Christiaan Van Vuuren – The Fresh Face of Australian Comedy

By Dan Hutton on January 1, 2015 in People

Where are you originally from?
I’m from Cronulla. I was born in the Sutherland Shire back in ’82 at Sutherland Hospital. My old man’s South African and my mum’s a Kiwi. They met in London travelling, doing that thing that every South African, Kiwi and Aussie does, which is go and spend some time in London. They actually had quite a romantic meeting that they always tell me about. Dad was working as a dentist at the time in London and he was at this dental conference. He was a bit of a f**king renegade dentist; he didn’t really like sitting around and talking to other doctors and dentists. He was there in a leather jacket, probably having a dart up the back corner or something, and Mum was feeling a little bit slinky after a couple of Champagnes. She was a nurse at the time and she kind of wandered up the back, saw this guy in his leather jacket hanging on his own, loosened the back of her dress a little bit and went over and said, “Excuse me, can you just help me zip up my dress?” Dad zipped it up and the rest is history. When they started hooking up and I came along as an accident, they thought, ‘quick, we better f**king get married’, because such was the time. They got married and then they were deciding where we should go. Mum was not keen on raising a family in South Africa because of the violence and Dad had tried New Zealand and thought, ‘this place is boring; I don’t want to have a family here and business is going to suck’, so they ended up in Australia.

Where are you living these days?
I had been in Bondi for the last few years until I got some news that my own girlfriend’s pregnant with our own accidental baby, so I’ve moved to Randwick because I get an extra bedroom for the same rent.

What do you love about living in the Eastern Suburbs?
It’s close to the city but there’s a feel of being suburban, and a feeling like there’s fresh air. Then there’s the beaches, the atmosphere, lots of young people, good energy, it’s interesting and there’s a pretty friendly crowd. When you go out, there are some good innovative restaurants and nice places to eat, and decent coffee. I don’t really do public transport, but public transport is apparently not too bad here too.

Is there anything you don’t like about living in the Eastern Suburbs?
I would say there’s a certain level of pretension around the place amongst some crowds.

Is the best way to deal with that to mock it?
Probably. Just make YouTube videos about it. I also don’t like the exclusivity of some friendship groups and things like that. Right smack bang in Bondi is pretty good because there are so many travellers. That’s the thing: constantly living in a place like Bondi, you remember that people come from all over the world to be at your home. The very first time I moved to Bondi was because I wanted to go travelling to Europe but I couldn’t afford to, and I needed to stay here for work. The closest thing to going away and spending some time overseas is moving somewhere where people who go away would be. They bring an attitude with them of ‘I would do shit that I wouldn’t normally do when surrounded by my own family and friends’.

How did you and your partner in crime Nick Boshier meet?
Nick and I met at a YouTube conference. I was there to talk about the Fully Sick Rapper videos that I’d done and some other stuff that my brother Connor and I had been working on. Nick was there to talk about Beached Az, which is the Kiwi whale cartoon that he’d done. When we met on the day, I realised that he was also Trent from Punchy, which was f**king mind-blowing for me because I’d always thought Trent was real. Not only did I think he was real, but I also thought that I knew him, like a friend of a friend. That’s the power of Trent from Punchy; he’s like an urban legend. I was mind-blown and I thought therefore that makes Nick the best actor in the country and we’ve got to make some stuff together.

Did you guys click straight away?
Yeah, we did actually. Connor and I cast Nick immediately in a pilot. We got 180 grand to make a pilot for a show called Sick. The first thing we noticed was that he’s perfect for this Dexter character in the pilot, so we cast him in that role. We worked together on that, in the capacity of him being an actor and us writing and directing. After that we’d had such a good experience, we just wanted to work with him again. I went to him with the Bondi Hipsters idea and just said, “Two dickheads living in Bondi and they’ve got a fashion label.” It would be a mockumentary style, and all they f**king do is talk about it and talk about it; they really want to make the world a better place but they’re clearly part of the problem. From then on, we developed the characters of Dom and Adrian.

Do you reckon everyone has a little bit of hipster in them?
I think everyone has that bit of hipster in them, in that we all – particularly our generation now with the social awareness and consciousness that’s rising – want to make the world a better place. We all want to make a difference but we’re all scared of it impacting our own personal quality of life. The other thing we wanted to show through these characters is that we’re not above it, because it’s our life too. People go, “It’s f**cking terrible what they’re paying people in those factories in Pakistan,” but then they buy the f**king clothes that they make there because they’re the best clothes. They drive, like I do, a Jeep Wrangler, which is the f**king worst car for the environment. It chews petrol, it’s terrible, but I like it; it’s a cute four wheel drive. My girlfriend can drive it and it’s sort of her monster truck, but it’s terrible for the environment and it’s not minimising my environmental footprint. I will literally go to town on the fact that the government are making all these decisions that are going to involve more mining and tearing the Earth’s resources out, and say we need to f**king tax carbon, we need to do this, we need to do that, but I drive a Jeep Wrangler.

What happened with your tuberculosis (TB) incident?
Originally when I got sick, I’d just got home from South America. I’d been travelling for six weeks with a mate and I got halfway through my trip to South America when I got this gnarly fever, and then I came down with a chest infection. It’s really lucky I didn’t get to see a doctor there because if they gave me a chest x ray I never would have been able to leave, because I had a massive cyst in my lung at the time. Anyway, I kept partying and got through that holiday. When I got home, I’d been back for about a week and I was taking some clients out to a media lunch. They’d just dropped $500,000 with us on a JCDecaux campaign. I took them to Pony Lounge in The Rocks and ordered one beer. The food was just coming out and I started coughing and couldn’t stop, so I had to walk away. I pulled my hand away from my face and it was covered in blood. I spent 25 minutes sitting there coughing blood waiting for the ambulance to arrive. The ambulance got there, took me to hospital and then I didn’t leave for six and a half months. At first they thought it was just normal TB, so after a couple of weeks they said, “Oh, you should be better by now.” I didn’t feel better, I was gaunt and still coughing blood. They said I should be on the road to recovery and it was time to go home. I just kept coughing blood and it got worse and worse over a week, so I went back to hospital and they kept me there for another six months. After I finally got out of hospital, it took another 12 months of going to a hospital every single day to get these antibiotics administered because some of them were intravenous and some of them were tablets. I moved back in with my parents when I got out of hospital and stayed there in Cronulla for a while because I couldn’t hold a job. The side effects of a couple of those antibiotics were extreme paranoia and f**king mega depression, but then after that, almost as soon as I stopped taking the medication, everything was better again.

That’s heavy…
I cried a lot in hospital and I got really negative and I got shit scared of all the things I could never have. I was just bawling my eyes out. The saddest thing about it was not whether I would live or die, but that I might not ever get to have children; I might not ever have a son that I get to pass on my wisdom to. Then I f**king found out that week that my partner Adele was pregnant and I was going to get to have a kid. I’d always thought since I got out of hospital that I was probably going to be infertile. I thought that my nuts weren’t going to work because I’d just had a year and a half of intense, heavy medications that were wearing away my audiological nerve and making me crazy and causing eye damage. I thought there was no way that they weren’t f**king up my sperm. I was actually resigned to the idea of probably never having children, so that was a nice surprise.

What’s it like being a YouTube and online celebrity?
I don’t think we’re celebrities, for starters. I just feel like we’re people that make lots of stuff. I’ve realised that this career is just you working at something; it’s just a thing that you work at and part of that is the people that watch you. Your client is all the people. The other thing that’s interesting that I’ve realised is that the image of success is very different to the reality of success. This year, because we have a show coming out and we’re on the front cover of Sunday Style and we did a front cover on Jetstar magazine and we’re in The Beast, it would make a reader who wasn’t otherwise informed think that we’re successful people, but they don’t know that you’ve paid yourself $8 to create the show and paying rent every month is tricky.

Your new show Soul Mates started going to air on ABC2 in October; did you pitch the idea to them of the Bondi Hipsters Dom and Adrian reincarnated across the time continuum?
The ABC called us in and asked about what we should do with Sick, the show I mentioned earlier, and at that time it was all wrapped up with MTV so there was nothing we could do on that. Then they asked about Bondi Hipsters, whether there was anything we wanted to do there with regard to developing a show. We pitched them four ideas, which were Bondi Hipsters as a TV show, Kiwi Assassins as a TV show, Cavemen as a TV show, and then idea that we ran with, which was all of them together.

Why do you think you and Nick’s senses of humour align so well? Is there any creative division between the two of you?
We do have like a slightly different sense of humour, but I think it’s complementary. I know particularly when it comes to the relationship between the three of us, Connor really adds the structural element to it, and intelligence to the humour. I think that Nick adds lots and lots of possibilities for jokes. He’s like a f**king joke machine gun.

What has been your most popular work? The Miranda Kerr and Kim Kardashian nude shoots?
Both of those things went global. The Miranda Kerr one was on the front page of the Huffington Post and The Guardian in the UK. The Huffington Post picked up on the Kim Kardashian one as well, and Buzz Feed covered the Miranda Kerr one. That’s the funny thing, some ideas will take forever and it will take such intricate work to develop them, but the Miranda Kerr thing came about when we were sitting around on a Thursday in a meeting and we were like, “Have you seen that new Miranda Kerr shoot that she did talking about how she like joined the mile high club.” We shot it straight away and put them online that afternoon and it got seen by 25 to 30 million people around the world. Our Facebook page grew by 15,000 in a week. The same thing happened with the Kardashian ones when we put them online. Facebook actually pulled them down because of the nudity.

What does your missus think of your choice of career?
She’s as supportive as someone could be. She’s an aspiring writer and actress too. We made this pact where we said, “No matter what, let’s pursue the things that we love,” because before I got sick my pursuits were all finance based. All my career decisions and moving from job to job was to make more money. You make more money then you move into a nicer place and you’ve got that extra rent to pay. Now we’ve split the lifestyle away, we don’t party and we don’t go out. We made a pact with each other, based on both of us wanting to do what we love for the rest of our lives, but also based on seeing a lot of people who are good friends who are not so happy with careers. They’ve got to have finance and they’ve got a mortgage and things like that. We never want to put ourselves too deep in debt that we need to work other jobs in order to pay for it. We’re just going to favour being poor and passionate rather than wealthy and stale. There are different measures of success and ours is not a financial one. We really do think we’re successful. In three years we’ve gone from making YouTube videos to now having our own TV show and getting another one in development in the US, and I think that’s f**king awesome.

How far do you think Dom and Adrian can go in terms of their global reach as Bondi Hipsters?
The bubble hasn’t burst with Dom and Adrian in America. We’re going to keep making stuff as long as people are watching it and staying involved in it.

In your opinion, what is the funniest clip that you guys have produced?
I think the Life Organic clip is my favourite thing that we’ve ever made. I feel like it was just at the right time. It was something that a lot of people were living. There’s this lifestyle of organic food throughout the week and then smashing drugs on the weekend, and then clean living mixed with a self interested party lifestyle. One of the other ones I get a real kick out of is called ‘Bondi Hipsters Shrooming in the Countryside’, I think part of what I find really funny about it is that we didn’t really have a script. We just went out to this farm in the English countryside and said, “Alright, let’s pretend we’re on shrooms.”

Do you guys have any other projects in the pipeline?
Yes. My brother Connor and are busy writing Sick into a half hour comedy, which we’re developing with an American network at the moment. Season two of Soul Mates is something we’re also working towards, and we’re applying for some Screen Australia funding to set up a bunch of other projects too. We’ve got lots of stuff going on.

Do you have any role models in the industry?
I’m personally obsessed with what the South Park guys have done and I think as comedic role models, their ability to tell some truth, make you question certain things, make you think, and just f**king do it in a way that is so ridiculous and out-there is a really cool basis for comedy. From an acting and character point of view, Chris Lilley, Sacha Baron Cohen and the early Jim Carrey are all influences.

I believe you’re appearing in a Flickerfest film this year, is that right?
Yes, I’m in a film called Emu by a talented young filmmaker named Kacie Anning. She wrote this short coming off the back of making a web series called Fragments of Friday, which got picked up by Southern Cross to be developed into a series. I’d done some work with Kacie before. She’d helped us put together a few treatments for directing jobs we were doing. It’s also being produced by a friend of mine named Sarah Bishop, who is acting in the film as well. I’ve done some work with Sarah through Skitbox, which is the comedy group that she does with another couple of chicks. They asked if I would come along and play this role and there’s a moment in the film where the guy plays a song to his chick, and I got to help out writing the song, which was quite fun. It’s just a cool, slightly dark, funny, weird little short film.

Why should punters get down to Flickerfest this year?
It is the best film festival in Australia and it’s the only one that’s got Academy accreditation, so it’s a good launch pad for people’s careers. Short films are a really easily digestible format and they’re fun. If you don’t like something, you know it only lasts 10 or 15 minutes and then you can be on to something else. You get multiple shots at finding things you may or may not like. You often get to see things in short films that people wouldn’t be brave enough to do in a longer format, because it’s a great testing ground for audiences. I find the format really fun and easy to watch. It’s a nice way to support Australian filmmakers and also see some films from international filmmakers that you might not see otherwise. It’s also nice and social to get down there under the summer moonlight at the Bondi Pavilion.

What would Dom and Adrian’s thoughts be on Flickerfest? Do you think they would get down there?
I think it’s probably become too big for Dom and Adrian. I’d imagine that they would put on their own short film festival in a stormwater drain.

In an ideal world what does the future hold for Christiaan Van Vuuren?
I’d get to keep making stuff for the rest of my life. I’m not too concerned with what the trajectory is and whether it ends up being in the capacity of acting, writing or directing; hopefully there’ll be bits of all three of those. I’d just love to get to do this for a career and get it to a point where I can pay the rent without having to do other jobs as well. That would be cool.

Flickerfest runs from January 9-18. For tickets and information, please visit www.flickerfest.com.au.