As he talks about what a fabulous thing it is to be Taika Waititi, he occasionally glances out the window of the hotel to the gin palaces moored in Auckland’s Viaduct Harbour.
So, which one is his? “They’re all mine. I’m actually trying to get rid of some of these to make room for my QE3.”
Everyone in the room laughs – there’s a Disney PR team with camera crew present for a small conveyor belt of local interviews with journalists under instruction not to ask our most prominent global celebrity anything unrelated to his new movie.
But Waititi does present as a man who has done quite well for himself. That’s assuming the jewellery that is adorning his fingers, neck and ear is as expensive as it looks.
Of course it is. The man’s been on the cover of Vogue, after all, albeit as half of a “power couple” with wife of a year-plus, UK pop star Rita Ora.
It’s not the Listener that has brought up the fruits of his success. Just before the boat quips, Waititi had been pondering the difference between being the young Taika following his creative whims and the 48-year-old one, who now doesn’t have the option of starting things – like multimillion-dollar superhero films – and not finishing them because he can’t be bothered.
Add to that, he has so many irons in the fire, there is a risk of a stable overflowing with shoeless horses. That’s whether it’s writing that Star Wars film (“four pages,” he deadpans on how far he’s got), acting in pirate comedy series Our Flag Means Death, making videos for the All Blacks, among other corporate gigs, or supposedly doing remakes of seemingly everything he ever liked growing up.
Yes, there is a New Zealand film on his to-do list. More of which later.
To that work-in-progress pile (“I’ve got a few irons underneath the other irons”) you can also add a redo of Mel Brooks’ classic comedy Young Frankenstein. The Jewish-American comedy great liked Waititi’s Hitler-spoofing Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit very much – it reminded him of his own Hitler-spoofing good old days. He asked Waititi if he’d like to remake Young Frankenstein, the 1974 film starring Gene Wilder that was arguably his greatest big-screen comedy. You don’t say no to Mel Brooks. He is 97, after all.
That said, Waititi says he could do with a break from the blacksmith shop. Right now, he says, “I just want to spend my money and enjoy it”.
Well, reportedly, he has splashed out on that unobtainable thing for many Kiwi artists of his generation – a nice house in Auckland. The NZ Herald last month reported he’d bought a $10.5 million waterfront property in Point Chevalier, supposedly as a base for his joint custody of his two daughters with his former wife, producer Chelsea Winstanley.
We would be discussing his purchase – after all, who doesn’t like a natter about Auckland real estate? – but this interview is taking place back in April. Disney stipulated it couldn’t run until the local release of his new film Next Goal Wins, which it eventually bumped until the end of the year, having made its New Zealand staff redundant in the interim.
Next Goal Wins is based on the true story – there was an earlier doco of the same name – about the American Samoan football team, the biggest losers of any Fifa World Cup qualifying round, having gone down 31-0 to Australia.
It stars many familiar faces including Oscar Kightley, Beulah Koale, Dave Fane (“all of my mates – I think Robbie Magasiva is the only one not in this”). And, as the Palagi saviour coach, is Michael Fassbender, an actor not exactly known for his comedy. He plays Dutch-American Thomas Rongen, who became the team’s coach and lifted them from the bottom of the Fifa rankings, a little.
It’s a film that seems to have been stuck in extra time. It was shot in Hawai’i in 2019. Then came the pandemic, which paused production for a year. Along the way, Armie Hammer, who played a minor role as an American Fifa official, became persona non grata due to a storm of sexual abuse allegations, which required reshoots with comic actor Will Arnett subbing in.
“I was actually already changing that character in the edit and Will came in and played a different version of it,” says Waititi, who isn’t the first director caught with a cast member who’s acquired a toxic reputation. But all his films, even his modest budget New Zealand ones at the start of his career, have taken years. “This is just the normal Taika schedule … I started working on Star Wars three years ago. By the time I finish, it will probably be another four years from now.”
Next Goal Wins debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opened in North America last week. The reviews have been decidedly mixed. That’s possibly because, like his parody-risking Thor films, it’s trying to be two things at the same time – a feel-good underdog sports film with the coach trying to redeem himself, and a send-up of feel-good sports films.
It takes the story told in the documentary in some interesting new directions. The doco’s makers were co-producers on the feature and directed some of the match scenes. “I had never made a sports film, so I didn’t really know what I was chasing. I just knew that I loved the story and I love the doco, and I wanted to do something set in the islands.”
The American-Samoan team featured Jaiyah Saelua, a fa’afafine who was the first transgender international footballer. Played by fa’afafine actor Kaimana in the film, the character is a big chunk of the story. Some reviews have wondered why the film’s whole focus wasn’t Saelua. Why wasn’t it?
“Jaiyah’s story is really interesting, but I was not tempted, because I really wanted it … to be about that relationship between the team and Thomas. But also him and the team, because there are a lot of other interesting characters there … [Jaiyah’s story] wasn’t something that I was massively drawn to as the main thing.”
Waititi wanted to keep things light and bright in what he has said is his least cynical film yet. By which he means? “It’s more just that in this film nothing bad happens to anyone. In all of the other films there’s some darkness there. Jojo Rabbit is probably the most cynical, but in a satirical way. But with this film, the message is on the poster: “Be happy.” I think one of the most important parts of the film is when Thomas says, ‘I can’t win’, and Oscar says, ‘Well, then lose, but don’t do it alone, come lose with us.’ That’s a really important thing. If it was in an American’s hands, it would be all about winning … I think it’s good to embrace losing but doing it together.”
Waititi isn’t much of a football fan. He played as a kid for a while before switching to rugby. “I played it from, like, eight to 10. I just felt like it was a real white sport, so I was a bit turned off because all of my mates were playing rugby. I just enjoyed playing touch a lot more than waiting for that round ball to come my way … ‘Can someone, like, kick it to me?’
“Notoriously, soccer is one of the worst things to try to film, because it just always comes across as super boring … It’s bad enough watching it when you’re waiting for something to happen in a big game. But it’s just a hard sport to make look interesting on film. And I think we did a really good job.”
Whatever Next Goal Wins does at the box office – and it’s unlikely to be troubling Oscar voters – you suspect Waititi’s life and career will continue on its seemingly charmed way. According to the man living it, it has always been thus.
“It’s like The Truman Show – everything has just been put in front of me, for me. Like, you’ve just been sent in here to entertain me for 15-20 minutes, then you’ll go and these people [the PR team] will do something for me. My mother says this to me all the time … I used to write stories about how the world was on fire and everyone was dying. My parents died and I was the only one who survived. I’m always, like, the star of my own show … This is basically my whole story, just for me.”
There are words for that. “It’s called being a Leo. Oh, narcissism? It’s true.”
But with that, he says, is the self-doubt of being a fêted figure but feeling a bit of a fake. “It all comes from a deep place of insecurity and imposter syndrome – all the things that everyone else in this industry has – the deep sense of not feeling like you belong here, or that you’ve gotten away with something, and no one’s found out yet.
“Most people in this industry have that fear or that sense that it’s either all going to be taken away – the window is going to close – you’re going to be irrelevant soon, or that you’ve somehow stumbled into this undeservedly – that there’s been some sort of glitch or mistake, and no one has noticed that you don’t know what you’re doing.
“If anyone asks me, ‘So, how do you make films?’ I don’t know. I don’t know any of the names of the equipment on set. All I know is what I’d like to see as an audience member in a rectangle on a big screen, and I’ll try my hardest to get that.
“I think directing in general is just you making decisions fast and confidently, and then people will believe you and follow you.”
Does he have anything left to prove? “Nah, I’m good. Film wasn’t even my dream. I didn’t have a dream of doing this, and I’ve already achieved it. I don’t care about anything other than just my happiness and my family.”
His marriage to Ora has made him both tabloid-famous and a glossy magazine fixture. He also appears to have met everybody. Yes, he has been starstruck on occasions. Such as when Ora introduced him to Mick Jagger at a party. He gulped, excused himself and departed.
“It was, ‘I’m not going to sit down and talk to you because I’m going to fuck this up, so I’m just going to walk away.’ ‘Have a good night.’ That was enough for me.”
He will be busy for the foreseeable future with whatever is next on his Hollywood to-do list.
But he does have the makings of a New Zealand film in a drawer somewhere. One of his early short films, Tama Tū, was about six Māori Battalion soldiers in World War II Italy.
He’s been tinkering with an idea about a battalion feature. It is the “Don Quixote of all films that every Māori film-maker has been trying to make,” says Waititi.
He’s not the only one – Muru director Tearepa Kahi also has one in the works. Waititi feels his is a good 10 years away.
“I think the problem is we shouldn’t be making a Saving Private Ryan version of the Māori Battalion film because we’ve already got Saving Private Ryan, right? So, it has to be something that celebrates being Māori – the stories, the cool, amazing stories of the battalion. It’s got to be in our style, which means it has to be entertaining and fun.”
Next Goal Wins is in cinemas on December 7.
