Jemaine Clement on Loving Bowie, Hating L.A., and Needing Some Space From Bret

What's going on with Season 3 of Flight of the Conchords?

Uh... Bret has a, um, a sex operation, and it really changes the dynamic between us.

Does it enhance him, or change him to a different sex?

It's just the same sex, but more so. No, we're thinking about it. I think you'll know more in a month. We're going to have a meeting about it when we're all in the same country -- that's me, Bret and James [Bobin], the director. We have to think about what we want to do, if anything.

So there's a possibility you might not want to do anything?

To be honest with you, every time I finish something -- look, I think of Bret as one of the nicest guys in the world. Honestly, one of the humblest, nicest guys in the world. But at the end of a thing like that, I can't stand him more than anyone else. I'm pretty sure it goes both ways. It's just a really intense thing to do. I'm sure there's lots of famous examples of that.

Are you guys best friends?

I've got one -- no, I've got two better friends than him. Yeah, but he's up there.

Interesting. Is it a grind writing a season's worth of songs like that?

It's a grind trying to do that simultaneously with writing a show. If it were one or the other it would be great, it would be fun. Maybe. It makes it really hard, because you have to decide what to prioritize. We split it up a little bit, and Bret did more of the production and I did more of the rewrites. But I didn't rewrite everything -- usually I would just rewrite the scripts by other writers. And that happens on every show, apparently the showrunner will usually go over everything. But we just didn't have time to do that, so sometimes a very unpolished would hit the stage, and we'd work on it while we were shooting it. But it's very difficult.

Are you living in New York while you're shooting the show?

Yeah.

How do you like that?

I love that place.

But you usually live in --

In Wellington. Well, actually I usually work more than I don't work. So I'm usually in America, for the past three years.

What do you think of L.A.?

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. Is this the L.A. Times? Los Angeles magazine? [Laughs]

No, it's not.

Just, it's so badly planned. But there are some great things about it, as well. Like, you go to Venice Beach. It's amazing every time. And downtown's really cool. I've lived here, if you added it all up, probably a year, and the whole time I was terrified of going downtown, because people here are terrified of going downtown. In the daytime, anyway, it's pretty good. And there's even some good bars and stuff down there. I don't know -- it's love/hate.

A friend of mine told me he spotted you at an outdoor café in Silver Lake wearing very, very short shorts, and was wondering why. Can you answer his question?

Sometimes I dress because I find it funny. But now that people watch what I dress I probably do less so. But in New Zealand in the '70s and '80s -- and I think to an extent here, but not the same tightness as New Zealand -- it was considered very manly to wear tiny shorts. Which is the most ridiculously gay thing, from this chronological vantage point. It just makes me laugh.

So you weren't shooting a movie or anything.

Yeah. It just reminds me of stuff I'd wear as a kid and makes me laugh. But it's true. He caught me!

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