#jojo rabbit 2020

[forthepleasureofmylife]

Bushwick New York City

Photo: Dieter Krehbiel

#jojo rabbit #high contrast #source:forthepleasureofmylife #dieter krehbiel #photography #black and white #green eyes 55 #photographers on tumblr #street photography #urban #black and white photography #urban life #2020s #advertising #bushwick #billboard #new york city #source: forthepleasureofmylife #urban architecture #urban photography

[tricksyliesmith]

I just felt like revisiting Them.

Bong Joon-ho & Taika Waititi winning at the 2020 Oscars

#this was one of my last good pre-pandemic memories #taika waititi #bong joon ho #Oscars 2020 #parasite #jojo rabbit

[rhysdarbinizedarby]

Couch surfer in his 30s. Oscar winner in his 40s. Why the whole world wants Taika

**Notes: This is very long post!**

Good Weekend

In his 30s, he was sleeping on couches. By his 40s, he’d directed a Kiwi classic, taken a Marvel movie to billion-dollar success, and won an Oscar. Meet Taika Waititi, king of the oddball – and one of New Zealand’s most original creative exports.

Taika Waititi: “Be a nice person and live a good life. And just don’t be an arsehole.”

The good news? Taika Waititi is still alive. I wasn’t sure. The screen we were speaking through jolted savagely a few minutes ago, with a cacophonous bang and a confused yelp, then radio silence. Now the Kiwi ­ filmmaker is back, grinning like a loon: “I just broke the f---ing table, bro!”

Come again? “I just smashed this f---ing table and glass flew everywhere. It’s one of those old annoying colonial tables. It goes like this – see that?” Waititi says, holding up a folding furniture leg. “I hit the mechanism and it wasn’t locked. Anyway …”

I’m glad he’s fine. The stuff he’s been saying from his London hotel room could incur biblical wrath. We’re talking about his latest project, Next Goal Wins, a movie about the American Samoa soccer team’s quest to score a solitary goal, 10 years after suffering the worst loss in the game’s international history – a 31-0 ­ignominy to Australia – but our chat strays into ­spirituality, then faith, then religion.

“I don’t personally believe in a big guy sitting on a cloud judging everyone, but that’s just me,” Waititi says, deadpan. “Because I’m a grown-up.”

This is the way his interview answers often unfold. Waititi addresses your topic – dogma turns good people bad, he says, yet belief itself is worth lauding – but bookends every response with a conspiratorial nudge, wink, joke or poke. “Regardless of whether it’s some guy living on a cloud, or some other deity that you’ve made up – and they’re all made up – the message across the board is the same, and it’s important: Be a nice person, and live a good life. And just don’t be an arsehole!”

Not being an arsehole seems to have served Waititi, 48, well. Once a national treasure and indie darling (through the quirky tenderness of his breakout New Zealand films Boy in 2010 and Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016), Waititi then became a star of both the global box office (through his 2017 entry into the Marvel Universe, Thor: Ragnarok, which grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide) and then the Academy Awards (winning the 2020 best adapted screenplay Oscar for his subversive Holocaust dramedy JoJo Rabbit, in which he played an imaginary Hitler).

Waititi playing Adolf Hitler in the 2019 movie JoJo Rabbit. (Alamy)

A handsome devil with undeniable roguish charm, Waititi also slid seamlessly into style-icon status (attending this year’s Met Gala shirtless, in a floor-length gunmetal-grey Atelier Prabal Gurung wrap coat, with pendulous pearl necklaces), as well as becoming his own brand (releasing an eponymous line of canned ­coffee drinks) and bona fide Hollywood A-lister (he was introduced to his second wife, British singer Rita Ora, by actor Robert Pattinson at a barbecue).

Putting that platform to use, Waititi is an Indigenous pioneer and mentor, too, co-creating the critically acclaimed TV series Reservation Dogs, while co-founding the Piki Films production company, committed to promoting the next generation of storytellers – a mission that might sound all weighty and worthy, yet Waititi’s new wave of First Nations work is never earnest, always mixing hurt with heart and howling humour.

Waititi with wife Rita Ora at the 2023 Met Gala in May. (Getty Images)

Makes sense. Waititi is a byproduct of “the weirdest coupling ever” – his late Maori father from the Te Whanau-a-Apanui tribe was an artist, farmer and “Satan’s Slaves” bikie gang founder, while his Wellington schoolteacher mum descended from Russian Jews, although he’s not devout about her faith. (“No, I don’t practise,” he confirms. “I’m just good at everything, straight away.”)

He’s remained loyally tethered to his ­origin story, too – and to a cadre of creative Kiwi mates, including actors Jemaine Clement and Rhys Darby – never forgetting that not long before the actor/writer/producer/director was an industry maven, he was a penniless painter/photographer/ musician/comedian.

With no set title and no fixed address, he’s seemingly happy to be everything, everywhere (to everyone) all at once. “‘The universe’ is bandied around a lot these days, but I do believe in the kind of connective tissue of the universe, and the energy that – scientifically – we are made up of a bunch of atoms that are bouncing around off each other, and some of the atoms are just squished together a bit tighter than others,” he says, smiling. “We’re all made of the same stardust, and that’s pretty special.”

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We’ve caught Waititi in a somewhat relaxed moment, right before the screen actors’ and media artists’ strike ends. He’s ­sensitive to the struggle but doesn’t deny enjoying the break. “I spent a lot of time thinking about writing, and not writing, and having a nice ­holiday,” he tells Good Weekend. “Honestly, it was a good chance just to recombobulate.”

Waititi, at right, with Hunt for the Wilderpeople actors, from left, Sam Neill, Rhys Darby and Julian Dennison. (Getty Images)

It’s mid-October, and he’s just headed to Paris to watch his beloved All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup. He’s deeply obsessed with the game, and sport in general. “Humans spend all of our time knowing what’s going to happen with our day. There’s no surprises ­any more. We’ve become quite stagnant. And I think that’s why people love sport, because of the air of unpredictability,” he says. “It’s the last great arena entertainment.”

The main filmic touchstone for Next Goal Wins (which premieres in Australian cinemas on New Year’s Day) would be Cool Runnings (1993), the unlikely true story of a Jamaican bobsled team, but Waititi also draws from genre classics such as Any Given Sunday and Rocky, sampling trusted tropes like the musical training montage. (His best one is set to Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears.)

Filming in Hawaii was an uplifting experience for the self-­described Polynesian Jew. “It wasn’t about death, or people being cruel to each other. Thematically, it was this simple idea, of getting a small win, and winning the game wasn’t even their goal – their goal was to get a goal,” he says. “It was a really sweet backbone.”

Waititi understands this because, growing up, he was as much an athlete as a nerd, fooling around with softball and soccer before discovering rugby league, then union. “There’s something about doing exercise when you don’t know you’re doing exercise,” he enthuses. “It’s all about the fun of throwing a ball around and trying to achieve something together.” (Whenever Waititi is in Auckland he joins his mates in a long-running weekend game of touch rugby. “And then throughout the week I work out every day. Obviously. I mean, look at me.”)

Auckland is where his kids live, too, so he spends as much time there as possible. Waititi met his first wife, producer Chelsea Winstanley, on the set of Boy in 2010, and they had two daughters, Matewa Kiritapu, 8, and his firstborn, Te Kainga O’Te Hinekahu, 11. (The latter is a derivative of his grandmother’s name, but he jokes with American friends that it means “Resurrection of Tupac” or “Mazda RX7″) Waititi and Winstanley split in about 2018, and he married the pop star Ora in 2022.

He offers a novel method for balancing work with parenthood … “Look, you just abandon them, and know that the experience will make them harder individuals later on in life. And it’s their problem,” he says. “I’m going to give them all of the things that they need, and I’m going to leave behind a decent bank ­account for their therapy, and they will be just like me, and the cycle will continue.”

Jokes aside – I think he’s joking – school holidays are always his, and he brings the girls onto the set of every movie he makes. “They know enough not to get in the way or touch anything that looks like it could kill you, and they know to be respectful and quiet when they need to. But they’re just very comfortable around filmmakers, which I’m really happy about, because eventually I hope they will get into the ­industry. One more year,” he laughs, “then they can leave school and come work for Dad.”

Theirs is certainly a different childhood than his. Growing up, he was a product of two worlds. His given names, for instance, were based on his appearance at birth: “Taika David” if he looked Maori (after his Maori grandfather) and “David Taika” if he looked Pakeha (after his white grandfather). His parents split when he was five, so he bounced between his dad’s place in Waihau Bay, where he went by the surname Waititi, and his mum, eight hours drive away in Wellington, where he went by Cohen (the last name on his birth ­certificate and passport).

Waititi was precocious, even charismatic. His mother Robin once told Radio New Zealand that people always wanted to know him, even as an infant: “I’d be on a bus with him, and he was that kind of baby who smiled at people, and next thing you know they’re saying, ‘Can I hold your baby?’ He’s always been a charmer to the public eye.”

He describes himself as a cool, sporty, good-looking nerd, raised on whatever pop culture screened on the two TV channels New Zealand offered in the early 1980s, from M*A*S*H and Taxi to Eddie Murphy and Michael Jackson. He was well-read, too. When punished by his mum, he would likely be forced to analyse a set of William Blake poems.

He puts on a whimpering voice to describe their finances – “We didn’t have much monneeey” – explaining how his mum spent her days in the classroom but also worked in pubs, where he would sit sipping a raspberry lemonade, doodling drawings and writing stories. She took in ­ironing and cleaned houses; he would help out, learning valuable lessons he imparts to his kids. “And to random people who come to my house,” he says. “I’ll say, ‘Here’s a novel idea, wash this dish,’ but people don’t know how to do anything these days.”

“Every single character I’ve ever written has been based on someone I’ve known or met or a story I’ve stolen from someone.” - Taika Waititi

He loved entertaining others, clearly, but also himself, recording little improvised radio plays on a tape deck – his own offbeat versions of ET and Indiana Jones and Star Wars. “Great free stuff where you don’t have any idea what the story is as you’re doing it,” he says. “You’re just sort of making it up and enjoying the ­freedom of playing god in this world where you can make people and characters do whatever you want.”

His other sphere of influence lay in Raukokore, the tiny town where his father lived. Although Boy is not autobiographical, it’s deeply personal insofar as it’s filmed in the house where he grew up, and where he lived a life similar to that portrayed in the story, surrounded by his recurring archetypes: warm grandmothers and worldly kids; staunch, stoic mums; and silly, stunted men. “Every single character I’ve ever written has been based on someone I’ve known or met,” he says, “or a story I’ve stolen from someone.”

He grew to love drawing and painting, obsessed early on with reproducing the Sistine Chapel. During a 2011 TED Talk on creativity, Waititi describes his odd subject matter, from swastikas and fawns to a picture of an old lady going for a walk … upon a sword … with Robocop. “My father was an outsider artist, even though he wouldn’t know what that meant,” Waititi told the audience in Doha. “I love the naive. I love people who can see things through an innocent viewpoint. It’s inspiring.”

After winning Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for JoJo Rabbit in 2020. (Getty Images)

It was an interesting time in New Zealand, too – a coming-of-age decade in which the Maori were rediscovering their culture. His area was poor, “but only ­financially,” he says. “It’s very rich in terms of the ­people and the culture.” He learned kapa haka – the songs, dances and chants performed by competing tribes at cultural events, or to honour people at funerals and graduations – weddings, parties, ­anything. “Man, any excuse,” he explains. “A big part of doing them is to uplift your spirits.”

Photography was a passion, so I ask what he shot. “Just my penis. I sent them to people, but we didn’t have phones, so I would print them out, post them. One of the first dick pics,” he says. Actually, his lens was trained on regular people. He watches us still – in airports, ­restaurants. “Other times late at night, from a tree. Whatever it takes to get the story. You know that.”

He went to the Wellington state school Onslow College and did plays like Androcles and the Lion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Crucible. His crew of arty students eventually ended up on stage at Bats Theatre in the city, where they would perform haphazard comedy shows for years.

“Taika was always rebellious and wild in his comedy, which I loved,” says his high school mate Jackie van Beek, who became a longtime collaborator, including working with Waititi on a Tourism New Zealand campaign this year. “I remember he went through a phase of turning up in bars around town wearing wigs, and you’d try and sit down and have a drink with him but he’d be doing some weird character that would invariably turn up in some show down the track.”

He met more like-minded peers at Victoria University, including Jemaine Clement (who’d later become co-creator of Flight of the Conchords). During a 2019 chat with actor Elijah Wood, Waititi ­describes he and Clement clocking one another from opposite sides of the library one day: a pair of Maoris experiencing hate at first sight, based on a mutual suspicion of cultural appropriation. (Clement was wearing a traditional tapa cloth Samoan shirt, and Waititi was like: “This motherf---er’s not Samoan.” Meanwhile, Waititi was wearing a Rastafarian beanie, and Clement was like, “This ­motherf---er’s not Jamaican.”)

With Jemaine Clement in 2014. (Getty Images)

But they eventually bonded over Blackadder and Fawlty Towers, and especially Kenny Everett, and did comedy shows together everywhere from Edinburgh to Melbourne. Waititi was almost itinerant, spending months at a time busking, or living in a commune in Berlin. He acted in a few small films, and then – while playing a stripper on a bad TV show – realised he wanted to try life behind the camera. “I became tired of being told what to do and ordered around,” he told Wellington’s Dominion Post in 2004. “I remember sitting around in the green room in my G-string ­thinking, ‘Why am I doing this? Just helping someone else to realise their dream.’ ”

He did two strong short films, then directed his first feature – Eagle vs Shark (2007) – when he was 32. He brought his mates along (Clement, starring with Waititi’s then-girlfriend Loren Horsley), setting something of a pattern in his career: hiring friends instead of constantly navigating new working relationships. “If you look at things I’m doing,” he tells me, “there’s ­always a few common denominators.”

Sam Neill says Waititi is the exemplar of a new New Zealand humour. “The basis of it is this: we’re just a little bit crap at things.”

This gang of collaborators shares a common Kiwi vibe, too, which his longtime friend, actor Rhys Darby, once coined “the comedy of the mundane”. Their new TV show, Our Flag Means Death, for example, leans heavily into the mundanity of pirate life – what happens on those long days at sea when the crew aren’t unsheathing swords from scabbards or burying treasure.

Waititi plays pirate captain Blackbeard, centre, in Our Flag Means Death, with Rhys Darby, left, and Rory Kinnear. (Google Images)

Sam Neill, who first met Waititi when starring in Hunt for the Wilderpeople, says Waititi is the exemplar of a new New Zealand humour. “And I think the basis of it is this,” says Neill. “We’re just a little bit crap at things, and that in itself is funny.” After all, Neill asks, what is What We Do in The Shadows (2014) if not a film (then later a TV show) about a bunch of vampires who are pretty crap at being vampires, ­living in a pretty crappy house, not quite getting busted by crappy local cops? “New Zealand often gets named as the least corrupt country in the world, and I think it’s just that we would be pretty crap at being corrupt,” Neill says. “We don’t have the capacity for it.”

Waititi’s whimsy also spurns the dominant on-screen oeuvre of his homeland – the so-called “cinema of ­unease” exemplified by the brutality of Once Were Warriors (1994) and the emotional peril of The Piano (1993). Waititi still explores pathos and pain, but through laughter and weirdness. “Taika feels to me like an ­antidote to that dark aspect, and a gift somehow,” Neill says. “And I’m grateful for that.”

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Something happened to Taika Waititi when he was about 11 – something he doesn’t go into with Good Weekend, but which he considered a betrayal by the adults in his life. He ­mentioned it only recently – not the ­moment itself, but the lesson he learnt: “That you cannot and must not rely on grown-ups to help you – you’re basically in the world alone, and you’re gonna die alone, and you’ve just gotta make it all for yourself,” he told Irish podcast host James Brown. “I basically never forgave people in positions of responsibility.”

What does that mean in his work? First, his finest films tend to reflect the clarity of mind possessed by children, and the unseen worlds they create – fantasies conjured up as a way to understand or overcome. (His mum once summed up the main ­message of Boy: “The ­unconditional love you get from your children, and how many of us waste that, and don’t know what we’ve got.”)

Second, he’s suited to movie-making – “Russian roulette with art” – because he’s drawn to disruptive force and chaos. And that in turn produces creative defiance: allowing him to reinvigorate the Marvel Universe by making superheroes fallible, or tell a Holocaust story by making fun of Hitler. “Whenever I have to deal with someone who’s a boss, or in charge, I challenge them,” he told Brown, “and I really do take whatever they say with a pinch of salt.”

It’s no surprise then that Waititi was comfortable leaping from independent films to the vast complexity of Hollywood blockbusters. He loves the challenge of coordinating a thousand interlocking parts, requiring an army of experts in vocations as diverse as construction, sound, art, performance and logistics. “I delegate a lot,” he says, “and share the load with a lot of people.”

“This is a cool concept, being able to ­afford whatever I want, as opposed to sleeping on couches until I was 35.” - Taika Waititi

But the buck stops with him. Time magazine named Waititi one of its Most Influential 100 People of 2022. “You can tell that a film was made by Taika Waititi the same way you can tell a piece was painted by Picasso,” wrote Sacha Baron Cohen. Compassionate but comic. Satirical but watchable. Rockstar but auteur. “Actually, sorry, but this guy’s really starting to piss me off,” Cohen concluded. “Can someone else write this piece?”

Directing Chris Hemsworth in 2017 in Thor: Ragnarok, which grossed more than $1.3 billion at the box office. (Alamy)

I’m curious to know how he stays grounded amid such adulation. Coming into the game late, he says, helped immensely. After all, Waititi was 40 by the time he left New Zealand to do Thor: Ragnarok. “If you let things go to your head, then it means you’ve struggled to find out who you are,” he says. “But I’ve always felt very comfortable with who I am.” Hollywood access and acclaim – and the pay cheques – don’t erase memories of poverty, either. “It’s more like, ‘Oh, this is a cool concept, being able to ­afford whatever I want, as opposed to sleeping on couches until I was 35.’ ” Small towns and strong tribes keep him in check, too. “You know you can’t piss around and be a fool, because you’re going to embarrass your family,” he says. “Hasn’t stopped me, though.”

Sam Neill says there was never any doubt Waititi would be able to steer a major movie with energy and imagination. “It’s no accident that the whole world wants Taika,” he says. “But his seductiveness comes with its own dangers. You can spread yourself a bit thin. The temptation will be to do more, more, more. That’ll be interesting to watch.”

Indeed, I find myself vicariously stressed out over the list of potential projects in Waititi’s future. A Roald Dahl animated series for Netflix. An Apple TV show based on the 1981 film Time Bandits. A sequel to What We Do In The Shadows. A reboot of Flash Gordon. A gonzo horror comedy, The Auteur, starring Jude Law. Adapting a cult graphic novel, The Incal, as a feature. A streaming series based on the novel Interior Chinatown. A film based on a Kazuo Ishiguro bestseller. Plus bringing to life the wildly popular Akira comic books. Oh, and for good measure, a new instalment of Star Wars, which he’s already warned the world will be … different.

“It’s going to change things,” he told Good Morning America. “It’s going to change what you guys know and expect.”

Did I say I was stressed for Waititi? I meant physically sick.

“Well…” he qualifies, “some of those things I’m just producing, so I come up with an idea or someone comes to me with an idea, and I shape how ‘it’s this kind of show’ and ‘here’s how we can get it made.’ It’s easier for me to have a part in those things and feel like I’ve had a meaningful role in the creative process, but also not having to do what I’ve always done, which is trying to control everything.”

In the 2014 mockumentary horror film What We Do in the Shadows, which he co-directed with Jemaine Clement. (Alamy)

What about moving away from the niche New Zealand settings he represented so well in his early work? How does he stay connected to his roots? “I think you just need to know where you’re from,” he says, “and just don’t forget that.”

They certainly haven’t forgotten him.

Jasmin McSweeney sits in her office at the New Zealand Film Commission in Wellington, surrounded by promotional posters Waititi signed for her two decades ago, when she was tasked with promoting his nascent talent. Now the organisation’s marketing chief, she talks to me after visiting the heart of thriving “Wellywood”, overseeing the traditional karakia prayer on the set of a new movie starring Geoffrey Rush.

Waititi isn’t the first great Kiwi filmmaker – dual Oscar-winner Jane Campion and blockbuster king Peter Jackson come to mind – yet his particular ascendance, she says, has spurred unparalleled enthusiasm. “Taika gave everyone here confidence. He always says, ‘Don’t sit around waiting for people to say, you can do this.’ Just do it, because he just did it. That’s the Taika effect.”

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Taika David Waititi is known for wearing everything from technicolour dreamcoats to pineapple print rompers, and today he’s wearing a roomy teal and white Isabel Marant jumper. The mohair garment has the same wispy frizz as his hair, which curls like a wave of grey steel wool, and connects with a shorn salty beard.

A stylish silver fox, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he suddenly announced he was launching a fashion label. He’s definitely a commercial animal, to the point of directing television commercials for Coke and Amazon, along with a fabulous 2023 spot for Belvedere vodka starring Daniel Craig. He also joined forces with a beverage company in Finland (where “taika” means “magic”) to release his coffee drinks. Announcing the partnership on social media, he flagged that he would be doing more of this kind of stuff, too (“Soz not soz”).

Waititi has long been sick of reverent portrayals of Indigenous people talking to spirits.

There’s substance behind the swank. Fashion is a creative outlet but he’s also bought sewing machines in the past with the intention of designing and making clothes, and comes from a family of tailors. “I learnt how to sew a button on when I was very young,” he says. “I learnt how to fix holes or patches in your clothes, and darn things.”

And while he gallivants around the globe watching Wimbledon or modelling for Hermès at New York Fashion Week, all that glamour belies a depth of purpose, particularly when it comes to Indigenous representation.

There’s a moment in his new movie where a Samoan player realises that their Dutch coach, played by Michael Fassbender, is emotionally struggling, and he offers a lament for white people: “They need us.” I can’t help but think Waititi meant something more by that line – maybe that First Nations people have ­wisdom to offer if others will just listen?

“Weeelllll, a little bit …” he says – but from his intonation, and what he says next, I’m dead wrong. Waititi has long been sick of reverent ­portrayals of Indigenous people talking to kehua (spirits), or riding a ghost waka (phantom canoe), or playing a flute on a mountain. “Always the boring characters,” he says. “They’ve got no real contemporary relationship with the world, because they’re always living in the past in their spiritual ways.”

A scene from Next Goal Wins, filmed earlier this year. (Alamy)

He’s part of a vanguard consciously poking fun at those stereotypes. Another is the Navajo writer and director Billy Luther, who met Waititi at Sundance Film Festival back in 2003, along with Reservation Dogs co-creator Sterlin Harjo. “We were this group of outsiders trying to make films, when nobody was really biting,” says Luther. “It was a different time. The really cool thing about it now is we’re all working. We persevered. We didn’t give up. We slept on each other’s couches and hung out. It’s like family.”

Waititi has power now, and is known for using Indigenous interns wherever possible (“because there weren’t those opportunities when I was growing up”), making important introductions, offering feedback on scripts, and lending his name to projects through executive producer credits, too, which he did for Luther’s new feature film, Frybread Face and Me (2023).

He called Luther back from the set of Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) to offer advice on working with child actors – “Don’t box them into the characters you’ve ­created,” he said, “let them naturally figure it out on their own” – but it’s definitely harder to get Waititi on the phone these days. “He’s a little bitch,” Luther says, laughing. “Nah, there’s nothing like him. He’s a genius. You just knew he was going to be something. I just knew it. He’s my brother.“

I’ve been asked to explicitly avoid political questions in this interview, probably because Waititi tends to back so many causes, from child poverty and teenage suicide to a campaign protesting offshore gas and oil exploration near his tribal lands. But it’s hard to ignore his recent Instagram post, sharing a viral video about the Voice to Parliament referendum starring Indigenous Aussie rapper Adam Briggs. After all, we speak only two days after the proposal is defeated. “Yeah, sad to say but, Australia, you really shat the bed on that one,” Waititi says, pausing. “But go see my movie!”

About that movie – the early reviews aren’t great. IndieWire called it a misfire, too wrapped in its quirks to develop its arcs, with Waititi’s directorial voice drowning out his characters, while The Guardian called it “a shoddily made and strikingly unfunny attempt to tell an interesting story in an uninteresting way”. I want to know how he moves past that kind of criticism. “For a start, I never read reviews,” he says, concerned only with the opinion of people who paid for admission, never professional appraisals. “It’s not important to me. I know I’m good at what I do.”

Criticism that Indigenous concepts weren’t sufficiently explained in Next Goal Wins gets his back up a little, though. The film’s protagonist, Jaiyah Saelua, the first transgender football player in a FIFA World Cup qualifying match, is fa’afafine – an American Samoan identifier for someone with fluid genders – but there wasn’t much exposition of this concept in the film. “That’s not my job,” Waititi says. “It’s not a movie where I have to explain every facet of Samoan culture to an audience. Our job is to retain our culture, and present a story that’s inherently Polynesian, and if you don’t like it, you can go and watch any number of those other movies out there, 99 per cent of which are terrible.”

*notes: (there is video clip in the article)

Waititi sounds momentarily cranky, but he’s mostly unflappable and hilarious. He’s the kind of guy who prefers “Correctumundo bro!” to “Yes”. When our video connection is too laggy, he plays up to it by periodically pretending to be frozen, sitting perfectly still, mouth open, his big shifting eyeballs the only giveaway.

He’s at his best on set. Saelua sat next to him in Honolulu while filming the joyous soccer sequences. “He’s so chill. He just let the actors do their thing, giving them creative freedom, barely interjecting unless it was something important. His style matches the vibe of the Pacific people. We’re a very funny people. We like to laugh. He just fit perfectly.”

People do seem to love working alongside him, citing his ability to make productions fresh and unpredictable and funny. Chris Hemsworth once said that Waititi’s favourite gag is to “forget” that his microphone is switched on, so he can go on a pantomime rant for all to hear – usually about his disastrous Australian lead actor – only to “remember” that he’s wired and the whole crew is listening.

“I wouldn’t know about that, because I don’t listen to what other people say about anything – I’ve told you this,” Waititi says. “I just try to have fun when there’s time to have fun. And when you do that, and you bring people together, they’re more willing to go the extra mile for you, and they’re more willing to believe in the thing that you’re trying to do.”

Yes, he plays music between takes, and dances out of his director’s chair, but it’s really all about relaxing amid the immense pressure and intense privilege of making movies. “Do you know how hard it is just to get anything financed or green-lit, then getting a crew, ­getting producers to put all the pieces together, and then making it to set?” Waititi asks. “It’s a real gift, even to be working, and I feel like I have to remind ­people of that: enjoy this moment.”

Source: The Age

By: Konrad Marshall (December 1, 2023)

#rhys darby #taika waititi #next goal wins #our flag means death #hunt for the wilderpeople #interview

[stick2strokes]

Merry Christmas!! Just wanted to do a nice little drawing for most of the fandoms I've found (sometimes again) , joined, then stored at the back of my mind (not included in the art are Carrie 1976, Jojo Rabbit, Sister Act, Disney's Animated Pinocchio, etc.) from 2020 to 2022 - A rollercoaster, truly. Have a good Christmas, guys! [Click on picture for better quality]

#matilda the musical #deltarune #pikachu #miles morales #my child lebensborn #wednesday #spy x family #mirabel madrigal #steven universe #turning red #friday night funkin #harry potter #helluva boss #alice in wonderland #genshin traveler #traveler genshin impact #steve minecraft #gdt pinocchio #charlie bucket #alto's odyssey #crossover #wolfwalkers #sky: cotl

[divinity1999]

Black Beauty by Anna Sewell • White Oleander (2002) • Mama (1997-2020) • Mermaids (1990) • White Oleander by Janet Fitch • Jojo Rabbit (2019) • Writers & Lovers by Lily King • Ladybird (2017)

#web weaving #web weavings #words #moodboard #parallel #writing #mother #white oleander #lady bird #quotes #aestethic #coquette #sharp objects #mothers day

[handgiven]

TAG NINE PEOPLE YOU’D LIKE TO KNOW BETTER!

I. favourite colours: yellow & blue, especially when they occur together (like on van gogh's yellow house painting, or the siesta painting, or like when it's stormy and the sky is dark blue and grey, but the sun still shines on the yellowy buildings, or yellow acer leaves)

II. favourite flavours: palm sugar, pho broth, wild blueberries, masala chai, walnuts & honey, rosehip, elderberry

III. favourite genres: urban fantasy, queer & historical queer lit, poetry in prose, dystopian, philosophical, interviews with ordinary people & stories about ordinary people (bohumil hrabal, my beloved)

IV. favourite music: ambient, indie, folk, folk-punk, folk-rock, lo-fi (mostly i like anything that i can vibe with on account of the Vibes)

V. favourite movies: the fall (2006) -- it's so beautiful and it uses real locations and !!!!!! it's so good and sad and beautiful, maurice (1987) -- historical queer story with a happy ending, thank you mr e.m.forster o7, hombre mirando al sudeste (1986) -- philosophical scifi kind of thing it lives rent-free in my head, rent-a-neko (2012) -- "are you lonely? i'll rent you a cat.", jojo rabbit (2019), lola rennt (1998), mad max: fury road (2015), pride (2014), isle of dogs (2018), inside llewyn davis (2013), samotáři (2000)

VI. favourite series: in the flesh (2013), firefly (2002), the good place (2016-2020), attack on titan (still haven't seen the last two episodes, so no spoilers haha), the magicians (2015-2020), crazy ex-girlfriend (2015-2019), black books

VII. last song: radio by fred again.. & brian eno

VIII. last series: genuinely do not recall, but it might be good omens season 2, i just didn't have time to watch anything else since that came out

IX. last movie: blow-up (1966)

X. currently reading: lots of things started, none finished, but i do carry 'matter & desire' by andreas weber wherever i go these days s o i guess that; i am also listening to vonnegut's mother night as an audiobook :')

XI. currently watching: trying to listen to wtnv for the 5142952 time

XII. currently working on: art project for uni, deep-cleaning up my living space for the first time in months, trying to sort through my drafts & asks so it's all manageable

tagged by: stolen from @chiefofstafftanner tagging: @spookyagentfmulder @beyondthescully @talentforlying @shilohgreen @void-foxy @primordialchoice @amischiefofmuses @ravmalakh && anyone who sees this and is intrigued enough .) (also all you tagged people do feel free to ignore this, i appreciate you either way !!)

#▻ 𝐺𝐸𝑁𝐸𝑅𝐴𝐿 、ooc ⁽ ᵐᵃʸᵇᵉ ᶦ'ˡˡ ᵍʳᵒʷ ᵒᵘᵗ ᵒᶠ ᶦᵗ ⁾ #in the spirit of munday (:

[twopoppies]

Hi, Gina. Can I please rant in your asks? I might be a complete idiot, but the more i look on the timeline (literal timeline, not a social media one) the more i come to one conclusion.

So Syco dies in 2020. Louis greets us with «decided to part ways» tweet, but the parting ways is useless, company is already dead. All the rights go to (presumably) Sony. Sony doesn’t give a fuck about Louis. He’s not profitable. I mean in our little community he’s the center of the world, but in the real world not so much.

But what they do care about is Harry. Harry is their golden goose for now and for many more years to come. The more Louis flaunts with huge «H» on his chest and changes the Spotify canvas to Harry’s tattoos, the more people might believe that Larry Stylinson rumours (gasp!) might be true.

The company that holds the rights can prohibit all recording and publishing activity altogether. We’ve seen it with JoJo. We’ve seen it with Kesha. We’ve seen it with Raye. And probably with hundreds more, that we know nothing about (like what happened to Alexis Jordan?). So Louis is given a simple choice: he shuts down all the rumours by himself or Walls will be his last album.

So that’s when OATV production and the Big Freddy Push begins.

We all screaming that everything he did in the last two years doesn’t make sense. But it’s because it simply doesn’t. We’ve been watching this guy for the ten years prior. And there’s no fucking way in hell i’m gonna believe that one nice Wednesday morning in the beginning of 2021 Louis Tomlinson woke up, yawned and said: «Well, why don’t I start mentioning my fake son everywhere, because that’s the kind a person i am now.»

If he’s doing it, he’s either gaining something big from it, or at least not losing something big from it. And what is bigger than the simple opportunity to make music?

And if the question is why his promo so shit and what audience he’s targeting, then the answer is - he’s not promoting his music, he’s promoting the fact that Harry Styles is not, in fact, gay.

I hope it does make sense. And also I love you, Gina. Thank you for being the voice of reason in this fandom. (And sorry for my English, I did my best 😖)

Hi darling. Your English is absolutely fine. No apologies needed!

As for your thoughts… I do think there’s some plausibility in your theories. Although, Louis isn’t the main reason people think H is queer. He’s doing a pretty good job of making people question it, all on his own. TBH, most of his new fans probably have never heard of Louis unless they already are wondering about Harry’s sexuality go search through Google and stumble on Larry. And even then they would have to already be open to it to really fall down the rabbit hole to get past all the denials and beards and the idea that larries are crazy.

I’m not saying Sony wouldn’t go to those lengths, but it seems like blowing out a candle when there’s a brush fire around the corner.

Anyway, I don’t think Louis would have been allowed to part ways with Syco/Sony without them getting something out of it. God knows what deal he made, but I’m sure Sony is more ruthless than we can imagine.

#Louis’ career #babygate #louis’ image #music industry #record contracts

[dr-aegon]

✨💙 Spreading some love and joy in people's ask boxes 💙✨ If you get this, it means you're awesome, and I hope you're having a great day! Now copy and paste this message to at least 3 other blogs to keep it going! Then answer to show you're done: What are your three favorite movies?

😘💖💖

Jen, my love 🥰💕 thank you for the ask!! 🫶

it’s progressively becoming harder to remember which movies i liked and consider as my faves 😂 but i did it! here are :

yet another three favorite movies (that i can think of rn)

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Constantine (2005)

The Social Network (2010)

i have answered three times before with these movies :

Saltburn (2023)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Promising Young Woman (2020)

Gone Girl (2014)

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

The Favourite (2018)

Chicago (2002)

Amélie (2001)

#ask games #lovely mutuals ❤️ #my sweet Jen

[sirgenry]

«КРОЛИК ДЖОДЖО»

«JOJO RABBIT»    

режиссер Тайка ВАЙТИТИ трагикомедия  Новая Зеландия  2019

Оскар 2020  Лучший сценарий

Самый известный вампир современного кино Тайка Вайтити решил что хватит ему прятаться по темным углам и спать в гробу и подумал, а почему бы не замахнуться на Адольфа нашего, понимаете ли, Гитлера. Внезапно выяснилось, что нацисты удаются ему не хуже вурдалаков. Как говорится, чем дальше в лес, тем больше мразей. Таким макаром он и до зомби докатится, которых и так уже на экранах с избытком и пора бы киношникам с мертвечиной притормозить.

Очень надеюсь, что Тайка пойдет другим путем. Что касается самого фильма, то Чаплина он конечно не переплюнул, но харкнул в том направлении достаточно далеко. Если бы была номинация «Самый смешной фюрер», он бы ее непременно получил. Впрочем, Оскар за лучший сценарий тоже сойдет. Детский фильм про фашистов, взгляд на войну глазами ребенка, отнюдь не в новинку для Голливуда, но столь уморительной комедии на эту тему я еще не видел.

Маленький немецкий мальчик живет в фашистской Германии и очень хочет стать настоящим нацистом. А поскольку истинный ариец из него так себе, на помощь юному патриоту приходит его воображаемый друг Адольф Гитлер. В исполнении Тайки Вайтити, который выбрал своим актерским амплуа буффонаду и клоунаду, фюрер, естественно, получился тем еще клоуном. И это правильно, потому что расставаться с кошмарным прошлым надо весело, как завещал нам еще один не менее известный хоть и не такой одиозный немец, Карл Маркс.

Вот ведь засада. Стоило только написать о прощании с кошмарным фашистским прошлым, как выяснилось, что не такое уж это прошлое. Оказывается Адольфа Гитлера клонировали лет этак 70 назад и назвали Владимиром Путиным. А 20 лет назад его назначили фюрером России и теперь эта мразь, видимо для того чтобы никто не усомнился в его нацистской сущности, решил оккупировать Украину. Вот такая вот, уже совсем не смешная реальность, про которую, когда эта плешивая моль сдохнет, кто-нибудь снимет смешную комедию.

#рецензия на фильм #кино #киноблог #русский tumblr #русский блог #оскар

[spectrestardust]

Movie Meme 🍿

Rules: post 7 comfort movies and tag 7 people 

Thank you @pfirsichspritzer for tagging me 💕

Lady Bird (2017): I cannot even express how important this movie is to me. If I had to choose a movie to watch everyday for the rest of my life, it would be this one. 

Pride and Prejudice (2005): this movie is perfect, argue with the wall (and that’s my Letterboxd review) 

Thor Ragnarok (2017): forever my comfort Marvel movie. The dialogue, the music, the characters, the themes -  it’s such an good watch!

Tangled (2012): my favorite Disney movie. There will be no further explanation.

Begin Again (2013): I still listen to this movie’s soundtrack almost every week, that’s how much I love it.

Jojo Rabbit (2019): I was never the same after watching this movie. It makes me laugh and cry and feel so many things, but in the end, it never fails to cheer me up and believe there’s good in the world.

Rocketman (2019): listen, it was my 2019/2020 hyperfixation. And Elton John is one of my all time favorite artists, there was no way I wouldn’t include this movie here. 

(some honorable mentions: Encanto, Tick Tick Boom, Ratatouille, School of Rock, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, Sense and Sensibility)  

tagging (no pressure ofc): @lunapascal @grimm-lynn @gaygingersnaps @daffodelia @novasforce @andorology @woahpip

#tag game #movie tag game #thank u so much joanna

[fleshadept]

sorry if you've been asked this before but i'm curious: when and how did you get into film? i've followed you for some time and you mention being in film school, did you always know you wanted to study film? what/who inspired you? how close are you to graduating? i hope these questions are okay and not intrusive!

i only got into film pretty recently actually!! for the longest time i thought i didn't like movies. i went to uni to major in film primarily to take editing courses because what i wanted more than anything was to be an editor for any of the youtubers whose stuff i liked (which tbf would still be a lot of fun). i dabbled in making videos myself for a while, then kinda fell off.

i had a moment in 2020 when i sort of realized what film could be for the first time and watched a lot of great ones: oldboy (2003), fight club (1999), pride (2014), 13th (2016), portrait of a lady on fire (2019), parasite (2019), us (2019), really 2019 was a fucking great year for movies tbh. and i kind of realized that the reason i had said i didn't like movies was because 98% of what i watched was marvel/family movies and i didn't really look for anything else.

but i never REALLY got into the whole analysis thing or fell in love with film until i watched boy (2010) in april of last year. my letterboxd diary before and after that movie is crazy. something snapped in my brain idk. before that i couldn't really sit through movies very often but after that i just couldn't get enough of it and wanted to see everything movies could do because boy hit so hard and was so, so gorgeous. so i did a deep dive into taika waititi's work (i had seen thor and jojo rabbit and what we do in the shadows before but never really cared who made them) and just went a little bit insane. and started watching every other movie i had even wanted to watch a little bit

and it's funny, because looking back at my letterboxd after this, i realized the moment back in 2020 where i started watching more films for a little bit was kicked off by jojo rabbit. so something about this guy's work was just so effective for me, even when i didn't know who he was, and part of what got me so interested in film was trying to figure out why the hell that was and how he did it. and in the process of that i discovered a love for so many other things i didn't realize i had--filmmaking as well as analysis, production as well as postproduction, even writing! i love it all. but taika's work will always have a solid place in my heart because of that.

#and now my gender & sexuality in the horror film class has opened up a whole extra area that i've found out i love #i just. ugh it's so <333 #sorry this answer is probably way longer than you anticipated but i just LOVE FILM!!!!!! #everyone watch boy (2010) right now #it's in my desc #cricket answers #as for graduating i'm pretty close but staying longer than i need to so i can take a few extra classes i really want to

[mistressdickens]

So, I starter thinking about doing a poll for every Oscars ceremony to see if the academy got it right, but that's a hell of a lot of work, and I don't have the time. So instead I'm gonna see which wrong decision was the biggest Oscar robbery of all time. Restricting this to acting, but feel free to put other thoughts in the tags.

Doing this by decade so watch out for others.

#oscars #robbery #poll

[edenbearshaw]

If you’re reading this, thanks. You’ve decided to see if I can succinctly talk about cinema in posts that are longer than three sentences. Truthfully, I doubt I can. Yet.

This isn’t because I’m afraid to share my feelings on film and my experiences within it, but more because I’m REALLY out of my depth here. I’m 32 years old, and I’ve never seen Schindler’s List. Never seen Saving Private Ryan, or The Godfather Part 2 (but yes, I did love the first one). Scarface, Avengers Endgame, Citizen Kane…you name it, there’s a good chance I haven’t seen it.

But over the past three years, I’ve been making a serious effort to work on this. In 2020, I set myself the task of seeing one film every week in the cinema, and it was all going so well. I saw Jojo Rabbit, Little Women, Onward, and a number of others that I’ve now somehow forgotten. I could feel myself getting fully invested into a new hobby, something I hadn’t done for years. Then COVID came, and it was back to the small screen to continue my journey. I wasn’t deterred.

Fast forward to now (July 2023) and I’m continuing to explore the different films that have meant so much to so many people, and the films that have perhaps not had the same acclaim. Through this blog I will look at different individual films, and the experiences I’ve had in finding them. I would love any feedback any of you may have, and would absolutely encourage any recommendations for what I should be watching next.

So, that’s the intro sorted. See you all in the next blog.

Eden.

#movies #films #cinema

[magnetothemagnificent]

https://estheronfilm.wordpress.com/2020/02/13/my-final-words-on-jojo-rabbit/

An excellent article, perfectly expressing how I've been feeling for a long time. Highly recommend this article for both Jews and non-Jews alike.

#jojo rabbit #media antisemitism #antisemitism #critical media analysis

[a-man-for-hire-and-his-archives]

What Makes Taika Waititi Run and Run and Run?

The “Thor: Love and Thunder” director can’t say no — to starring in “Our Flag Means Death,” making a soccer movie, writing a “Star Wars” idea, adapting Roald Dahl. For starters.

If he stepped back and considered all of his projects, “I’d probably have a panic attack,” Taika Waititi said. “I know there’s too many things.” Credit: Dana Scruggs for The New York Times

Even when your job is to dream up the interplanetary adventures of a Norse god, you might still want to run off and play pirates.

So during the weeks he was editing “Thor: Love and Thunder,” the Marvel movie that opens on July 8, Taika Waititi, its director and co-writer, would occasionally take weekends off for a different journey.

He would get outfitted in a flowing gray wig, matching facial hair and temporary tattoos, and don deliciously fetishistic leather gear to portray Blackbeard, the swashbuckling, loin-kindling buccaneer of the HBO Max comedy series “Our Flag Means Death.”

This is admittedly not a bad way to spend your spare time, though Waititi did occasionally fret over the trade-offs. As he explained recently, “Sometimes you’re pissed off at life and you’re like, ‘Why did I say yes to everything? I don’t have a social life — I’m just working.’ But then the thing comes out, you see where the hard work goes and it’s really worth it.”

On TV, Waititi, 46, has had a hand in the FX comedies “Reservation Dogs” (as a co-creator) and “What We Do in the Shadows” (a series based on a movie he co-wrote and co-directed), as well as a “Shadows” spinoff, “Wellington Paranormal.” At the movies, you can hear him voice a good guy in “Lightyear” or see him play a bad guy in “Free Guy.”

Waititi is also editing “Next Goal Wins,” a soccer comedy-drama that he co-wrote and directed for Searchlight. He’s writing a new “Star Wars” movie for Lucasfilm, a “Time Bandits” series for Apple TV+. He’s preparing two Roald Dahl projects for Netflix and adapting a graphic novel by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius for a feature film.

“All my films are about underdogs,” Waititi said. “Not being able to choose your family and sometimes that’s not your blood family, it’s just who you end up gravitating towards.”

If that isn’t enough, consider that it’s taken this many paragraphs to acknowledge that in 2020 Waititi won an Academy Award for the adapted screenplay of his World War II comedy-drama “Jojo Rabbit,” in which he played — in his own words — “a lovable, quirky, whimsical Hitler.”

From this inventory alone (“not even mentioning the five other things that haven’t been reported on yet,” Waititi said), you can gauge how highly desired his services are. In just a few years, he has become one of the industry’s most ingenious and reliable purveyors of escapist fare while devising for himself some fulfilling escape routes from those escapes. And his filmmaking style is distinctive enough that it still shines through on monolithic and increasingly familiar Marvel movies.

But his runaway résumé is also a sign of how difficult Waititi finds it to say no. And if you wonder how anyone can possibly balance so many demanding projects, rest assured Waititi is asking himself these same questions.

“Sometimes I’ll wake up and be like, Am I having a midlife crisis?” he said. “Should I even be a filmmaker? Maybe I should have been a carpenter. Maybe I should just be a gardener.”

Waititi’s estimable career isn’t necessarily the one he imagined for himself while growing up in New Zealand — half a world away from Hollywood and wondering how to gain its attention. “It was never my dream to do this,” he explained. “I would much rather have been a fighter pilot or a fireman, but then it appeared that you’ve got to be actually quite smart to be a pilot.”

He added, more sincerely, that he didn’t start making films until his late 20s, at which point he’d already been a graphic artist, a musician and a comedian. “I don’t know if I’ve ever chased any of my dreams,” Waititi said. “My dreams have sort of developed through being part of the dream.”

Though he fell in love with film, he calls it “an arranged marriage.” And the solution he has found for managing his workload is, essentially, not to think too much about it and never to stand in one place for too long.

“Because if I was to step back and look at all of the things I’m doing, I’d probably have a panic attack,” he said. “I know there’s too many things. I know I’m doing a lot. I just have to keep pivoting every couple of hours.”

Earlier this month, Waititi kept stationary long enough to savor a plate of smoked trout and avocado toast in the lobby of a Midtown Manhattan hotel. Wearing loosefitting clothes in pastel colors and a neatly trimmed mustache, he carried himself like all of the Marx Brothers rolled into one: He could be suave, sheepish or scheming, and was always ready with a self-deprecating quip.

For example: “New Zealanders hate compliments,” Waititi said. “I think it’s because of our moms. Our moms are the ones who go, ‘Don’t worry — I still liked it.’ That’s the kind of support you’ll get.”

Decked out in a gray wig and leather gear for “Our Flag Means Death.” Credit: HBO Max

Waititi was not the most obvious candidate to join the Marvel roster when the studio began to consider him in 2015. At the time, his directorial efforts included intimate short films (including the Oscar-nominated “Two Cars, One Night”) and features like “Boy,” an affectionate, coming-of-age tribute to his upbringing in a rural Maori community, about a child enthralled by his charmingly reprobate father (played by Waititi, of course).

Before that, Waititi was a theater student at Victoria University of Wellington, where he befriended future collaborators like Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie (who would form the satirical rock duo Flight of the Conchords), obsessed over Monty Python and yearned for outlets for his wry comic voice.

“In those days, you’re like, I wish I had something to work on,” Waititi said. “I would just make lists of things I would like to do.”

But others from that era regarded Waititi as highly motivated and likely to fulfill his ambitions.

“I still see within Taika the same cheeky alternative comic from the 1990s,” said Rhys Darby, a longtime friend and a co-star on “Our Flag Means Death.”

“He found that creating behind the camera was more viable than being in front of it,” Darby explained. “But even when he directs, he’ll get in front of the camera and show the actors what he wants them to do. He gets them to mimic him. That’s why he always ends up in his own films. Because he’s trying to control everything.”

At Marvel, the studio knew it needed a comprehensive reinvention of “Thor.” That film’s sluggish 2013 sequel, “The Dark World,” remains no one’s favorite entry in the franchise.

“We were waning, as far as support for the character,” said Chris Hemsworth, who has played Thor since 2011. “I felt fatigued and there was an audience fatigue, too. If we didn’t do something different and change it up, I wasn’t convinced we were going to bring back an audience.”

The comic-book literate Waititi was no fan of the annoyingly flawless Thor, whom he described as “a rich kid from outer space who’s trapped in the ghetto.” But as he reflected further, Waititi wanted to understand his own resistance to the hero and see if he could make a movie that acknowledged and embraced those traits.

Moreover, Waititi wanted to know if he could handle making movies at a mammoth scale. Addressing himself, he said, “You’ve always been scared of working with studios, worried about working in America and what it might do to you. But why not go straight into the deep end and see how that goes?”

The result was the wildly successful “Thor: Ragnarok” (2017), in which the Viking deity is stripped of his magical hammer and shorn of his flowing locks but overcomes his villainous sister, Hela (Cate Blanchett), and the flamboyant Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum).

Why do so many in Hollywood try to hire Waititi? “He gives you his cachet, and he puts himself 100 percent behind your ideas,” said David Jenkins, creator of “Our Flag Means Death.”

Directed by Waititi (from a screenplay credited to Eric Pearson, Craig Kyle and Christopher L. Yost), “Ragnarok” featured plenty of his personal flair — like two different battle sequences set to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” — while allowing him to play the soft-spoken stone warrior Korg. (It was well-reviewed and sold more than $853 million in tickets worldwide, outstripping its predecessors.)

Almost immediately, Waititi and Marvel began devising a follow-up, but getting him back in the director’s chair was not so simple. Within weeks of his Oscar victory, the pandemic hit.

“Painting, learning a language, exercising — you think I did any of them?” he said. “No, I didn’t. What I wanted to do was sleep for a month and then I got to sleep for six months.”

Then he launched into projects he had been neglecting. By this point, Marvel had become accustomed to sharing Waititi.

As Kevin Feige, the studio’s president, explained, “On ‘Ragnarok,’ it was, ‘I’m just finishing this little thing.’” That turned out to be Waititi’s 2016 comedy-drama “Hunt for the Wilderpeople.” “While we were writing and developing this movie, it was, ‘I’m just going to do this other thing in Manhattan Beach.’” That was Waititi’s work on the “Star Wars” series “The Mandalorian,” for which he directed an episode and voiced the robot bounty hunter IG-11. “‘I’m just going to Hawaii for a few weeks.’ Oh, I guess family vacation?” Feige recalled. Actually, he was filming “Next Goal Wins.”

Even after the “Thor: Love and Thunder” shoot ended in Australia last summer and postproduction began in Los Angeles, Feige said, “we were always on alert for Taika being spread too thin. We were very ready to be like, We’re in the cutting room, it’s 8 p.m., where is he? But he was always sitting right next to us.”

Hemsworth said that Waititi’s numerous extracurricular activities are not diversions, but intellectual necessities. “If he isn’t continually creating, he would become stagnant,” Hemsworth said. “Most of us would fall flat on our asses from exhaustion. That’s what fuels him, in a strange way.”

Waititi’s to-do list included “Our Flag Means Death,” whose creator, David Jenkins, spent three years wooing Waititi — first to serve as an executive producer and director of the pilot, and then to play Blackbeard.

“It’s like writing a song for Prince,” said Jenkins, who got Disney and Marvel’s permission to borrow Waititi on weekends. “He gives you his cachet, and he puts himself 100 percent behind your ideas.”

“I would much rather have been a fighter pilot or a fireman, but then it appeared that you’ve got to be actually quite smart to be a pilot,” Waititi said.

Waititi said he did not need much persuading to play Blackbeard once Jenkins suggested he was right for the part. “This is what I needed to hear,” Waititi said. “My ego loves that.”

But “Our Flag Means Death” offered Waititi more than just a morale boost. (Here there be spoilers, me hearties.) While the series told the comic tale of Stede Bonnet (Darby), a befuddled but well-meaning aristocrat trying to make it as a pirate, it did not simply dangle Blackbeard as an unlikely mentor to Bonnet and a source of will-they-or-won’t-they, bro-ho-ho innuendo.

In the first season’s penultimate episode, Bonnet and Blackbeard realized they loved each other and shared a tender kiss. Their romance has become integral to the series going forward, and the inspiration for countless works of fan art that Waititi keeps saved on his phone.

As much as he understands the cultural fascination with Stede and Blackbeard’s kiss, Waititi said he wished it wasn’t remarkable for its rarity: “It needs to be normalized.”

It is a wish that Waititi understands he cannot necessarily fulfill in a Marvel movie, despite some of the wink-wink repartee shared by Thor and his hunky ally Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) in a “Love and Thunder” teaser trailer.

“No one talks about Tom Cruise hooking up with Jennifer Connelly in ‘Top Gun,’” he said. But in “Our Flag Means Death, “it’s a massive talking point that two dudes kiss on the beach. I’m cool with talking about it because I’m really proud of the moment. But my dream is to be like the world of the pirates, where no one bats an eye.”

The new “Thor” is partly concerned with expanding the Marvel empire to include Russell Crowe as the vainglorious Greek god Zeus and Christian Bale as the nefarious Gorr the God Butcher. But as the title implies, the movie is also a romance, one that continues Thor’s journey from “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).

Looking at the character there, Waititi said he asked himself, “What is he missing most in his life?” And the answer: “It was love. It was a partner. For people who are larger than life, what completes them? I think a lot of superheroes, when you look at them, they’re just lonely.”

The story line provided the opportunity to bring back Natalie Portman, who played Thor’s love interest Jane Foster in the first two films but did not appear in “Ragnarok.”

Portman, who gets to wield Thor’s mighty hammer in the new film, said that she had seen “Ragnarok” and was excited that Waititi’s style was “so free and creative.”

“His other work, too, has impressed me so much over the years and how he’s able to blend the silly and the profound, all with a distinctive visual style,” Portman said. “Everything in his films always feels spontaneous and hilarious and full of heart.”

The idea of yearning for companionship is particularly prevalent in this “Thor,” and one could speculate about why it appeals so strongly to Waititi. His parents separated when he was young, and he is divorced from the film producer Chelsea Winstanley, with whom he has two daughters.

But as we talked about the strands that tie his work together, Waititi preferred to point to broader themes.

“All my films are about underdogs,” he said. “Not being able to choose your family and sometimes that’s not your blood family, it’s just who you end up gravitating towards. You’re like, How did I end up with these weirdos? What is it about these guys?”

Waititi didn’t start making films until his late 20s. “Before that,” he said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever chased any of my dreams.”

Without quite naming himself, Waititi spun an extemporaneous monologue about why certain people — whoever they might be — can never see themselves as being successful or having made it.

“What drives people is this idea of, I’ll show you,” he said. “Sometimes it’s an ill-perceived, false idea that people don’t believe in you. You still carry that around and people will be like, ‘You can stop now — you’ve proven your point.’”

His voice rose to a comic volume as he continued: “No, there’s still some dead people I need to show! My dead dad, he needs to see!” Then in a softer, more sincere tone he added, “It’s a weird infatuation.”

Once this “Thor” has been safely launched into the world, more work awaits Waititi. “I’m trying to write the ‘Star Wars’ idea at the moment,” he said. “I’ve got to see how that goes, because once I submit it, that might determine when it gets made or if it gets made, even.”

But then again, “I am cool as well to take six months off and just go hang out with my kids.”

I asked him if he was starting to feel like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Inception,” just desperate to walk through the front door and have his children embrace him, and Waititi did not dismiss the comparison. “They’re in New Zealand,” he said. “I mean, they couldn’t be further away.”

For now, Waititi takes solace in the fact that he tried to have his daughters on the set of “Thor” as much as possible and provided them with experiences that would someday be meaningful to them.

“I know in the future, they’ll look back and go, ‘Wow, we were on set with Christian Bale,’” he said. “‘And we were rude to him and ignored him.’”

Source: The New York Times (published June 29, 2022, later updated July 8, 2022)

#taika waititi #the new york times #ofmd #interview

[princessofbookaholics]

FAV MOVIES TAG

I was tagged by @marisareadsalot to share my 10 favorite movies of all time which is hard to narrow down but I'll try! Thanks for the tag 💕

I can't rank them so I'm listing them in order of their release:

HOME ALONE (1990)

FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1991)

YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998)

HOW TO LOSE A GUY IN 10 DAYS (2003)

SHE'S THE MAN (2006)

TANGLED (2010)

LOVE, SIMON (2018)

JOJO RABBIT (2019)

PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (2020)

PURPLE HEARTS (2022)

I'm pretty sure there are more but these were the ones that come to mind! Also these are only the English ones, I have lots of Hindi movies i love too! This was fun and I would like to tag @storytime-reviews @tatithetinybooktuber @therefugeofbooks to do this as well but feel free to ignore if you've already done it!

#tags #movies tag #movies watched