TAIKA WAITITI WAS WEARING A G-STRING WHEN he decided to start making his own movies.
It was 2002, more than a decade before Marvel plucked the director from his native New Zealand and tasked him with revamping the formulaic Thor series into a psychedelic romp for the God of Thunder’s third film, Thor: Ragnarok. Back then, Waititi was just an actor playing a stripper in an Australian television series called the The Strip. And he was not happy about it. “I was being paid money. So on the one hand, I was eating and paying rent,” says Waititi, 42. “On the other hand, I was creatively depressed, because I was getting my body waxed and having to eat tuna all day. I remember thinking, ‘I’m helping to make someone else’s bad idea. I’m sure I have better ideas than this.’”
He did. During breaks in the greenroom on set, Waititi wrote his first film, a short about three kids hanging out in a parking lot titled Two Cars, One Night. The movie’s mix of childish innocence and deadpan humor has since become Waititi’s trademark. It was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. When the camera cut to Waititi’s seat during the ceremony, he pretended to be asleep. “Because that film did really well, I felt like the pressure was on to direct as a job,” he says.
But he could also create parts for himself—ones that didn’t involve giving lap dances. He played a pot-smoking dad with killer Michael Jackson dance moves in his 2010 movie Boy and a priest who gives a funeral sermon about Doritos in his ’16 movie Hunt for the Wilder people. Like his first movie, those films focused on misfit kids in search of family. They also upended stereotypes about the Maori, the indigenous New Zealanders. (Waititi is half Maori.) Both movies set records for the highest-grossing local films in New Zealand. Waititi won awards at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals.
This story is from the November 13, 2017 edition of TIME Magazine.
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This story is from the November 13, 2017 edition of TIME Magazine.
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