“I think it was difficult for
people to figure out if it was a
good career move, and I can
fucking totally understand.”THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 60 SEPTEMBER 4, 2019
E
ven Taika Waititi is surprised
by his own Hollywood success. An
admitted late bloomer, the native
New Zealander spent a chunk of
his twenties in Berlin, embracing
the life of a struggling artist as both a
performer and painter. “I thought I was
some cool bohemian artist,” he says of this
late-1990s period.
By the time he decided to try his hand at
filmmaking, he was 30, ancient by Hollywood
standards. It didn’t matter: One of the
filmmaker’s first projects, a 12-minute,
black-and-white charmer called Two Cars,
One Night, picked up awards at fests around
the world (including Berlin) before landing
an Oscar nomination in the best live action
short category.Now, two decades after chasing the la bohème
lifestyle in Berlin, Waititi chose to make a
return to Germany with the decidedly risky
Nazi Germany satire Jojo Rabbit, which pre-
mieres Sept. 8 in Toronto and opens in the
U.S. on Oct. 18. It’s taken him eight years to
get the film made, and while buzz is strong,
all eyes will be on whether Waititi’s winningstreak can continue with a project that, by his
own admission, scared off virtually everyone
in the early stages.
In the 15-some years since he traded his
paintbrush for a movie camera, Waititi,
44, has become one of the most in-demand
writer-directors in the film world, thanks to
his ability to apply his distinctive Kiwi sensi-
bility to a range of material. His 2010 critical
darling Boy became the highest-grossing film
ever in New Zealand — and was unseated only
by his own Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 2016.
Then Marvel came calling. With 2017’s Thor:
Ragnarok, Waititi made his first venture into
big-budget studio filmmaking and became the
first non-white director of a Marvel title in the
process. The film, the third installment of a
flailing franchise (at least, by Marvel’s stan-
dards), made $853 million at the global box
office and turned Waititi into a name director
in Hollywood.
It was in 2011 that Waititi began writing
a screenplay based on Christine Leunens’
novel Caging Skies, which follows Johannes
Betzler (Jojo), a boy in the Hitler Youth who
finds out that his parents have been secretly
harboring a Jewish girl in their family home.
Waititi knew immediately that adapting the
novel would be tricky, and he struggled early
with his own misgivings about the project.
“I hate Nazis,” he notes emphatically. “And
I don’t really care too much about making a
film about their point of view. [But] there’s
something so amazing about the seeds of the
story and what it could be — could I figure
out a way to make this enjoyable for myself
to make if I ever get to?” Eventually, he had
a breakthrough when he decided to expand
on the novel’s already satirical tone with an
audacious new element: the inclusion of an
imaginary friend for Jojo in the form of der
Führer himself.
The first stop for Jojo was to secure initial
financing from Germany’s Studio Babelsberg.
With credits that included The Pianist and
Tom Cruise-starrer Va lk y r i e, the financier
was experienced in making World War II-set
properties (albeit ones with a far more dra-
matic tone than Jojo). The plan was to package
the project with an A-list star attached to play
Hitler. “Most people really loved the script,”
recalls the filmmaker of the feedback he was
getting from potential stars — all of whom‘ WHO WANTS TO
SEE THEMSELVES
AS ADOLF HITLER?’
After years of trying to get Jojo Rabbit off the ground, Taika Waititi finally
convinced Fox Searchlight to roll the dice on a comedy set in Nazi Germany,
but there was only one catch — he had to play der Führer himself BY MIA GALUPPO↓ Taika Waititi (right) on the set of Thor: Ragnarok with
Tessa Thompson.