It just changes things, really.” It’s hard to tell whether this is Waititi being serious or another deadpan punchline. “I like to be everyone’s friend as a director, to have a nice familial feel on set, and I’m trying to encourage sharing of ideas and a cool, creative space … but I’m dressed like Hitler. The cast and crew felt the same, he says.
“The clothes were uncomfortable, the glue-on moustache was uncomfortable, and I had to have my hair dyed and straightened, which just made me feel weird all day long.” The studio only agreed to make Jojo Rabbit if Waititi played the role himself. Portraying Hitler was never a career goal. “I’d never really seen that before and never seen it done in my style or my sensibility.” He was initially drawn to the story’s German point of view, he says.
The movie was adapted from a serious novel – Caging Skies by Christine Leunens – but the Hitler character was Waititi’s own addition. They grow when you’re aged 21,” she replies). Inevitably, Jojo’s prejudices are challenged. Waititi as Hitler is the attention-grabbing headline, but the story’s real focus is the relationship between Jojo, a lonely boy too timid for the Hitler Youth, and a Jewish girl he discovers his mother is hiding in their attic. Jojo Rabbit feels like Waititi’s riskiest proposition so far. But yeah, I’m busy for the next few years.”
“Some would say I’ve got too many things going on and I should just stop saying yes, but most of them are a little ways off being made so I’ve got time to figure out how to make the schedules work. “I’m going to drain myself, then I’ll fade away and be like a dried husk, blowing in the wind,” he jokes. Photograph: Kimberley French/Twentieth Century Fox Waititi with Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. A new Thor sequel is also in the pipeline, but currently he is in Hawaii directing Next Goal Wins, based on the true story of the world’s worst national football team, and starring Michael Fassbender.
His 2014 vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows is in its second series on TV.
Darby is to be found in the latest Jumanji movie, Clement is filming James Cameron’s Avatar sequels, and Waititi is everywhere you look: Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian Ryan Reynolds’ next blockbuster, Free Guy cult animation Rick and Morty James Gunn’s Suicide Squad and a Time Bandits reboot. This very local sensibility has turned out to have global appeal.
“Rhys Darby called it the comedy of mundanity,” says Waititi, “focusing on just the most boring parts of life and then trying to find the funniest aspects of that.” Along with his compatriots on Flight of the Conchords (Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie and Rhys Darby), for which he has writing and directing credits, Waititi has been ambassador for a brand of comedy that seems to be quintessentially New Zealand: modest, understated, deadpan even when surreal, rooted in the essential crapness of life. His previous film as a director, Thor Ragnarok, broke him into the mainstream after a decade of steadily growing appeal that became too big to describe as “cult”. But this is Taika Waititi: not only is he a self-identifying “Polynesian Jew” (his father is Maori his mother’s father was Jewish), but one of the most likable people on the planet.Īs with his dress sense, Waititi’s comedy compass has been unerring in recent years, both in front of and behind the camera. Jojo Rabbit is a comedy about a wartime German boy whose imaginary friend is, indeed, Hitler. Ordinarily, it would be a matter of some concern if that swastika-fixated child grew up to cast himself as Adolf Hitler in his own movie. “I’d instantly feel really guilty and turn it into a window.” “But you tell a kid they’re not allowed to do something, that it’s the worst thing to do, and they automatically want to do it.” The transgressive thrill was usually fleeting, he admits. He knew what Nazis were and what the symbol represented, he says.
A s a boy in New Zealand, Taika Waititi went through a phase of obsessively drawing swastikas all over his notebooks.