Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement on being ‘total nerds’, Time Bandits and 30 years of laughs
Kiwi comedians Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement forged a partnership that has lasted 30 years and open up on their rocky start.
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To many, Taika Waititi is the epitome of cool.
His movies have been loved by millions, he’s won an Oscar, Time Magazine named him one of the most influential people in the world in 2022, he’s a red carpet regular with his A-list mates, where his bold sense of style makes him stand out alongside his pop star wife Rita Ora and his passionate advocacy for Indigenous storytelling has made him a respected voice in his native New Zealand and around the world.
But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, the Kiwi director of Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit admits that he and his longtime friend and collaborator Jemaine Clement were “total nerds” as kids, something that held them in good stead for their latest venture together, Time Bandits.
Based on Terry Gilliam’s much loved 1981 family film of the same name – of which both were fans – it tells the story of nerdy young kid called Kevin, who is taken on a wild adventure by a band of time-travelling thieves, led by Lisa Kudrow’s Penelope.
“I was very much like Kevin and pored over the pages of history books,” says Waititi, sitting next to Clement over Zoom call from New Zealand.
Growing up in single-mother families on the North Island of New Zealand – Waititi in the suburbs of Wellington and Clement in Masterson – both threw themselves into books on ancient cultures such as Rome, Greece Egypt and the Viking era. But to really illustrate their geeky credentials, Clement cheerfully dobs in his mate as having played Dungeons and Dragons in his teenage years – by himself.
“I did,” confirms Waititi. “Now listen, I don’t think that’s nerdy – I think that’s very brave.”
“How is that brave?,” counters Clement. “No one is seeing you.”
“No, I’m seeing myself,” argues Waititi. “Everyone else knew. My mum knew.”
“You heard her walking past saying ‘nerd!’,” finishes Clement.
They both admit there’s an element of wish fulfilment in being able to choose the time periods Kevin visits based on where they would want to go – from prehistoric times to ancient Troy and the Middle Ages to name a few. Pressed on where they would time travel to if they could visit any point in history, Clement can’t decide between seeing Jimi Hendrix play Woodstock, visiting the fabled pink and white terraces near Rotorua that were destroyed by a volcano in 1886, and seeing the now-extinct giant Moa bird in the wild.
Waititi says he’d like to travel back to ancient Rome to see “to see just one fight in the Colosseum”.
“But not super bloodthirsty one,” he adds quickly. “I just want to see the spectacle of it. Maybe towards the end when they weren’t killing each other.”
But Clement has a better idea for his mate.
“Maybe you’d like to go back in time and actually play Dungeons and Dragons with other people? You could play with your young self.”
Time Bandits is the pair’s biggest collaboration since their acclaimed 2014 vampire mockumentary movie What We Do In the Shadows, which they co-wrote, co-directed and co-starred in as squabbling bloodsucking housemates. It led to the sequel TV series of the same name – which will wrap up this year after six seasons – and spin-off Wellington Paranormal. Each also had a hand in directing and writing of Time Bandits as well as appearing on screen, where Waititi plays the God-like Supreme Being, while Clement takes on his nemesis, Pure Evil.
“For a long time, we were playing the other parts,” says Clement. “I was going to be God and he was going to be the Devil and I think we just went to what we usually do. I think being God is like being the director and being stuck in hell is like being the writer, so we just really went to our jobs.”
Interviewing the long-time friends and collaborators together is a bit like herding cats as the pair constantly crack each other up, finish each other’s sentences and veer off on tangents borne of three decades of clowning around.
But when they met in the drama club at the University of Wellington, neither one had an inkling they would form a lasting creative partnership and that each would scale the heights of Hollywood stardom.
In fact, the very first impression for each of them was that the other was a bit of a “dick”. When they first spied each other in the university library, Clement was sporting a loud Samoan shirt and Waititi was rocking a crocheted reggae hat, much to their mutual displeasure.
“I noticed this guy in the library this guy and he seemed a bit cocky, or something,” says Jemaine.
“I was there and I thought the same thing,” confirms Waititi.
“Then coincidentally we were both auditioning for a show at university later on …,” adds Clement.”
“ … and it turned out we were the only two people each other liked,” finishes Waititi.
Once they got over their initial misgivings, the pair became firm friends after bonding over comedy and finding out they had a lot in common that set them apart from many of their contemporaries.
“We were both raised by single mums in fairly modest circumstances unlike most of the people at university,” says Clement. “And we’re also both part-Maori-part-Pakeha and we felt like we both crossed these different worlds and there were certain things that only we understood in a way that other people around us mostly didn’t get.”
Waititi agrees, adding jokingly: “They all came from two parent homes. I grew up in a street in the ‘80s full of solo mums and me and my friends used to walking around looking for kids with two parents and bully them. Like ‘hey kid, you’ve got a dad who loves you …’.”
Their first projects together were five-man comedy troupe So You’re a Man, which played for a month in Melbourne in 1997, and the duo The Humourbeasts, which won New Zealand’s highest comedy award. But even back then Waititi and Clement were dreaming big, and spurred each other on to achieve greatness, both together and separately.
Clement would go on to form the comedy-musical duo Flight of the Conchords with Brett McKenzie, which filled arenas around the world and spawned a hit TV spin-off, with Waititi directing several episodes. He also appeared in villainous roles in movies including Dinner For Schmucks, Men In Black 3 and as the voice of the evil crab Tamatoa in Disney’s animated gem, Moana.
Meanwhile, after directing Clement in his debut movie Eagle Vs Shark, Waititi had huge local and critical successes with the movies Boy and Hunt For the Wilderpeople, which led to him directing Chris Hemsworth in the rapturously received Thor: Ragnarok (and its less enthusiastically embraced sequel Thor: Love and Thunder), and then winning an Oscar for writing Jojo Rabbit, in which he also played a buffoonish version of Hitler.
“I think we did want to make TV shows,” reflects Clement of their ambitions all the way back when. “We had this discussion between ourselves where we have gone ‘who could imagine that we would be doing this?’ I think I said that to Taika recently and he says ‘us – but only us’. No one else thought it, but we thought it. No one else would have believed it.”
Time Bandits streams on Apple TV+ from July 24
Originally published as Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement on being ‘total nerds’, Time Bandits and 30 years of laughs
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