Time after time
The Inbetweeners co-creator Iain Morris tells DQ about reimagining Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy adventure Time Bandits for Apple TV+, his partnership with co-creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, and acting with Lisa Kudrow.
As the father of an eight-year-old boy, it might be a few years yet before Iain Morris can sit down with his son to watch his now iconic British teen comedy The Inbetweeners.
Morris and co-creator Damon Beesley based the series on their own lives, telling the coming-of-age story of four socially awkward teenagers – Will, Simon, Neil and Jay – who find themselves in increasingly desperate situations.
The writer’s latest project, however, is much more family friendly. Time Bandits, which is now streaming on Apple TV+, is a comedic, high-stakes journey through time and space with a ragtag group of thieves and their newest recruit: an 11-year-old history nerd. Together, they set out on a thrilling quest to save the boy’s parents – and the world.
“Well, there are fewer dick jokes than in The Inbetweeners,” Morris tells DQ of his latest project. “It just feels like a big, exciting adventure. I watched all the Indiana Jones stuff with my son the other day and it’s a bit like that. It doesn’t feel like anything else [on TV at the moment]. I find it funny and I’m excited to have people watch it because I think it’s funny and entertaining.”
The series introduces the Bandits – Alto (Tadhg Murphy), Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), Saffron (Kiera Thompson) and Bittelig (Rune Temte) – as they encounter young Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) and embark on a series of adventures that lead them to encounter ancient Mayans, dragon slayers, Casanova and Mansa Musa, as well as land in Prohibition-era New York.
Filmed in Wellington, New Zealand, it also blends stunning locations with astonishing set builds to bring numerous eras to life over the 10-part series, which is based on the 1981 fantasy adventure film of the same directed by Terry Gilliam.
US studio Paramount had been looking for a series with a young protagonist and approached Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows) to take on a small-screen reimagination of the movie. He then enlisted Jemaine Clement, who in turn brought Morris on board and the trio then came together to write the first two scripts.
Long-time friends before partnering on Time Bandits, Morris and Clement have previously written on vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, while Morris and Waititi have written for Flight of the Conchords, the television series based on Clement and Bret McKenzie’s musical comedy double act of the same name. Waititi and Clement’s small-screen work also includes Wellington Paranormal, and Waititi and Morris co-wrote 2023 feature Next Goal Wins.
“I’ve been friends with Jemaine and Taika for many years now. I always loved their work, I’m a big fan of their stuff, so it was great to get to work with them really closely,” Morris says. “Me and Jemaine still talk almost every single day.
“It was the first time the three of us had done something together. I’ve worked with both of them quite closely before, so we’ve been very good friends. So it was nice. Really nice, actually. It’s nice to go to New Zealand to shoot, to go to their hometown of Wellington for a bit and hang out. It was great.”
Morris credits Monty Python with inspiring his career in comedy, so perhaps it isn’t a surprise that he should work on the adaptation of a film featuring three Pythons: director Gilliam co-wrote the script with Michael Palin, while Palin and John Cleese are among the cast.
“Thinking about the show as a Python-esque family romp was how I approached it,” he says. “There’s a Python-esque humour and silliness at times, really expanding it out from Terry Gilliam’s original film and using a lot of the things that happen in it but doing it over 10 episodes rather than one brilliant film.”
The central idea of this new version of Time Bandits certainly takes its cue from the film, with a kid meeting up with five people who take him through history. “But then it veers off. The characters are different from the film, they want different things, they do different things and they’re worried about different things, so it goes a bit differently,” Morris notes. “The three of us really just went through our favourite times in history. We had other people throwing in ideas and stuff, and it was really great fun. I hope we get to do it again.”
Writing a 10-episode series set across numerous periods of history was an opportunity a self-confessed “history nerd” like Morris couldn’t turn down, and he found it was a good excuse to talk to history experts about their areas of interest. Yet no matter where the Bandits land in each episode, the series still retains a contemporary style that explores some historical figures as if they were modern figures still living today.
“It felt to us like we were living through extraordinary times, and certainly extraordinary times for personalities, in terms of politicians and leaders,” Morris explains. “And a lot of the people we visit are leaders or people higher up in society, like kings or emperors. Part of that joke is imagining them as humans, with the same flaws and problems and issues we all have and that you see in politicians today. That was something we really felt we wanted to push, this idea of modernising these historical characters that actually we don’t know much about and can see how they might behave if they were a bit more modern.”
Then when it came to developing each of the main characters, Morris likens it to working on The Inbetweeners. “When you know the characters so well and know what they’re going to say in a situation, it becomes easier to write for an ensemble,” he says. “This one would have this opinion, and this one would have this opinion, and this one would think this. The better you know the characters, the easier ensemble writing becomes for me.”
Morris, Clement and Time Bandits’ other writers also had to find a balance between the family-friendly, high-stakes tension in each ‘quest of the week’ and the show’s more adult humour and themes, with a rule never to undercut the drama with too many jokes.
“You want to keep the jokes flowing and also make it feel like a genuine family show so that adults can watch it and enjoy it and get certain jokes the kids might not get or understand,” Morris says. “There are motivations for the characters the kids might not understand, while the kids still have plenty of adventure to enjoy. It’s definitely, for me, a throwback show in many ways but expanded into a full series.”
Behind the scenes, Morris split showrunning duties on the series with Clement – a strategy he likens to working with Beesley on The Inbetweeners. In both cases, he was working with someone “who I think is really clever and funny,” and part of the job was batting ideas back and forth between each other.
“I’m incredibly lucky to be able to do that,” he says. “I think I answered more emails about the budget than he did, I’ll say that much. He was great, he was amazing. We got on very well. We shared an office and it was great fun sitting there. People would come in and see us sitting behind our desks like we were proper executives rather than just two punters. It was good. I miss him very much. We talk all the time but I miss him very much.”
For the production, Morris, his wife and children spent a year in Wellington, where his kids went to school and the whole family got to experience the “unbelievably bad” winter weather. Despite that, “I fell in love with Wellington,” he says. “I know Bret McKenzie really well as well, he’s a friend, so I had another friend there apart from Jemaine I could hang out with. And Wellington’s a beautiful place. The creative community, the stuff the art department built and the costume department made and all the make-up they made still blows my mind when I think about it. They did such an incredible job and it was also historically accurate. It was just incredible.”
Time Bandits posed a particular challenge for the art team, who had to recreate a different period of history in each episode. For their work, they utilised five sound stages and a backlot at Lane Street Studios – and Morris still remembers the first time he did a walkthrough to see all the completed sets.
“I went a bit quiet halfway through and Brendan Heffernan, one of the art directors, said to me, ‘It’s a lot isn’t it?’ We’d been walking for an hour and still going through new sets he designed,” the writer recalls. “But it was wonderful. It was so thorough.”
With a focus on practical over visual effects, the VFX team built models that were then photographed and inserted into the series, rather than creating those elements digitally from scratch. “We tried to keep that Gilliam-esque tactile sense to these things. It was awesome, I loved it. I’m desperate to do it again,” Morris says.
He points to the upcoming sixth episode featuring Mansa Musa (played by Hammed Animashaun) as a particular highlight, while Mark Gatiss (Sherlock) also appears as the Earl of Sandwich in the Georgian-themed fifth episode.
“The main cast were all great fun and so nice,” he continues. “Every morning I’d get up and do a walkround of the costume and make-up and say hello to everyone and it was always so nice. It was a really lovely time.”
Another of his favourite parts of the project was watching Clement and Waititi acting, with Clement appearing as a character called Wrongness and Waititi as Supreme Being. “It was both intimidating and exhilarating watching them do that,” he says.
Like his co-creators, Morris also got the chance to appear on screen with a cameo as a ‘second’ in an English duel scene alongside Kudrow. Adding to his duties, he also directed episode nine, written by Peep Show co-creator Sam Bain. “It was kind of amazing. We were writing the script, Jemaine and I came up with this idea in the office, and Jemaine was like, ‘Oh, you should I do it,’” he says of his step into acting. “I was like, ‘I don’t think so. I’m not really an actor.’ And then I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll do it,’ because you get carried away.
“So I was doing a scene and the only person I’m talking to in the scene is Lisa Kudrow, literally a comedy legend, and she was so incredibly supportive, nice, kind and generous, and it felt great in the end. At the time I was really nervous, and now I’m absolutely delighted. It’s so lovely to have done it.”
Of course, Kudrow is familiar to millions as Phoebe from Friends, but Penelope couldn’t be more different. “She’s cynical, hard, bitter and horrible to kids and quite grumpy and sarcastic, and very hubristic in many ways and thinks she knows everything,” Morris says of her character. “She was just so funny doing that. It’s similar to what she did in The Comeback, but not the same, and totally different from Phoebe. She’s hilarious, just a joke machine, and she gets it every time. She’s a killer with the gags. She’s really brilliant and such a joy.”
Morris doesn’t hide his love for the show and his hopes that he might get to do it all again if Apple orders a second season. With that in mind, he and his co-creators are already dreaming of new historical eras to which they can send the Time Bandits.
“I’d love to do it again and visit new worlds. That’s the thing for me, to try to find new places in history to visit, and the craftmanship watching it all come together is just incredible,” he says. “The thing I’m most proud of is that it doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve seen on TV for a while. It doesn’t feel like many things.”
Meanwhile, it’s now been 16 years since The Inbetweeners first aired in 2008, and 10 years since the show’s second feature film spin-off was released. With another similarly beloved sitcom, Gavin & Stacey, returning for a Christmas finale this year after five years off-screen, could The Inbetweeners follow suit?
“I certainly love it, and the more I’m away from it, the more I love it,” Morris adds. “I speak to Damon all the time, and hopefully we’ll catch up with the boys soon and have a chat at least. I can’t see us doing any more, but never say never.
“But it was great, I loved every second of it. It was just a fantastic time. And actually, I’m working with a couple of people that worked on the films at the moment. It’s always fun to laugh about The Inbetweeners, so who knows? Never say never.”
tagged in: Apple TV+, Iain Morris, Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, Time Bandits