THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 92 NOVEMBER 6, 2019
BTS, JOHANSSON, WAITITI: KIMBERLY FRENCH/COURTESY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION. ROCKWELL: LARRY HORRICKS/COURTESYOF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION.P
retty much every actor
Taika Waititi approached
to star in Jojo Rabbit had
the same reaction as Sam
Rockwell. “I was a little reticent to
play a Nazi,” he says.
Understandably, the story of a
10-year-old boy in World War II
Germany who discovers his
mother is hiding a Jewish girl in
their home and enlists the guid-
ance of his imaginary best friend
— a wacky, kid-friendly Adolf
Hitler — was not a particularly
easy sell. “There is no ‘in’ with
that logline,” Scarlett Johansson,
who plays the mother, notes with
a laugh.
But according to Waititi — the
44-year-old New Zealand director
whose previous credits includequirky indies like What We Do
in the Shadows and Hunt for the
Wilderpeople, as well as Marvel
tentpole Thor: Ragnarok — a
$14 million surrealistic Third
Reich comedy was exactly what
the current zeitgeist needed.
Especially one with an adorable
kid at its center (Roman Griffin
Davis plays Jojo “Rabbit” Beltzer),
a turn by the director himself
as Hitler and a soundtrack filled
with German-language versions
of David Bowie and Beatles tunes
(the rights to “Komm, Gib Mir
Deine Hand” did not come easy).
“People say it’s a bit divisive,”
says Waititi of his unconventional
war movie, which opened Oct. 18.
“But where I come from, that’s a
good thing.”The original source material for
the film was Christine Leunens’
2004 novel Caging Skies, but it’s
fair to say that the director took
liberties. At no point in the book,
for instance, does an imaginary
Hitler make an appearance. That
bit was invented by Waititi him-
self. And while he knew he wanted
to make a movie about World
War II — he’s a fan of Schindler’s
List — he also understood that
heavy drama was not his forte. “I
felt like if I was going to reach any
audience or try to make something
that meant something, I couldn’t
do a film that dramatic,” he says.
So, while tapping out the script
throughout 2011 — just after his
coming-of-age drama Boy had
become the highest-grossingnative-made movie in New
Zealand — Waititi added “ele-
ments that you wouldn’t normally
have with these films.”
Studios, not surprisingly,
did not flock to buy his comedy
with Nazis, but the script did
develop a following and in 2012
landed a spot on the Black List
of top unproduced screenplays.
Meanwhile, Waititi got on with
his career, making his critically
adored 2014 vampire mockumen-
tary W hat We Do in the Shadows
and his 2016 adventure comedy
Hunt for the Wilderpeople and
then, in 2017, Ragnarok, his first
big Hollywood production, which
grossed $853 million worldwide.
Going from a big-budget comic
book tentpole to a low-budget
comedy could be seen as an odd
career move, but for Waititi, a
director with an offbeat sensibil-
ity, in the logic of Hollywood it
sort of made sense.
Around that time, Fox
Searchlight was gearing up its
Oscar campaign for Guillermo
del Toro’s girl-meets-fishman
love story, The Shape of Water,Nobody wanted to make Taika Waititi’s World War II satire about a boy and his imaginary friend,
the Führer. ‘People say it’s divisive. Where I come from, that’s a good thing’ By Mia GaluppoMAKING OF
JOJO RABBIT