMPIRES Interview – “Jemaine Clement & Taika Waititi: Bloody hilarious” These two have been friends for years, and their latest film What We Do In The Shadows, which they co-wrote, co-directed, and co-star in, is not just a grand celebration of ordinary vampires, but of a fruitful creative relationship. They have made their names separately with Flight of the Conchords and Boy, but some of their first steps in the entertainment world were made together, at Victoria University in the 1990s. "I don't remember the moment when we actually met, but I remember the moment I first saw Jemaine," Waititi recalls. "It was in the library at Victoria University. I remember looking across and going, 'Ugh. Man, look at that dick!' because he had this colourful Samoan shirt on, and I remember thinking, 'Oh, he's probably one of those snooty arty types.' "And that night there were auditions for a university show, and I saw him there and thought, 'Oh no, not that guy again'." Jemaine laughs: "I remember that same moment seeing Taika and thinking, 'What a dick!' because he had a reggae hat on, one of those big red, yellow and green crocheted hats. So both of us based our instant dislike on each other's clothes. Both of us were sending misleading messages about our ethnicities!" Fortunately, they both got through the auditions for the show, and started hanging out, which quickly changed their initial judgments. "I think when I saw Taika do his audition bits, he was actually one of the few people who made me laugh." They went on to form comedy acts, So You're A Man (which included Bret McKenzie), and The Humourbeasts, and have since collaborated on episodes of Flight of the Conchords, and Radiradirah, as well as Eagle vs Shark - Waititi's first feature in which he had Clement as the lead. But pretty much throughout their entire relationship, they've been thinking of making a vampire 7 movie together - they've both been keen on the genre since they were young. "I've loved vampires since I was a kid, or loved a lot of the vampire movies that I saw. Anything with sharp teeth really," Waititi explains. "I remember you could get those fake vampire teeth, and I remember just keeping them in all the time." "Me too! They were these plastic ones with hinges," Clement adds. "They were the classic ones," Waititi agrees, "and they made your gums bleed because they were quite sharp." Clement even started a gang of 10-year-old schoolboys called The Vampires. "The only rule was that everyone had to wear those fake teeth. And then we would ride around the streets of Masterton on bikes, yelling out to girls: 'I vant to drink your blood!'" They didn't actually ever give the blood-drinking thing a go though. "No, we were only 10! We'd stay on the bikes." Waititi completed his fang-teeth look with a coat his mum found. "I was a big fan of The Lost Boys, and I asked my mum to help me get a trenchcoat like the one Corey Haim wears. I think it was a women's one 'cos it had these big shoulder pads." They remember first creating vampire characters together as part of a skit they did for a fundraising show in 2000. "I think that's where it started," Clement muses. "Did we do a song?" Waititi wonders. "Yeah, I think we did a song. And me, you, and Bret did a song about being werewolves too." "Vampires singing a song about werewolves? Oh man." That was obviously a prescient performance though, as six years later, they decided to test out the idea of making a vampire mockumentary together, and created a short film centred around a bunch of vampire flatmates in Wellington. It was part funding application, part testing the water, part distillation of ideas. They asked friends and family if they wanted to be involved, and shot a bunch of documentary- style interviews with whoever turned up. "We didn't plan any of the characters, who they would be, or what they would be like," Waititi explains. "I wanted to try out the obsession with cleanliness, and whatever we tried out back then, we just kind of stuck with it really, so cleanliness became one of Viago's traits as an 18th- century dandy. Johnny Brugh, who plays Deacon, was really sick at the time, and he just spent his whole interview lying down on the couch, so that became the thing that Deacon did - he's always lying around, being the lazy, cool, vampire who didn't give a shit." Their Eastern European accents were a given though - the pair wanted their vampire characters to have an air of being quite foreign, and old school. "One of the things we were hoping that would come through thematically was xenophobia - the idea that these guys were still very foreign in New Zealand, and the idea that they've been 8 chased right round the world down to Wellington, so they've had this life of constantly running, kind of in exile," Clement nods. His character Vladislav seems to have had a particularly tough time in centuries gone past, and has become a bit of a pervert as a consequence - a benevolent pervert though. The short film/pitch turned out well, so they decided to go for the feature length version, and then, well, they both got busy. "We're actually pretty embarrassed, because we must've been mentioning this movie in interviews for about seven years," Clement laughs. "I found these old emails between us from 2007 saying things like, "We've gotta make this vampire movie man! We've gotta stop messing around and do it." "And it was five years before we got around to it," Waititi adds. Needless to say, the vampire craze found a whole new level of crazy in that period - Blade, and Underworld had been and gone, but Twilight rose up in their place, not to mention Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Byzantium, Let The Right One In, 30 Days Of Night, and countless others. It did give them pause for thought. "I was always scared that people would have reached the point of going 'I never want to see another vampire movie again' by now," Waititi explains. But the recent obsession with the genre has made it ripe for mocking in many ways, and reviewers have been very quick to understand that WWDITS is a fresh, Wellington-inspired version of the well-trodden storylines, and mostly harks back to old school vampire mythology. Plus, it's funny as hell. "We did want to film the character of Nick, who is the new guy who's excited about becoming a vampire, we wanted to have him see the poster for Twilight Breaking Dawn Part II being pulled down, just as a message to say, 'Sorry bro, it's not cool any more, nobody cares'. But we didn't manage to pull that off," Clement laughs. "Otherwise most of the genre references are pretty old. Our vampires are pretty traditional - they burst into flames rather than sparkle. They turn into bats, which I'm pretty sure modern vampires don't do." "I guess they thought it wasn't all that cool anymore," Waititi smiles. "It's like turning into a big black butterfly." The pair wrote the script together, initially going back and forward via email, sending each other scenes, and ideas for twists, or jokes. Then they got together for three days in a house to fill in all the holes, and finally took it in turns doing re-writes. By the time they were finished, they had 150 pages of polished, precise material.