Movie Buff Bill Hader Explains 'Documentary Now!'

In addition to being one of Saturday Night Live’s most popular cast members for eight seasons, Bill Hader was also the show’s resident movie buff. He applied that knowledge to spot-on impressions of such classic big-screen icons as Vincent Price, Clint Eastwood, and Al Pacino. Now, with the help of some of his old SNL buddies, Hader is preparing to teach a master class in (fake) non-fiction filmmaking as the star of the new IFC series, Documentary Now!.

Hader shares the screen with Fred Armisen, while Studio 8H vets Seth Meyers, Rhys Thomas, and Alex Buono run things behind the camera. Each episode of Documentary Now! uses a classic documentary as the inspiration for a mock-doc that begins as a parody and evolves into its own creature. The series premiere, “Sandy Passage,” for example is inspired by the Maysles Brothers’ beloved 1975 feature, Grey Gardens, about Kennedy relatives Big Edie and Little Edie Beale. Hader spoke with Yahoo TV about his favorite documentaries and which SNL sketch inspired Documentary Now!.

Seth and Fred probably learned about your film buff cred when you all worked together on SNL. Is that why they brought you aboard Documentary Now!?
We did this sketch on Saturday Night Live called “History of Punk” that Seth and Fred wrote and Rhys and Alex directed, and it did such an amazing job of recreating the looks of music documentaries like Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization. They cared so much about the authenticity of it, even making sure that they had the right lenses and the right lights. I thought it was really beautiful and at the afterparty, I said that we should do this as a show — each episode would be its own documentary. Mock documentaries have been done a lot, so we wanted to make this feel incredibly authentic, where the filmmaking is really in the foreground. There’s this thing with comedy were people think it can’t work if its cinematic or beautiful, and as a film fan, I know it can. If we did our job right, people will be flipping through the channels and say “Oh, Grey Gardens is on. And then they’ll be like, “Wait, Fred Armisen is in this. This isn’t Grey Gardens!”

How many times did you re-watch Grey Gardens to prepare for Sandy Passage?
I’ve only seen Grey Gardens twice. My favorite Maysles brothers movie is probably Salesman; I’ve seen that one more. But I really enjoy Grey Gardens. And Sandy Passage is all written. There’s no improvising in that one. Seth wrote it and Fred and I are doing our lines word for word. That’s a real testament to Seth’s writing; he wrote a brilliant script, and we just wanted to honor that. It’s a different type of performing than we’d do on SNL. It’s not sketch performing, the audience is watching behavior, which is my favorite kind of acting. When you sketch comedy, you want to keep the pace up and the rhythm going. But when you do this show, you’re stuck with the tone and pace of the documentary you’re doing. The pace of Grey Gardens is very slow and meandering. That was the trick, and the way we solved it was to just kind of own it. It was fun to commit to a style and let that dictate where you went.

You’ve also got a spoof of Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line coming up later in the season.
It’s so good. [SNL writer and Stefon co-creator] John Mulaney wrote that episode, “The Eye Doesn’t Lie,” and it’s the one that makes me laugh the hardest. And the last show of the season is “Gentle & Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee,“ which is about a soft-rock band. Although it’s really about these two characters and the reality of what they’re going through.

That seems like ideal material for you since you listed This Is Spinal Tap amongst your Top 10 Criterion Collection DVDs.
People ask me if the Blue Jean Committee is Spinal Tap, but you’d never watch a mockumentary to make a mockumentary. We’re only watching other documentaries. For “Gentle & Soft,” specifically, we watched Alison Ellwood’s History of the Eagles documentary. Then we made up a fake band and did that.

Even though it’s mostly improvised, Spinal Tap does feature that same kind of behavioral quality present in Grey Gardens. And it also gets surprisingly serious at times.
Yeah, when Nigel leaves the band, it gets really scary! We had this dynamic where we could either do jokes or let the characters dictate where they should go, and they end up going to this interesting, melancholy place. I showed it to my wife [writer/director Maggie Carrie] and she said, “I love this. It’s not really joke heavy, but it’s really cool that you guys wanted it to go there.” We keep getting asked, “Who is this show for — documentary lovers or comedy fans?” My answer is that it’s for me, Seth, Fred, Rhys, and Alex. We wanted to see this show and hope other people do, too.

And in this new TV landscape, you know that people who would think it’s funny will eventually find it.
Yeah! You let them come to it. And if people don’t like it, they don’t like it. There’s a thing in comedy where you want to make everyone happy. I totally get that and it’s not like its wrong, but for this show it was very liberating to say, “What would make us laugh?” That was my favorite kind of comedy growing up. I watched Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, and SCTV and to them, comedy was all personal. It was what they found funny.

IFC has already renewed the show for Season 2. Do you have specific documentaries in mind that you’ll be spoofing?
Not yet. There’s a kind of documentary where the documentarian is more in the foreground than the actual subject of the documentary. Like, say, there’s a guy who really loves The Far Side and he’s going to go out and meet Gary Larson, but then the film really turns into a documentary about that guy. And you’re like, “This isn’t a documentary about The Far Side. It’s about this dude I don’t care about!” I think that’s a documentary we see a lot and it would be fun to find some characters for Fred and I to play.

So what’s your all-time favorite documentary?
Oh, The Thin Blue Line by far. It’s the first film that works on so many levels; it’s a great murder mystery, but at the same time has this big philosophical question about what is truth. It was a new type of filmmaking, something you’d never seen before. Originally, we were talking about doing The Jinx with Fred playing Robert Durst, but then we said, “That style actually started with The Thin Blue Line so let’s go back and do that.” All of Errol Morris’s early films are so hypnotic. That film that he and Werner Herzog produced, The Act of Killing, is another kind of documentary I’d never seen before. I thought it was really fascinating.

Documentary Now! premieres Aug. 20 at 10 p.m. on IFC.

Watch the show’s second episode: