Monday 23 June 2014

The Ides of March


Act MP John Banks will await his fate today (Getty Images)
















After  nearly a decade, 150 pages of script and 130 hours of footage, Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement's vampire mockumentary reaches the screen.

Jermaine was doing Conchord stuff
, but every now and then we'd email or we'd write a scene or have an idea. It got cobbled together until in 2012 we finally said.

By the end of the decade, Waititi was helping run the Wellington Artists' Charitable Trust in a warehouse in Cable St and working primarily in visual art. "Painting, photography, a little bit of comedy on the side. I don't know if I'd have kept being an actor, I was getting a bit sick of it. But film was something I hadn't really explored yet, so I tried my hand.

These characters were clearly rich enough to sustain a feature. The problem with the 150-page script Waititi and Clement eventually created was twofold: it was too long and they both ended up feeling characters created through improve should not be scripted at all.

"So we cut 50 pages and then we didn't show the actors the script. We did pitch this film in the States to a few studios, and we had offers to go and make it over there, but they wanted to put celebrities in it. We would still have made a good film, but we would have probably had to make it according to studio rules. We wouldn't have had this kind of process, improvising the entire thing."

To some extent there was.