Quotes

[on how he ranks in musical skills in Flight of the Conchords (2007)] Bret's a little better than me and I'm a little worse than Bret.

What do I think of L.A.? It's boring, with some amazing nuggets. Like there are some parts of it that are great, but by and large I think it's quite boring.

Well, I grew up in the '80s, which was a really massive time for sci-fi.

In real life I'm very low-key. A wallflower. One of the reasons I went into comedy and acting was that I was sick of being shy.

I'm part Maori. My mum's Maori, and she raised me. And my grandma, she's Maori.

I can only think of one wacky best friend who I thought was awesome: Rhys Ifans in 'Notting Hill.' He really nailed the wacky best friend.

I feel like I need to think of myself as an outsider. I hate it when I can tell when people see me and my friends as part of this establishment...It feels more creative to be small, to be creating something from very little.

As a pale-skinned Maori person, I felt like a spy as a kid. I could tell what pakeha [New Zealanders of European origin] people actually say, which sometimes would be quite shocking. And also, I heard what Maori people say and it's essentially the same thing. Each group thinks the other one are thieves.

The way [Bret McKenzie] and I work and the way [Taika Waititi] and I work are different. Bret and I, we don't like the same movies. We like the same music but we don't like the same comedy stuff often. He would rather watch Sex and the City (1998), whereas I could not sit through that. He loves Knocked Up (2007) and things about groups of friends having babies and stuff, whereas I look around at the audience in total confusion. But he walked out of Step Brothers (2008). At the time, I thought it was one of the funniest movies I'd seen in years. So we have to work on a subset of what we both find funny. I think sometimes that raises the quality because you get rid of all this crap. Me and Taika, we're more similar in sense of humor.

We were watching Larry David intently because we are big fans; we'd actually been studying Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000) a lot because it's a really great way to learn structure for a sitcom. It's a perfect structured sitcom. Curb and Seinfeld (1989) are big influences on our writing. But then Larry David got up and he really didn't care. Every single question, he obliterated the journalist until they wouldn't talk again! We thought he was hilarious, it was like a stand-up routine. So we suddenly had to rethink how we were going to be able to survive. It wasn't going to be by being irreverent.