Top 45 Taika Waititi Quotes

I’d loved ‘Iron Man,’ you know, with a passion. I thought that was the most fresh, cool thing, in terms of superhero movies, that I’d seen in a long time.

As kids, we all thought Bob Marley was Maori.

Independent films are really the best ones out there. They’re the most original stories, and they’re very good.

The stuff I’m passionate about is what I write; it isn’t multi-million-dollar franchise movies.

Coming from a very small country, it’s always nice to see our own doing well.

To me, spending millions of dollars recreating the world’s sadness with actors and props and sets – it seems like a kind of arrogant waste of money… Unless, that is, it’s a film about an historical event.

In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.

You can have integrity with your art, but worrying about integrity doesn’t pay the bills.

I wish I was less good-looking and more unpopular. Then I could get into politics and use my pent-up resentment about being ugly and unpopular to systematically destroy the country.

You have to write what you know.

Unfortunately, there aren’t enough interesting acting roles in New Zealand to sustain a career.

You realise that there’s nothing more endearing than people who are desperately trying to be liked or trying to be the hero, you know? Who also probably just need a hug or want to impress their dad?

It was never really my plan to become a filmmaker.

I find that a lot of child actors are ruined once they’ve done a job.

I think something that every actor wants, whether they’ve done four movies or forty movies, is they want to find the work interesting. You want to come to work and think this is going to be a challenge.

You have to let go of the control and allow things to develop. You need to have a flexible attitude, especially working with kids.

I love living in New Zealand.

Films that are easy to sell happen to be the worst films. Look at the poster for ‘Wrath of the Titans’ and ‘John Carter’: they’re exactly the same. You could switch titles.

The thing for me is that ‘Thor’ was an indie film that just had a few more zeros on the budget. At heart, it is just a simple story about a guy trying to get home to deal with someone who has broken into his house. It’s just ‘After Hours,’ but set in space.

Characters I create are just mixtures of the people I know.

Nothing could be more restrictive than working with people in advertising.

I’m not interested in doing work that doesn’t captivate me.

If someone asked, ‘What are your films like?,’ the best I can come up with is that they’re, like, a fine balance between comedy and drama. And they deal mainly with the clumsiness of humanity.

Within the family unit, you have people you grew up with who are supposed to be your brother, father, or your mother who are almost like strangers and acquaintances.

New Zealand was such a weird place in the 1980s. For instance, we used to have this commercial in the late 1970s where this guy drives this car and stops outside a corner store. He goes in to buy something, and when he comes out, his car is gone. He’s like, ‘Huh?’ Then a voice says, ‘Don’t leave your keys in the car.’

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

I’ve never been a guy who was anal about housework. A typical Wellington flat when I was flatting was a warehouse with, basically, sheets hung up for walls.

I did roles that I hated, and there were roles that were detrimental to my acting ability. There were roles that I was always doing that were always the comic relief… it was destroying my soul.

One of my favourite books when I was young was ‘Wuthering Heights.’

The family unit is very interesting because these are people that you’re supposed to be the closest to in your life, and yet that’s where you find the greatest distances between people as well – especially between parents and kids.

I don’t mind going from sadness to comedy in a split-second or mixing the two up.

My favourite kind of comedy comes from the awkwardness of living, the stuff that makes you cringe but borders on tragic – that is more interesting to me. It resonates; it comes from emotional truth.

Most people in their lives do feel like they are outsiders at some point.

Shooting a movie should be fun! It’s not a real job. It can be hard, but at the end of the day, we’re dressing up and playing pretend.

That’s what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write – that they’re not cut and dried.

When you’re on set, you’re like, ‘Everyone’s judging me because I’m the director, and everyone thinks I’m doing this because I just love myself and I want to do everything.’ Part of it’s true: I do want to do everything, and I do kind of love myself.

I play music all the time because silence freaks me out.

I think our first heroes with whom we discover flaws are our parents.

I’ve always found the script to be more of a skeleton, the template.

I love heroes that really go through ordeals, and they come out the other end completely changed.

I daydream all the time.

I come from a big extended family, so it’s very normal to be around babies for us, but when it’s your own, it’s a very different experience for us.

Kids are always very savvy. It doesn’t take long for a kid to realize when an adult is a loser.

Basically, the big studios and companies distributing your movie just take a big cut of profit for making posters.

‘Eagle vs Shark’ is a little film I could take risks with and make mistakes on.