With a bit more fantastical whimsy than many of Apple TV+’s best shows, the film-to-TV reimagining of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits is as irreverently wacky and ridiculous as time-travel movies and TV shows can get. Some of that comes from star Lisa Kudrow and the rest of the ragtag ensemble, but much of it stems from the imaginative duo of co-creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, whose past efforts helped to inform the streaming comedy.
CinemaBlend spoke with Waititi and Clement going into Season 1 of Time Bandits, and given just how wide the scope of the story is, I asked them if and how the former’s MCU films Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder paved the way for this series, and similarly inquired about how the impact of their shared vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows. Understandably, Clement attributed the size of it all to the Marvel features, as he put it:
Definitely Thor helped, you know, because the scale of this is quite big like a movie.
Of course, a sizeable budget and massive scale are good things to have for an audacious remake like this, but all are essentially worthless without someone who knows how to turn the money into gold. And Taika Waititi explained who that person was for this show, saying:
There's also Ra Vincent, who's the production designer, who worked on the Thor films with me, and also worked on all the Lord of the Rings films, and the Hobbits and everything. So he's very used to building to scale. It often would get down. I'd be like, 'Ra, why'd you build it this big? It's only gonna be in one episode.' But it looks so great when you shoot. He loves to build things really big. Just because if you're gonna do it, you might as well do it properly. So it's really cool.
Indeed, the Oscar-nominated Ra Vincent is no small-timer. He started as a sculptor for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Ring movies, moved up to handling set decoration for the Hobbit trilogy and Alice Through the Looking Glass. Along the way, he crossed professional paths with Waititi and Clement, and since handled production design on films like What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, JoJo Rabbit, and Next Goal Wins, as well as Our Flag Means Death and the pilot of What We Do in the Shadows.
Save for Thor: Love and Thunder, Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Eagle vs Shark, Vincent has been looped into the majority of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s mainstream creative ventures. And I think most fans would agree that the looks of all of those projects is spot-on and right in line with whatever moods and tones are needed. (The vamp’s house alone in Shadows is a design feat.)
Jemaine Clement agreeably shared praise for Ra Vincent in bringing up a series that wasn't already mentioned earlier. And he also spoke more generally to the idea that he and Waititi attempted to do with Time Bandits what they did with Shadows as far as building upon an existing story goes. In his words:
Yeah, Ra also worked on Wellington Paranormal with me, and that's a very small budget, and you have to move fast. So it was the mixture of the big movies with Taika and the small TV; we gotta make it big, but we're doing it quickly. So that's all him. But we had both worked on the adaptation from What We Do in the Shadows movie to the TV show. We were trying to make it its own thing, and I think we took the same approach here, where we want to capture the spirit of the movie, but make it its own thing and its own characters.
Among the funniest shows streaming on Hulu, Time Bandits was able to pull off some of its wild visuals by filming within the screened-in environments of The Volume, which Taika Waititi gained a bit of experience with while directing episodes of The Mandalorian. It's certainly possible his time on that show would have influenced his work on the Lisa Kudrow-helmed series even if he hadn't even joined the MCU or adapted his own film for TV. But I don't think he'd be going back in time to try and change any of that, either. And we're all the better for it. In Penelope, we trust!
Time Bandits is available to stream with an Apple TV+ subscription, with the final two episodes dropping on Wednesday, August 21. Check out all the other upcoming Apple TV+ shows heading to the 2024 TV schedule and beyond.
