Music - it's motivational and just makes you relax.
Taika Waititi
I come from a country whose idea of masculinity is quite extreme, and I've grown up around a lot of that energy. I've been part of that a lot. And it's very draining; it's quite tiring trying to be macho.
The ridiculous events in everyday life are often overlooked - people don't recognise it as potentially cinematic.
My favourite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic - that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.
At the end of the day, the reality is we're all losers, and we're all uncoordinated. We're the worst of all of the animals on earth, and there's something quite endearing about that.
One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'
My world is not spectacle and explosion. It's two people talking.
Indigenous people in films, it's all, like, nose flutes and panpipes and, you know, people talking to ghosts... which I hate.
In a lot of my films, the biggest theme is family, making families out of those around you.
People overcoming the odds is actually a really important part of humanity, and I don't think we kind of get to celebrate that as much as we should.
Maori get pigeonholed into the idea they're spiritual and telling stories like 'Whale Rider' and 'Once Were Warriors,' quite serious stuff, but we're pretty funny people, and we never really have had an opportunity to show that side of ourselves, the clumsy, nerdy side of ourselves, which is something I am.
I did roles that I hated, and there were roles that were detrimental to my acting ability. There were roles that I was always doing that were always the comic relief... it was destroying my soul.
I love heroes that really go through ordeals, and they come out the other end completely changed.
In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.
Shooting a movie should be fun! It's not a real job. It can be hard, but at the end of the day, we're dressing up and playing pretend.
A lot of people are trying to get out of their home country and think 'making it' is if you're able to work in another. For me... I'd be quite content to keep doing my own little films down there for the rest of my filmmaking career.
To me, spending millions of dollars recreating the world's sadness with actors and props and sets - it seems like a kind of arrogant waste of money... Unless, that is, it's a film about an historical event.
New Zealand was such a weird place in the 1980s. For instance, we used to have this commercial in the late 1970s where this guy drives this car and stops outside a corner store. He goes in to buy something, and when he comes out, his car is gone. He's like, 'Huh?' Then a voice says, 'Don't leave your keys in the car.'
I was depressed about the roles that were on offer, so I had to make my own stories.
You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn't pay the bills.
My job is to express myself.
You make up a character, there's always gonna be parts of you that, like it or not, shine through.
It was never really my plan to become a filmmaker.
'Boy' was about my dad.
I really didn't want to be boxed into becoming a certain kind of film-maker - becoming the Maori story film-maker because I had made those short films.
I've always said that, first and foremost, I make films for New Zealanders. They're my target audience. Then after that, if people appreciate my stories from outside this country, then that's an added bonus.
'Eagle vs Shark' was about keeping myself sane. I wanted to go back to my comedy roots with people I trusted and had worked with before and do something low-budget and more experimental.
I think our first heroes with whom we discover flaws are our parents.
When I play characters, I like playing people who just comment on stuff, stand around and talk.
Characters I create are just mixtures of the people I know.
I daydream all the time.
I love films that make you feel something but also deliver that payload behind jokes.
'Eagle vs Shark' is a little film I could take risks with and make mistakes on.
I find that relationships between kids and parents are very interesting.
Coming from a very small country, it's always nice to see our own doing well.
We've got a thing called the 'tall puppy syndrome' in New Zealand, where if anyone is doing really well, it's quite common to try and bring them down - like, cut them down and say, 'You've been to the moon? So what? I mean, plenty of people have been to the moon.'
I'm always fascinated by the theme of children who parent the adults.
I think... part of life skills is also socialising... I think many people make the mistake of not going out... You can spend a little bit too much time with your nose in your book or with your fingers on a keyboard, and you miss out.
The family unit is very interesting because these are people that you're supposed to be the closest to in your life, and yet that's where you find the greatest distances between people as well - especially between parents and kids.
You have to write what you know.
The thing for me is that 'Thor' was an indie film that just had a few more zeros on the budget. At heart, it is just a simple story about a guy trying to get home to deal with someone who has broken into his house. It's just 'After Hours,' but set in space.
Actors are terrible at overthinking things before they turn up to work, and they decide on a way they're going to do it, and then it's hard to break them out of it.
My style of working is I'll often be behind the camera, or right next to the camera yelling words at people, like, 'Say this, say this! Say it this way!' I'll straight-up give Anthony Hopkins a line reading. I don't care.
I wish I was less good-looking and more unpopular. Then I could get into politics and use my pent-up resentment about being ugly and unpopular to systematically destroy the country.
That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.
Within the family unit, you have people you grew up with who are supposed to be your brother, father, or your mother who are almost like strangers and acquaintances.
I've loved vampires since I was a kid, or loved a lot of the vampire movies that I saw. Anything with sharp teeth, really. I remember you could get those fake vampire teeth, and I remember just keeping them in all the time.
When I became a film-maker, all my favourite films, they weren't comedies.
You have to let go of the control and allow things to develop. You need to have a flexible attitude, especially working with kids.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
