Taika Waititi's beloved cult classic What We Do In The Shadows, a vampire mockumentary that helped put the New Zealand filmmaker on the map, originated as a standup bit between himself and co-director/fellow comedian Jemaine Clement. In 2014, the duo adapted their 2005 short What We Do In The Shadows: Interviews With Some Vampires into the celebrated feature-length mockumentary, which led to the popular FX spin-off, What We Do In The Shadows the show.
Waititi and Clement were entranced by vampires in media growing up in New Zealand. In an interview with the New York Times, Waititi recounts seeing Love at First Bite at age 7 or 8, while Clement cites being terrified by Scars of Dracula when he was 5. Waititi became interested in making a mockumentary, as the free-flowing nature and immediacy of the format allowed for ease of production. It wouldn't be long before Waititi and Clement would find a way to combine these interests — mockumentary and vampires — on-screen — but first, they toyed with the premise on stage.
Clement and his friend Bret McKenzie (his Flight of the Conchords partner) once played a show in Calgary in which Taika Waititi was performing stand-up as a vampire, and Clement heckled him from the audience, also dressed as a vampire. In the Times interview, Clement explained, "I'd get up from the audience, dressed as a vampire, too, and I'm heckling him." Waititi responded, "You've been heckling me for 250 years!" So the duo first explored building jokes out of vampiric conventions (immortality, for example) in that arena. When they developed the idea into a feature nearly a decade later, they held close to the spirit of amateur camaraderie, undoubtedly lending the film its lightness.
The two New Zealand vampire lore experts eventually made the cult classic What We Do in the Shadows, and while Clement and Waititi may not have felt much like professionals when making it, they certainly added valuable experience to the project. In fact, Clement described in the interview that he and Waititi were continually educating their writers on what vampires can and cannot do. Their background as comedians allowed them to conceive well-structured jokes, while their vampire expertise and experience as small-town New Zealanders provided the content of those jokes in What We Do in the Shadows movie.
The What We Do in the Shadows TV show bears much less involvement from Clement and Waititi, though no less creative ingenuity, thanks to its own talented writing staff and actors. What We Do in the Shadows has its humble origins in a 2005 mockumentary short, which itself owes creative forbearance to a stand-up routine capitalizing on the niche vampire knowledge of two New Zealand comedians. Looking back on these beginnings, it's not hard to see how Waititi has maintained his unique perspective, no matter the size of the production, and how Clement continues to turn out excellent comedic performances himself.