According to series creator and showrunner Taika Waititi, the reason for the deviation between the original Time Bandits film and his Apple TV outing lies in the simple fact that he approached the project with the intent to “reinvent” the IP for modern audiences.
The widely-panned filmmaker offered this insight into his latest work during a recent, series-centric interview given to Collider‘s Christina Radish.
Asked by his host as to how the decision came about to make the series a collaboration between himself and Flight of the Conchords member Jemaine Clement rather than a completely solo project, the Thor: Love and Thunder director recalled, ‘I love working with Jemaine. He’s my best bud. We’ve done a lot of stuff together. And we did it with [Inbetweeners writer] Iain Morris, another good friend of ours. We are all pretty much the same age. We grew up with Monty Python and all these other great British comedies and American comedies. Our sensibilities are all very similar.”
“We did a lot of work on [What We Do in the] Shadows, the movie, and also the TV show,” he continued. “Apple and Paramount said, ‘Do you wanna adapt this into a show?,’ and they were the first people I thought of. We just collaborated that way. It was a real honor to be asked to even do that, in the first place.”
To this end, turned to the topic of the Time Bandits series’ origins, Waititi then noted that between himself, Clement, and Morris, “Right from the start, we decided not to try to make a carbon copy of the film because that exists as its own thing for those fans and wanted to reinvent it a bit and bring it into a bit more of a modern context.”
“The original was quite dark,” Waititi told Radish, “but this version is probably a little bit more accessible to families in 2024.”
And it seems, if the financial fates would have it, that Waititi has more plans to reinvent the Terry Gilliam original story, as according to him, he and Clement are actively “mapping out a Season 2.”
“It depends on whether people watch it and like it, and whether it’s financially worth it for Apple to make another one,” admitted the director. “We’ll know a couple of months into it. But we are writing it at the moment, and yeah, there are more places and more characters and more guest stars and more costumes and all those things.”
The first season of Waititi and Clement’s Time Bandits is now streaming on Apple TV.