Decider Talks Documentaries (Now!) with Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but parody is the most endearing.

IFC’s Documentary Now!, which returns tonight for its second season, is a comedic take on classic documentaries like The War Room and Jiro Dreams of Sushi that transforms rather than mocks their worlds. Bill Hader, Fred Armisen and Seth Meyers love those documentaries, and their half-hour series reimagines them with new details and stories.

“On all of these episodes,” Hader says, “we take the style of the documentary but make sure that it’s different thematically. We’re not just doing them beat for beat.”

Decider caught up with the show’s creators late Tuesday morning — just as the caffeine was hitting — for a freewheeling discussion about what makes great documentaries tick and how Documentary Now! makes them funny.

DECIDER: When you start writing a Documentary Now! episode, is the idea to do a fairly straight documentary and make it funny with characters?

SETH MEYERS: I think it depends on the source material. Each documentary provides different ways to find comedy. Something like The War Room has some inherent comedy because of Stephanopoulos and Carville, so you can write around the way those guys talk to each other. We do it differently with each documentary.

BILL HADER (in JFK accent): I stand behind… what Seth Meyers just said.

Did you figure some things out during the first season about what works — period documentaries or character work or certain kinds of dialogue?

SETH MEYERS: We really liked it when Fred and Bill were together as characters, and the key was to have six episodes as a season that were different enough from each other in style and subject. So for Season 2, we have one that’s black and white. We have one in Spanish. We learned that it was important to have those differences.

Are you working off of a list of favorite documentaries, or do you do a lot of research about what documentaries to do?

BILL HADER: I’m kind of the resident film nerd, so I usually come in with a list. I remember early on saying we should do a concert movie, we should do The Kid Stays in the Picture, which we’re doing this season.

FRED ARMISEN: We do some homework between seasons. So far, we’ve made documentaries that we all love.

Bill, in this first episode, you’re playing a toned-down version of your SNL impression of James Carville. Was that to keep the episode from playing too much like a sketch?

BILL HADER: Yeah. On SNL, he was a guy who was raised by eels. [Laughs.] It was a little bananas. For this, I watched The War Room and really paid attention to how he was in that.

I talked to Carville a few weeks ago about his new book, and he said he had talked to you guys about the episode.

SETH MEYERS: He has helped promote the show a bit.

BILL HADER: I have never actually met him. He’s always been unbelievably nice about the impression. It’s nice when the people you impersonate have nice things to say about it.

SETH MEYERS: Especially when you say he was raised by eels. [Laughs.]

Carville said he heard Luke Wilson does a good impression of him but wouldn’t do it in front of him. Who else does a good James Carville?

FRED ARMISEN: Ben Affleck does a really good Carville.

BILL HADER: I did this Italian talk show character Vinny Vedecci with John Malkovich on SNL. We did it at the table without me doing an impression, and I remember Seth coming to me and saying, “I think you need to do a Malkovich impression to Malkovich.” So we went into Seth’s office, and I did the Malkovich impression right in front of him. I was terrified, and he was so nice and laughed about it.

I have seen The War Room a bunch of times and saw it last night for the first time in probably 10 years. I was surprised how old-fashioned it was. They talked about policy, and they provided access that I don’t think any filmmaker would get today.

SETH MEYERS: D.A. Pennebaker [who directed The War Room] was at our premiere last night.

BILL HADER: Yeah, he was sitting right behind us.

SETH MEYERS: We talked to him afterward. I asked him how long it took everyone to stop acting like there was a camera there, and he said, “About an hour.” People let down their guard. Today, nobody would give you that kind of access.

BILL HADER: Now you just put it all on Twitter. [Laughs.]

Carville and Stephanopoulos has an almost religious devotion to what they were doing. They believed in the ideas of that campaign in ways that would seem almost sentimental today.

SETH MEYERS: One of my favorite things about “The Bunker” is that Bill and Fred play it like they don’t care about the candidate at all.

FRED ARMISEN: It was just about winning.

BILL HADER: There’s a joke at the end where I forget the candidate’s name.

Fred, one of the documentaries I remember seeing you in was I Am Trying to Break Your Heart about the band Wilco.

FRED ARMISEN: That may have been the first thing I ever did in a movie. Sam Jones was making that movie with a little video camera, and it seemed so low-stakes. I love that movie because real things happened.

SETH MEYERS: That’s a great documentary.

They fire a guy [Jay Bennett] in the middle of the film.

FRED ARMISEN: And not just a guy. He was one of the main guys in the band.

SETH MEYERS: And it was exactly the kind of confrontation people have in a creative environment.

BILL HADER: In the movie version of that you would have seen people yelling and screaming, but it was just awkward silences. Everyone just looked down. It was awful. That’s what I really love in a documentary.

SETH MEYERS: The War Room works because it became Bill Clinton. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart works because it became Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Sometimes documentarians are in the right place early on for something to be able to show people how it got made. You realize how much luck is involved in great documentaries.

BILL HADER: Like in Weiner, you have a guy making a comeback, and then it all goes wrong.

To be fair, if you point a camera at Anthony Weiner, you’re probably going to get a documentary out of it.

BILL HADER: It’s just amazing for the filmmaker to be there when something like that happens. Just like in Citizenfour and so many of these other great documentaries.

When you’re having that first meeting about an episode, what’s that conversation?

SETH MEYERS: We just throw them out there and figure out an angle. Because of the speed with which we had to work at SNL, we can process things pretty quickly and figure out if something has legs. We don’t have a ton of time to work on the show. We get together with the directors for two days and break down what we want to do.

What kind of challenge does Lorne Michaels have at SNL this fall with the election? How do you handle parody when something is already absurd?

SETH MEYERS: You just have to react to the news each day and try to find a take. It never hurts when people are paying attention to what’s happening, which is certainly the case this year. The bigger issue for SNL is figuring out a way to be fresh when so many other people are doing comedy about the election, and SNL does a great job with that.

How are you dealing with it in the writers’ room on Late Night?

SETH MEYERS: We take it as a gift. We’re not going to get tired talking about Donald Trump, and we try to make jokes about it but also explain it a little bit. He’s given us plenty to explain.

Seth, you wrote the Jiro Dreams of Sushi episode — “Juan Likes Rice and Chicken” — that’s airing next week. Did you come up with that together and then you wrote a draft, or do you start with your own take on it?

SETH MEYERS: We talk about it a little bit in the room. We wanted to do a food documentary, and we all love that one. We came up with some basics, and then I went off and wrote it. We have table reads and work through that feedback.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a family drama dressed up as a restaurant documentary, and you took a similar approach.

SETH MEYERS: It’s fun to put these guys in a world with emotional stakes. We made it more absurd, but I like that we have directors and performers who can execute real emotion. You let the source material influence where you go. You can’t make it too ridiculous, or it won’t hold together.

How do you shoot Documentary Now! with your schedules putting you all over the place?

FRED ARMISEN: We’ll shoot two episodes and then take a break.

Do you have the luxury of shooting a lot of coverage and figuring out what’s funny when you edit, or are these two- or three-day shoots?

SETH MEYERS: They’re mostly two-day shoots. Right?

FRED ARMISEN: We definitely jam them in.

BILL HADER: We shoot them like documentaries, so there aren’t a lot of lighting setups and we don’t shoot my side and then reset and shoot Fred’s side. We have to run and gun.

Fred, Portlandia usually comes back in January. Are you on track for that this year?

FRED ARMISEN: That’s right. Season 7 starts January, and we’re shooting right now.

Any details to share?

FRED ARMISEN: Steve Buscemi is directing an episode. Carrie Brownstein is directing a couple of episodes.

SETH MEYERS: Are you directing an episode?

FRED ARMISEN: I am directing the season finale, yeah.

SETH MEYERS: Have you ever directed an episode?

FRED ARMISEN: Never, so I’m very excited about it.

SETH MEYERS: What do you say, “action”? Is that the word?

BILL HADER: And when it’s done, you say “cut”?

FRED ARMISEN: “Cut!” or “stop action!” [Laughs.] Keep your wigs on, but be yourselves!

The second season of Documentary Now premieres on IFC tonight, September 14, at 10 p.m. ET. You can catch up with the entirety of Documentary Now: Season One on Netflix.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.