A biography for Taika Waititihasn’t been written yet.
“I find that relationships between kids and parents are very interesting.”
“As kids, we all thought Bob Marley was Maori.”
“My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.”
“I think I'm a better filmmaker than actor, so I already know that. That's OK. I can handle not being a famous actor.”
“A lot of people are trying to get out of their home country and think 'making it' is if you're able to work in another. For me... I'd be quite content to keep doing my own little films down there for the rest of my filmmaking career.”
“That's what attracts me to the kind of characters I try and write - that they're not cut and dried.”
“Visually, I'm always considering shots and composition quite a lot, and I love putting art into films, and I do a lot of the art.”
“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.”
“I've been on a lot of film sets, and I've always promised myself I wouldn't create a set where people dread coming to work.”
“At the end of the day, the reality is we're all losers, and we're all uncoordinated. We're the worst of all of the animals on earth, and there's something quite endearing about that.”
“I'm in all my films, I can't help it. I just jam myself in there if there's a space.”
“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.”
“With some actors, you can tell, just from their different backgrounds and their different approaches to working, they would have just a natural conflict, just a sort of friction.”
“I think everyone has experienced those boring arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes.”
“I really like arcade games and like the '80s and early '90s kind of games, just because there's a real kind of naivete to them, but there's like a real inventiveness to it as well.”
“In my films, a lot of the situations come from real life.”
“I find that a lot of child actors are ruined once they've done a job.”
“My main thing was painting; I was just going to do that.”
“I play music all the time because silence freaks me out.”
“Anyone who has a parent can relate to this idea of not quite understanding who your parents are or making up stories about them.”