There are famous people who arrive polished. Then there are famous people who arrive dripped in diamonds and still somehow feel less like a celebrity doing a stage appearance and more like the funniest man at the dinner party who’s accidentally wandered onto a couch in front of a live audience and started unpacking his childhood. That was Taika Waititi at Cairns Crocodiles 2026, writes Shyaire Ganglani.
In conversation with Edwina McCann, the whole thing felt less like a formal industry chat and more like a therapy session with a really famous man spooning a pillow with his kicks off, while two old friends talked about how art imitates life and, in this case, absolutely does and did go both ways.
He opened by saying we should not talk about AI. Which, naturally, meant we immediately started talking about his new project involving robots, AI and love.
“Could you be programmed to be loved?” he asked.
Then came the very Taika line that made the room laugh and feel slightly attacked in equal measure: humans are basically “flashy dumb computers bumbling around the earth”, and so easily programmed we can convince ourselves of almost anything.
That was the rhythm of the whole conversation. One minute he was talking about technology, connection and human need. Next, he was telling a story about his dad burying money in the back of a paddock, getting a bit too fun-smoked, forgetting where he put it, and nobody ever finding it. So now, naturally, it’s a film.
He spoke about growing up between two very different energies: a shady “farmer” dad and a virtuous school-teacher mum. From his father, he said, came the looseness, the “I don’t care about tomorrow” part of him. From his mother came discipline, the kind of woman who, when he got in trouble, offered an all-time punishment choice: be grounded, or write an essay on three William Blake poems.
He told another brilliant story about Hunt for the Wilderpeople, where the priest’s absurd speech was taken almost verbatim from a real funeral. A speech about heaven, easy doors, Cheezels, Twisties, Diet Coke and Jesus. Completely ludicrous. Completely unforgettable. Exactly the kind of detail he’d clock and store away for later.
That’s what came through so clearly. Taika doesn’t talk about creativity like it’s some grand mystical force. He talks about it as paying attention. Stealing from life. Keeping your eyes open and your ears switched on.
Also… summoning a cheeseboard by whispering into a microphone.
At many points, he not so quietly murmured “where’s the cheeseboard?” into the mic with the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who either know exactly what they’re doing or absolutely do not but just have the charm of someone effortless. And then, after enough whispered requests into the void, a cheeseboard actually appeared. He hugged the man who brought it out like he’d just performed a miracle.
And I couldn’t help but wonder, Carrie Bradshaw style… would we all get more of what we wanted in life if we whispered it into a mic in front of a room full of people more often?
Maybe. As he held the cheeseboard knife and sipped what one would hope was water with lime and not truth juice, he moved into one of the strongest parts of the conversation: creativity, fear and trusting yourself.
Asked what creative rule he always breaks, he referenced that David Bowie idea of creativity being like walking into the ocean until you lose your footing. That unstable, nervous, unsure feeling, he said, is the perfect space to be creative.
And suddenly the whole talk had its thesis.
He said making Jojo Rabbit felt like a disaster. Nobody wanted to make it. He was nervous the whole time. But that discomfort, that sense of risk, was exactly what made it one of the best creative experiences of his life. The safe stuff, by contrast, often stays just that: safe.
That philosophy flowed straight into his gloriously anti-mentorship take.
Don’t just take people’s advice, he said. Back yourself. Then, in the same breath, he undercut it by saying his own advice shouldn’t be trusted either. It was funny, but the point landed: better to fail on your own terms than succeed in some diluted version of everybody else’s idea of what your work should be.
He was equally blunt on advertising. He talked about ads as a way of staying sharp between films, keeping the muscles working, experimenting with new gear, trying weird things. Asked why he made those Super Bowl spots, including making Daniel Craig dance like that, he made a tiny hand gesture strongly suggesting money before following up with: “Um, my love of brands?”
The room, understandably, lost it and burst into laughter. But even there, he had standards. Everyone has to believe in the thing they’re selling, he said. There are brands he wouldn’t touch, people he wouldn’t work with, and one line that probably deserved its own standing ovation: “Life’s too short to be working with arseholes. It really is.”
There was also something oddly heartening in his honesty about how often good ideas get flattened. Sometimes, he said, you think you’re making the coolest, weirdest ad anyone’s ever seen and it ends up becoming the safest thing you’ve ever made and you hate yourself a little. Which was, honestly, reassuring. Nice to know this happens at all scales.
The most unexpectedly moving answer came when he was asked what he was most proud of.
Not awards. Not success. Not scale. Finishing things.
He spoke openly about how hard it used to be to see projects through, how easy it was to get bored or distracted and want to bail halfway through. But budgets, deadlines and responsibility taught him discipline. They taught him to stay with the work long enough to solve it.
And maybe that was the real shape of the conversation: creativity not as confidence, but as uncertainty. Not as glamour, but as follow-through. Not as having all the answers, but as staying open enough to keep noticing things.
Near the end, he talked about how much he loves staring out of windows on planes and buses, and how his kids don’t do it the way he still does. Buried in that was something quietly lovely: don’t abandon the little version of yourself that still finds the world fascinating. That kid is where the creativity lives.
For all the jokes, the diamonds, the cheese-based manifestations and the one-liners, that’s what stayed with me most.
This whole thing felt like an honest conversation where a man was discovering some things about himself in real time, swinging between profound and hilarious, but never losing the warmth underneath it. And maybe that’s why it worked so well.
Because beneath all the chaos, Taika Waititi still seems deeply committed to wonder. To instinct. To risk. To staying a little bit loose in a world that loves to over-explain everything.
“Keep your eyes open. Keep your ears switched on. Don’t abandon the weird little kid in yourself,” as Daddy T said at the end (as I’ve named him in my head for decades).
And if all else fails, whisper your wish into the mic or the universe. Sometimes, apparently, the cheeseboard really does eventually come.
