Dr Matthew Bannister from Wintec has written a book about the career of Taika Waititi. He spoke to Lyn Freeman about Waititi's incredible achievements and what might come next.
Photo: AFP
Taika Waititi's films take three of the New Zealand Box Office Top 10 Films, including the top two Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Boy.
Taika's unique style of film-making has also made him one of the most in-demand film directors internationally. His second Marvel Comics movie Thor: Love and Thunder is out next year, and there's a huge sense of anticipation over a new Star Wars film that Watiti is both writing and directing.
Dr Matthew Bannister from Wintec reckons the time is right for an academic book about the filmmaker and his contribution to movies, particularly the Kiwi film industry.
Eye of the Taika - New Zealand Comedy and the Films of Taika Waititi is the result.
Matthew tells Lynn Freeman that the idea for the book came to him while at the cinema watching Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016. The reaction of the audience was extraordinary, he says.
"It was just that the atmosphere in the cinema was quite unlike the usual atmosphere in the cinema," he said.
"It was like people were really excited to see the film and they were reciting bits of dialogue and laughing.
"I was watching the film and I was enjoying it and I was enjoying the audience's reaction and I was thinking wow, this doesn't happen often in New Zealand that people go and see a New Zealand film and they celebrate it in an active sort of a way."
Dr Matthew Bannister Photo: supplied
Bannister made the decision not to talk to Waititi himself for the book, as there was already a wealth of interviews with him online. But he did correspond with his mother.
"I did talk to his mum, which I thought was important. She's clearly a big influence in his life and I even sent her a couple of sections of the book to have a look at and just check that everything was kosher, so to speak."
Talking about Waititi's breakout 2010 film Boy, his mother told Bannister she was surprised by how much he had absorbed his father's behaviour as a child.
Thor: Love and Thunder, written and directed by Taika Waititi Photo: Supplied
"I think it initiated the thing which he does in a lot of his work, which is he uses children as the centre of his sometimes childlike adults at the centre of his films," he said.
"I think he got the idea of doing that partly from Brotown. I saw a trace of the development of NZ comedy and I think Brotown was really quite important for using kids basically as a way to kind of diffuse some of the tensions around ethnicity and stuff in New Zealand and make it a laughing matter, as opposed to a political issue."
In the book, Bannister is somewhat critical of the film JoJo Rabbit, which follows a boy in Nazi Germany with Hitler, played by Waititi, as his imaginary friend.
"In the book I was kind of critical of it because I felt that Taika had stepped away to some degree from the things that he was familiar with and was good at," he said.
"Like films about New Zealand, he's good at. Films about total fantasy Marvel type or crazy vampires, he's good at. But making a film about Germany in the second world war is a totally different matter I think and I thought occasionally he portrayed a certain lack of knowledge of the historical circumstances of that."
However, Waititi would go on to win an Oscar for the film - the first indigenous director to do so.
"Even though I have some reservations about the film, I think in terms of PR and in terms of Waititi's career and indigenous film and comedy in general, it probably pushed things forward so you know, you could say it might not be an artistic success, but I think it was perhaps a political success."
As well as being a successful director, Waititi has also become a celebrity in his own right, which Bannister likens to the careers of Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen, who both wrote, directed and acted in their films.
"I think these days, the idea of the director that hides behind the camera and is only seen through his films, you can't really do that anymore. I think you have to be a personality as well and I think that's very typical of the age of social media that we live in.
"It's not enough just to do stuff, you also have to be someone and I think that Taika understands that very well and he understands that part of his brand, so to speak, is his persona, his personality."
The next project on the horizon for Waititi is his upcoming Star Wars film. Bannister said he was interested to see what he would do with the franchise.
"I think he did something reasonably remarkable with Thor: Ragnarok, it would be amazing for him to do the same thing with Star Wars," he said. "It's just a question of how much he can twist the normal formula and make things a bit weird."
Eye of the Taika: New Zealand Comedy and the Films of Taika Waititi is published by Wayne State University Press of Detroit, Michigan.
