It has been a busy few years for Taika Waititi. Until 2017, the writer, director and actor was best known for making small, silly but endearingly big-hearted films such as the 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, or 2016 coming-of-age comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. But then came Thor: Ragnarok, the hugely successful and wildly acclaimed Marvel film which reinvented Chris Hemsworth’s God of Thunder as a lovable goofball. It transformed Waititi’s career overnight, and has since seen him linked to everything from his own Star Wars film to a live-action version of Akira. Not bad for a 45-year-old who only decided on becoming a filmmaker at 30.
“People are like, ‘Oh you just popped out of nowhere’. Yeah, but I worked for ten years straight before Marvel gave me a call,” he says. “I was not just fucking around. I have evolved as a storyteller.”
Waititi is speaking to WIRED from his house in Auckland, New Zealand, where he is frantically bouncing between talking on Zoom, and placating his two at-home-from-school daughters (aged 5 and 9). They scream. They shout. They dance around. At one point he sits down with them to play Mario Kart. “This is pretty much my working life,” he laughs.
His latest project is a relatively rare return to actor-for-hire. He plays Antoine, the douchey tech-bro villain of new movie Free Guy, about a non-playable character (played by Ryan Reynolds) who steadily begins to gain self-awareness in a huge Grand Theft Auto-style video game. Waititi admits he’s not hugely interested in video games himself. Or at least not in anything more sophisticated than Mario Kart. Instead, his main motivation for taking the role was to take something of a break after directing his 2019 Oscar-winning Nazi satire Jojo Rabbit. “I was a little burned out,” he says, “and I wanted to do something a lot easier than directing, which is acting!”
Two years on however, and Waititi is fizzing with energy. He has recently finished shooting Thor: Love and Thunder (originally delayed for five months by Covid) in Australia. The sequel is set to reunite Thor and old flame Jane Foster, played by Natalie Portman, and is meant to be the “craziest” thing Waititi has done. “What I wanted to do from the beginning was to ask: ‘What are people expecting the least from this franchise?’ Oh, I know – a full-blown love story!”
He’s also advanced his use of cutting-edge technology. Waititi is not daunted by the demands of working on big, CGI-heavy films; as an independent filmmaker he had taught himself to understand green screens a long time ago. “I’m constantly working with [the VFX team] to find solutions for things,” he says.
For Thor: Ragnarok, creative studio Satellite Lab developed Dynamiclight, a technique which uses a special rig to move the lighting at eight times the speed of sound. It’s what allowed Waititi to create the visually striking Hela flashback sequence, in which light moves rapidly over footage shot at 1,200 frames per second. In Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi is excited about a new Satellite Lab technology called PlateLight, which uses the same principle (high-speed lights and slow-motion footage) to capture multiple lighting set-ups simultaneously within a single shot. “And then when you break down that footage into increments of 24 frames per second,” he says, “you have every single kind of lighting, all individually captured. So later you can choose your lighting in post-production.”
Waititi is also continuing his use of Industrial Light & Magic’s StageCraft technology, which he first used while directing the finale of The Mandalorian’s first season. It essentially allows filmmakers to generate reactive digital backdrops in real time (in front of the camera), through LED screens wrapped around a set. Waititi is a fan because, counterintuitively, it harks back to a more “old school” way of making films. “The actors can be in the environment; they can see what everyone else can see.”
Having finished filming on Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi is now focusing more on his Star Wars film. “It’s still in the ‘EXT. SPACE’ stage,” he laughs, referring to the format scriptwriters use to set up a scene. “But we’ve got a story. I’m really excited by it because it feels very me.” Has it been a challenge to marry his irreverent tone with the operatically sincere Star Wars universe? “I tend to go down that little sincerity alleyway in my films,” he says. “I like to fool the viewer into thinking ‘ha it’s this’ and then them going, ‘Damn it, you made me feel something!’”
But Star Wars is not the only project Waititi is committed to. At the time of writing, he is also tied to making a sequel to What We Do in the Shadows, an animated remake of Flash Gordon, two animated series of Roald Dahl stories for Netflix and of course that live-action adaptation of Akira, which has suffered a long and troubled development. “I’m still trying [to make it],” he says. “I don’t wanna give up on that.” Not to mention that before Thor: Love and Thunder he also finished filming on football comedy Next Goal Wins, adapted from a documentary about American Samoa, one of the worst national teams in the world.
“It’s my comfort zone to have a lot of things on,” he says. “That chaos is where my best work comes from. Someone said to me, ‘You need a break, man’. Yeah, but I feel like I was on a break for 35 years. I’m working now. I don’t want to stop.”
Free Guy is in cinemas August 13
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
