TAIKA WAITITI
“I’M DOING TOO MANY PROJECTS… I JUST WANT TO SLEEP, AND THEN MEET THE DEADLINES ON ALL THE OTHER STUFF I WAS AN IDIOT ENOUGH TO SIGN ON TO”
When Total Film meets Taika Waititi in London’s Soho Hotel in October 2019, he’s extremely tired, wiped out from having flown in from LA. “So if I yawn throughout this – just, y’know, a pre-warning disclaimer – it’s not you.” The tiredness hasn’t blunted his wit, but the directing/writing/acting multihyphenate is slightly more pensive than gag-per-minute today as he arrives to present his new film, Jojo Rabbit, at the London Film Festival.
A typically unique proposition, Jojo Rabbit is a comedy-drama set in Nazi Germany during the later days of WW2. The comedy is broad – the Nazi characters are played for laughs, and Waititi himself plays Hitler, or rather a child’s imaginary-friend version of Hitler. But there’s tenderness amid the laughs. Like Waititi himself, it evades easy categorisation.
Jojo Rabbit’s challenging premise hasn’t prevented it from entering the awards race: it won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, often an indicator that a film will go on to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. “It feels weird,” Waititi says of being in the awards conversation. “It feels gratifying just because I make my films mainly for audiences, and they’re usually the first people I think of when I’m making a film. Not that I knew anything about any of the awards, but that gratification came early during the screenings [at TIFF], because the audiences in the room were so positive. So it was a relief, and it made me feel very good about putting in the effort, I guess.”
You couldn’t accuse the permanently wisecracking New Zealander of not putting in the effort. He may not fit the stereotype of a blockbuster director. He’s tall and rakishly handsome, with a puff of salt-and-pepper curls emerging out from under the peak of his multicoloured baseball cap. His distinctive, kindling-dry sense of humour is ever-present, and he’s not shy of speaking his mind. The day before we meet, he tweeted “Lol he funny” in reaction to director Todd Phillips’ comments about the difficulty of
