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Disney's Kiwi misfits

Idealog September/October 2007, page 38. Photograph by Mike Clare

Eagle vs Shark, Taika Waititi’s movie about a couple of Kiwi misfits, was never intended for an overseas audience—but it’s showing on screens across the US courtesy of The Walt Disney Company, complete with a killer soundtrack by fellow Wellingtonians The Phoenix Foundation. Peter Griffin follows their road to the Magic Kingdom

Its doors are yet to open for the day, but film festival-goers are already queuing outside Wellington’s Embassy Theatre when Idealog meets filmmaker Taika Waititi at the neighbouring Deluxe cafe.

Eagle vs Shark, Waititi’s debut feature, has its second Wellington screening at the Embassy in the afternoon. A red sticker on the festival programme shows the session has sold out.

After weeks travelling the US on the press junket in support of Eagle vs Shark, the homecoming for Waititi, a committed Wellingtonian, has been a warm one. A stream of people walking past Deluxe, including Waititi’s old music teacher from Onslow College, stop to wish him well.

Waititi’s reputation as actor, artist, stand-up comedian and filmmaker is well established here at home, though it’s as a movie director that he has found success abroad—to his surprise.

“Eagle vs Shark was really something I wanted to make just to experiment, to learn how to make a feature film so I didn’t screw up my next one,” he says. “If it played in a few festivals overseas, that would be great. The fact it sold overseas was never factored into the equation when we were making it.”

Eagle vs Shark, which after a brief airing at the Cannes Film Market was picked up for US distribution by Disney-owned Miramax, is an oddball comedy about two social outcasts who fall in love. It’s also a distinctly New Zealand story and is punctuated with sequences of stop-motion animation. But it’s impossible to read an American review of Eagle vs Shark that doesn’t draw comparisons with that quirkiest of comedies, Napoleon Dynamite.

If Waititi is tired of having his film measured against one of the most successful low-budget movies of recent years, he’s not showing it.

“Today’s audiences may as well be screenwriters … they know when the cute meet is, they know when the inciting incident happens, they know when the first act is supposed to be over and they’ll freak out if it’s not”

“If Napoleon Dynamite wasn’t around, maybe we’d be compared to Little Miss Sunshine,” he says. “If that wasn’t around maybe it would be Buffalo ’66. You could probably go all the way back to Revenge of the Nerds.”

The common thread in all these films is the presence of eccentric downbeat characters. Waititi sees few other similarities between his movie and Napoleon Dynamite, which was drawing rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival three years ago as Waititi debuted his breakthrough short film, Two Cars, One Night.

He later picked up an Oscar nomination for the film in what turned out to be a bumper year for New Zealand at the awards ceremony, thanks to Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings.

The success of Two Cars, One Night won Waititi a place in the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters/Directors Labs, where Eagle vs Shark assumed its final characteristics.

Although the movie was originally intended as a drama, Waititi’s deadpan dialogue steered it towards comedy overall. “The main thing for me was finding the right tone, capturing the comedy and the drama together,” Waititi says. He still finds it hard to place Eagle vs Shark in any particular genre, something he believes reviewers have struggled with as well.

“It’s really a New Zealand take on the romantic comedy,” he says, reluctantly. That’s because the structure of romantic comedies, set in concrete by Hollywood’s filmmakers, has become so formulaic.

“They may as well be screenwriters,” says Waititi of today’s sophisticated audiences. “They know all the beats of the film, they know when the cute meet is, they know when the inciting incident happens, they know when the first act is supposed to be over and they’ll freak out if it’s not over,” he says with resignation.

Another friend stops outside the Deluxe to welcome Waititi home. “Are you enjoying the ride?” he asks. “It’s a rollercoaster. It’ll just never stop will it?” answers Waititi, with mock melodrama.

“Don’t try and jump off,” his friend advises.

Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley play two social misfits in small-town New Zealand, but the quirky Kiwi comedy found a big-time buyer at Cannes

Waititi’s happy to take that ride in filmmaking, but he’d rather make his own movies here, despite now being flooded with offers to direct other people’s movies in the US. The scripts come thick and fast, sent by his agent at the Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles.

“I’m almost one of the romantic comedy go-to guys. I was already getting sent a lot of shit scripts, but now it’s a lot of shit genre scripts,” he laughs. He reckons 80 percent of the scripts he receives are substandard. But he reads them all the same, in the hope of discovering something good enough to make a two-year commitment.

Waititi was reunited with Eagle vs Shark star Jemaine Clement, one half of the Wellington Flight of the Conchords duo, to direct two episodes of the Conchords’ HBO TV series. “It wasn’t that much different to here, other than they’ve got teamsters and a lot of union laws,” says Waititi of the directing gig.

“It was an easy job, the scripts were done. I basically walked in, sat down and said action.”

But the prospect of making feature films in the US currently holds little appeal, he says. “Times are changing … filmmakers don’t really have to leave New Zealand, go and live over there in that hell-hole, that soul-destroying tinsel town.”

That hell-hole? If Waititi sounds as if he has come to loathe Los Angeles in the space of his short film career, he says no—not completely, anyway. “It’s a great place if you know lots of people,” he admits. “But LA is filled with people who are talking about what they’re going to do. Not many of them actually do it.”

He occasionally catches up with Kiwi doers in LA like Lee Tamahori and Andrew Niccol, who picked up his own Oscar nomination for the screenplay for The Truman Show.

But Waititi sees potential in helping to build a more stable film industry here in New Zealand, one he hopes could be as successful as the prolific Hong Kong industry he admires. “If it’s something we can consistently achieve that would be great. The only way we can really do that is by staying here and making New Zealand stuff and not trying to copy overseas films so much.”

He says he made Eagle vs Shark with only a New Zealand audience in mind, determined not to broaden its appeal just to please overseas viewers. The approach paid off. A few lines of dialogue were re-recorded “to make them understandable”, says Waititi. Other than that, Eagle vs Shark was released in the US largely untouched by Miramax.

“If we tried to make a lot of films in a true New Zealand style, they would probably come across as not ground-breaking but definitely pushing the boundaries a bit, purely because we don’t really know the ground rules that well here,” he argues.

He has so far enjoyed a dream run with the New Zealand Film Commission, which funded Eagle vs Shark. “They basically gave me the money and left me alone. I’d be the first to admit that’s probably not a good idea with most directors.”

It helped that Whenua Films, helmed by experienced producer Ainsley Gardiner and actor Cliff Curtis, produced Two Cars, One Night and had a good track record with the Film Commission. “Ainsley’s the person I grew up with as a filmmaker—I can’t really imagine doing it with anyone else,” says Waititi.

While Eagle vs Shark had a fast-tracked ride through the Film Commission thanks to the buzz created by Two Cars, Waititi says the development process for most New Zealand feature films is too lengthy.

“There’s a lot of stuff in development, but a lot of it stays in development for a long time. I know people who’ve had stuff in script development for five years.”

But he says he tries not to take money in the form of film development funding. “For some reason I don’t trust it. If you can make the best script you can off your own back and then look to make it, you’ve a lot more protection for yourself.”

That’s exactly how he wrote what he hopes will be his next film.

“It’s not set in a car park or anything, it’s more about the world of those kids,” says Waititi of the feature-length version of Two Cars, One Night.

The three child actors who were plucked from an East Cape school to give such convincing performances in the short film are unlikely to make appearances in the same roles—after all, it’s been four years since the film was shot. But the feature will return to the same world, one that Waititi knows so well from his childhood.

Whenua Films will produce the film, though Waititi expects its route to a worldwide release will be more conventional route than that of Eagle vs Shark.

“Two Cars is a hard one for a studio to get on board with at an early stage, there’s no star or anything. They’d have to go to a festival and watch and see how it goes and then buy it,” he says.

The rest of the year will be spent refining further drafts of the script, a process Waititi relishes. “I love directing, but there’s nothing like that feeling when you’re on a roll writing, when a scene’s a scene and you know where it’s headed,” he says. “The sense of achievement when you’ve finished a screenplay is so pleasing.”

Eagle vs Shark opened on general release on August 16

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