In a highly entertaining 50 minute fireside chat with Vogue Australia editor in chief Edwina McCann, director, actor, comedian and author Taika Waititi shed light on his movie hits, including Boy, Hunt for Wilderpeople, Thor and Jojo Rabbit, as well as his love for advertising, researching for his movies, cheese boards and Dr Martens.
When Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi was filming JoJo Rabbit—the satirical World War II coming of age movie that follows a 10-year-old German boy confronting his blind hatred of Jews—the table stakes could not be higher.
Waititi played the role of a cartoonish, imaginary Adolf Hitler in this brilliant and dark satire that sees young Jojo Betzler fall in love with a Jewish girl hiding in his attic.
“No one wanted to make that movie and even when I was on set, I kept thinking ‘what a way to go out, they’ll remember this’,” Waititi told an overflowing auditorium at the Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, yesterday.
“I was so nervous, and was like, ‘what a disaster. This is the end. I’ve got to figure out a new job’.”
However, Waititi said the feeling of walking into an ocean and going under the water, being “completely unsure and nervous” with water flowing around your head, is the “perfect space to be creative”.
The movie that nobody wanted to touch ended up being a creative masterpiece and, arguably, the one of the greatest and boldest satirical takes of WWII and the holocaust.
It won an Oscar for the best adapted screenplay and catapulted the filmmaker, actor, author and comedian from Raukokore in New Zealand from indy cult hero to one of the hottest directors going around.
The unwieldy and hilarious session—kudos for McCann for even trying to keep it on some sort of track—provided the audience with plenty of laughs and a genuine insight inside the mind of a creative and comic genius.
“I am very distracted a lot,” Waititi said. “Growing up, I was very happy to see something through to the end. I’ll always be the person that halfway through goes, “it’s a disaster. Let’s just give up and fail. Relationships too. I admit it.”
“But if you hang in there, you can find a way to make things work. When the fire is hot, if you keep walking a bit further you start burning, but somewhere in there you do find solutions,” he said.
“At the end of the day, you’re trying to get the same thing, you’re trying to put some people in a rectangle and get them to say some words convincingly and create some nice human moments.”
Stealing from a priest
This year marks the 10th anniversary of arguably Waititi’s most critically acclaimed film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
In the film, Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison) alongside his grumpy foster father Hector (Sam Neil) become the targets of a national manhunt after going missing in the New Zealand bush.
Waititi said Hunt For The Wilderpeople was perhaps the last film he created with a small crew and a real familial feel. It took about 25 day shoots where “everyone is hustling”, versus the 100-plus days of shooting in the Marvel films he has created.
In that film, Waititi plays the role of a church priest (see above) who delivers a hilarious speech at a wake in which he talks about Jesus directing the deceased through doors of bounty…and confectionery.
“That whole speech was taken from a real funeral,” Waititi admitted. “It’s the most ludicrous speech, and the priest was talking about these doorways to get to heaven. And if you choose the easy doors, itt’s full of Fanta and Diet Coke, Twisties and Cheezels. My girlfriend at the time looked at me and she was like, ‘you’re so disgusting, I can see you stealing this’.”
Ironically, that bit of random theft (aka research) is not a common thread in Waititi’s approach to filmmaking.
He says that he never really researching his films or the subject matter. He once tried to read a Thor comic book to better understand the protagonist, but it was “unreadbale” and the Thor character is “lame”.
In fact, he asked Chris Hemsworth to “just be Chris Hemsworth” throughout the film, and it worked.
‘There are brands I wouldn’t work with’
Waititi is not just famous for directing and acting in feature films, he is also the director of great ads. Recently he directed Pepsi’ Super Bowl ad, ‘The Choice’ in which he counsels a polar bear who shows a preference for Pepsi over Coke (see above).
Waititi is also the director of Carlton Dry’s Hello Beer series (see below), Apple’s The Lost Voice and the DeLonghi ads starring Brad Pitt.
Interestingly, he prefers creating ads in Australia and New Zealand because it allows directors to see through the work, including the editing and post production phase, whereas in America you “just shoot it and walk off”.
Aside from the money, Waititi said he enjoys creating ads because it’s “a great way to keep exercising the creative muscle, keep it fresh” in between film shoots.
“I also get to work with cool people. Everyone has to understand what we are trying to make…but there are certain brands I wouldn’t work with, such as Nazis…again”.
Waititi said that sometimes actors, whether in advertising or film, need a reality check.
“A lot of people complain about their job, but actors often complain about things because they are big babies. There’s always something to whinge about,” he joked.
“I always try to remind people, ‘you know they haven’t discovered this isn’t a real job yet?’.
“We’re so lucky to be doing such a make-believe job. We get to go to work, put different clothes on, put on a mask, talk in a funny voice, and go home at 3pm. It’s disgusting. When people find out what this thing is, they’ll take it away from us!”
When asked what role Waititi would play in an autobiograhpical movie about his life, he said that he’d probably play the role of “protagonist, villain and antagonist”.
And if he wasn’t a filmmaker, he would probably go back to being a painter, although the “pay is shit”.
“It was actually the happiest I’ve ever been; sitting in a room smelling turpentine and painting pictures.”
One thing is clear, whatever he chooses next, Waititi would likely stay in the creatives sector.
“The office inside my brain is full of drunk workers…throwing typewriters around and at each other. It’s flooding and on fire but there’s a system in there I don’t know about, but it’s all being locked and filed away for future use,” he said.
“For anyone to be creative, you just have to have your eyes open and your ears switched on.
“You gotta check in with the little version of yourself. Be like, ‘Hey, Little Taika, it’s okay’. Don’t abandon that little kid, because it’s in all of us, and we all are so creative.”
