“Who cares?”: the genre Taika Waititi called “the worst type of movie”
Taika Waititi is who he is, and that can be confusing for those who love his work.
You might have been all-in for the micro-budget deadpan vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows, but felt physically ill at the thought of sitting through a Marvel movie. The New Zealand multi-hyphenate has covered a lot of territory in his career, and no matter how much you love him, you’ve probably struggled with at least a few of his passion projects.
Waititi himself would probably prefer it that way. He’s made a career out of the type of irreverent, devious humour that makes secondary school teachers want to spontaneously combust. That attitude is present in all of his movies, and it’s also on full display in many of his interviews. He seems to delight in saying the sorts of things that most famous people would barely dare to even acknowledge internally, let alone say out loud in front of a journalist.
For example, he once referred to himself as his own biggest fan, a sentiment that is probably shared by a lot of movie folk but which pretty much no one would ever admit to. Sometimes, his statements seem more geared toward provocation than honesty, such as when he said, point blank, that director’s cuts suck.
Another of his hot takes involves an entire movie genre. In a 2017 interview with The Guardian, the Kiwi star attacked biopics, calling them “the worst type of movie” and condemning them as universally boring. “They’re always subject to such scrutiny,” he said, “Like … ‘Oh, they really learned to play piano, they went around wearing blue suede shoes for the entire shoot’. I think, why is that interesting for an actor? Who cares?”
To be fair to Waititi, this is hardly a hot take. Hollywood has a long history of making absolutely tedious, self-important biopics and fast-tracking them to Oscar glory. But if you were to name the genre that has done the most goddamndamage to cinema as an art form, comic book movies are by far the biggest culprit.
The fact that the Thor director chose to vilify the genre that gave us Lawrence of Arabia and Raging Bull and conveniently side-step the one that gave us Green Lantern and the career of Zack Snyder is pretty telling, and it doesn’t reflect well on all his gestures towards unvarnished honesty.
The main takeaway from that spicy interview snippet, of course, is that Waititi is not a man who intends to be taken seriously, whether he’s giving a speech at an awards show or throwing rocks at various Hollywood institutions. In fact, we should all be hoping that he goes back on his strident opposition to the biopic because, quite frankly, he’d probably make an excellent one. Recently, he was tossing around the idea of doing a musical about the shambolic Fyre Festival saga.
Before we know it, he’ll be working on a science fiction movie based on the life of Genghis Khan or Mahatma Gandhi. I, for one, would be here for it.
