Whatever your thoughts on Taika Waititi, there’s one thing pretty much everyone agrees upon: the man is a master of branding. Over the course of just a handful of features, the Kiwi filmmaker has cannoned from indie darling, to blockbuster maven, to a sought-after actor and celebrity in his own right. In an age when the celebrity-filmmaker seems to be in decline, Waititi has carved out a niche and made sure he’s the one to fill it.
But what exactly is that niche? More so than pretty much any director of his profile, Waititi is impossible to pin down. His early films were modestly budgeted comedies – Eagle v Shark and Boy, both of which he also appeared in. He wrote two and directed four episodes of the cult HBO musical comedy Flight of the Conchords. It was 2014’s hilarious vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, starring former Conchords collaborator Jermaine Clement, that first introduced him to a wider western audience; this was consolidated with the utterly endearing comedy-drama Hunt for the Wilderpeople. While these two films stayed true to his New Zealand setting and sensibility, his next film – the Marvel blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok – was a drastic shunt towards the mainstream. Despite this, Waititi was still able to maintain some of his indie proclivities, deviating successfully from the generic Marvel house style. Ragnarok’s glam-rock technicolour glibness marked a particularly radical departure from the first two Thor films, which were generally considered sterile and un-hip and were not hits by Disney’s metric; credit was heaped on Waititi for the sequel’s $854m-grossing resurgence.
