Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s What We Do In The Shadows a vampire classic

OSCAR-NOMINATED Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi is back with a hilarious vampire comedy, that you’ll want to sink your teeth into for a good laugh.

HE directed the highest-grossing film in the history of New Zealand cinema, but Taika Waititi might still something of an outsider.

“Kiwi films aren’t traditionally funny,’’ says the 39-year-old filmmaker, in town to promote What We Do In the Shadows,the critically-acclaimed vampire mockumentary he made with old mate and long-time collaborator Jemaine Clements.

“Sam Neill, I think, coined the phrase ‘cinema of the unease’ to describe it. I mean, love Jane Campion’s stuff, but her last thing, Top of the Lake, was super bleak,” Waititi said.

New Zealand’s prejudice towards cinema that explores the dark side human existence might explain why Waititi’s 2010 coming of age story, Boy, is embraced as a feel-good comedy in his own country, while being classified as a gritty drama in the US, where it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

KIWI HUMOUR: Taps into a vein of fresh comedy with vampires

Compared to the brutally dysfunctional family dynamic in Lee Tamahori’s brutally effective Once Were Warriors (1994), the 11-year-old title character’s relationship with his dead loss of a father (played by Waititi) in Boy appears relatively benign.

“It’s tough and it’s real, but it’s not nearly as bleak as a lot of other New Zealand films,” says Waititi.dfa

Both sides of the Pacific, however, seem to be on the same page when it comes to Waititi’s latest film, What We Do In The Shadows, the story of four vampires who have been living in the same dilapidated share house for centuries.

When they are not sucking the life out of virgins or backpackers, Viago (Waititi), Deacon (Jonathan Brugh), Vladislav (Clement) and the Nosferatu-like Petyr (Ben Fransham) squabble over bills and whose turn it is to do the chores — until their niggly nocturnal existence is disrupted by a mouthy, 21st Century newbie (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) and his nerdy mate Stu (Stuart Rutherford).

The film, which is about to screen in the midnight madness section of the Toronto Film Festival, has a 93 per cent positive rating on critical aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.

This time, Waititi shared writing and directing credits with Clement, who is best known as one half of the comedy duo Flight Of the Conchords.

The pair met when as students at Wellington university and went on to form comedy duo The Humourbeasts.

They came up with the original idea — a kind of Gothic, supernatural take on Richard Lowenstein’s He Died with A Felafel in his Hand — while they were living in share houses just down the road from each other

“I guess we just thought: imagine if this was for a thousand years. Would it change?” says Clement.

But after making a short film of the same name as part of a funding application, the project was put on the back burner when their respective careers took off.

Nine years on, Waititi and Clement’s schedules finally aligned piled by a significantly bigger budget.

“It’s still low,’’ says Clement, who plays a lascivious 860-year-old who has been traumatised by an ancient beast.

“But it’s eight times more than (the original $250,000.)”

While the filmmakers’ shared-house experiences provided plenty of raw material for their screenplay, neither has much in common with the characters they play.

“One of the pros of being an actor and coming up with your own character is that you get to live out some sort of fantasy, to play someone who is quite different to yourself,’’ says Waititi, who has cast himself as a fastidious dandy.

“I would certainly never do anyone else’s dishes.

“I have lived in some pretty scuzzy houses.

“Sometimes, if things got too dirty, I would just go and stay at my girlfriend’s house for a month. And then hopefully when I came back things were cleaner.”

Waititi attributes brooding tone of the majority of his national cinema down to the country’s relative isolation in relation to the rest of the world — and the weather.

“We are like the Iceland of the South Pacific.”.

But he’s determined to buck the trend.

“It’s taken quite a while for New Zealanders to start being taken seriously as comics. (Flight Of the Conchords) Bret (McKenzie) and Jemaine really solidified that.”

For Waititi, who was nominated for an Oscar for his short film Two Cars, One Night (2005), comedy provides more of a creative challenge.

“With comedy you are engaging the audience more, you have to keep them interested, keep the energy up, and tell a story while still keeping them laughing.

“Whereas with a drama, if they don’t laugh, that’s a success.

“To me, many of the comedies out there have deeper and more poignant messages than (Oscar favourites) like Crash or Chicago. Half the time it’s about spectacle and the other half the time it’s about how much weight an actor loses.”

Perhaps Australia’s higher average of sunlight hours explains the stronger comedy tradition in this country.

“I find Australians funnier than New Zealanders,’’ says Waititi, listing The Castle and Shirley Barrett’s Love Serenade among his favourite films.

“And I am a big fan of John Clarke, who is a Kiwi but has spent a lot of his time here, and Chris Lilley.”

Waititi bemoans the tendency of actors like Eric Bana to eventually “graduate” towards drama.

“He’s one of the funniest people I have ever seen. I would much prefer to see him doing comedy than drama — not that he’s not good at it. But hardly anybody can do what he was doing in projects like Full Frontal. I think that’s a gift, if you have got it, that you should keep giving.”

That’s certai nly something he and Clement — with whom he is currently working on a US TV comedy pilot — intend to do.

What We Do In the Shadows opens today.

Originally published as Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s What We Do In The Shadows a vampire classic