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Thor director Taika Waititi on letting his cast ‘reboot’ their characters

Thor director Taika Waititi on letting his cast ‘reboot’ their characters

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Also: the never-before-used tech used on the Valkyries scene, who among the cast took to improv best, and more

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Taika Waititi and the Marvel Cinematic Universe always seemed like an odd team-up. Waititi is a New Zealand-born writer-director who’s primarily worked in comedy, from the vampire ensemble film What We Do In The Shadows to episodes of Flight of the Conchords to the terrific family action film Hunt For The Wilderpeople. He likes to work loose and let his actors improvise, and he’s always operated on a small scale. Putting him in charge of a $180 million blockbuster about superheroes whaling on each other in space was a bold and interesting move for Marvel Studios, but it was still certainly a counterintuitive one.

Still, his MCU film, Thor: Ragnarok, indisputably feels like one of his movies, not a personality-free cookie-cutter tentpole project. The latest MCU movie sees Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) trapped on the junk planet Sakaar, in the power of the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum), who pits Thor against the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). Along the way, they meet characters including Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson, a hard-hitting, no-nonsense fan favorite) and Korg, a mournful, entirely computer-generated rock-monster alien played by Waititi himself. Together, they go into battle against a new threat, with all the big action of the usual MCU films, but with a lot more irreverent, bantery, low-key looseness. I recently talked to Waititi about how and why he brought comedy improv rhythms to the MCU, how he gave a new lighting technology its first test run in cinema, and what it meant to the actors to see all their characters caught in moments of profound personal change.

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In another recent Verge interview, Thor: Ragnarok visual effects supervisor Jake Morrison talked a fair bit about how the set and costumes were specifically designed so you could keep your cameras rolling and shoot this as much like an indie film as possible. What was important for you about that style of shooting?

Well, I could improvise a lot, and have the actors talk over each other, and react to each other in real time. My biggest fear would be, Chris would do the lines that were written on the page by himself, and then I’d be in a mocap volume, plugging in my performance four months later, and we’d lose all the life and energy of the scene. It’d just feel a lot more stale. That’s something we avoided big time. We’re actually talking to each other. Pretty much all my dialogue [as Korg] is ad-libbed, and we could only really do that if we were there in the moment together. That was the freedom that style allowed me to have as an actor playing a CG character.

And then the other cool thing about it was, later on, there might be a gag or a line reading that I had done, or Mark had done as Hulk, that we wanted to plug into an earlier take. We could take all the best pieces from 10 different takes and cobble together the perfect take. And then someone in the effects house would come along and animate over the top of that, and stitch it all together, and make it look like one continuous seamless performance.

What were the barriers to shooting a Marvel blockbuster like an indie movie?

I think the thing most people would find difficult is the amount of time it takes to move a crew, or to move things around. There’s just a lot more people and stuff. Turning around and changing angles with your camera just requires the movement of a lot more stuff. Also, how long the shoot was. It was an 85-day shoot, and I’m used to like 25, 30-day shoots, because I move very fast. One of the hard things with these movies is keeping your energy up.

We improvised a huge amount of the film. That was all fine. It was more just, you have to wait a lot longer to move the equipment. It’s just annoying. As someone who likes to move fast, it’s more just, “I have to get out of the way for these cranes to move, and all these extras, and for the backgrounds to change,” because there’s 300 or 400 people around, so it takes three times as long to move anything.

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Normally if you’re directing an improv-heavy film, you have the luxury of picking a cast based on their improv skills. But here, so much of the cast was pre-established from past, non-improv movies. How did you get them comfortable with your style and your comedy rhythm?

Well for a start, I don’t allow everyone to do it. I figure out who’s good at it and who’s not, and only allow the people who are good at it to do it. And then I just tried to create an environment. We’re all friends on set. We become mates. And that, to me, is the perfect way of creating a free space to be creative. It’s a space where we feel like we’re family, and we can tell each other anything, and hassle each other, and make fun of each other. No one’s afraid to give an idea because it might be bad, because actually most of the good stuff comes because of bad ideas and big mistakes, like “Oh, we never would have thought about that, unless you’d said that really stupid line!” So I just run with that, and then what do you know, we’ve discovered something even cooler. It was a very open environment where anything goes.

Who surprised you most? Who came up with the most ridiculous thing you wanted to keep?

Jeff Goldblum is amazing at riffing and doing this stuff. Chris, Jeff, and Mark were the three I really admired for what they were able to bring.

You’ve said the scene where Thor and Hulk sit on the bed and work out their problems was entirely improvised. Was that in the original script in a fixed form? Did you add it later when you realized you were comfortable with their improv skills?

It’s just because we’d started shooting this argument scene. I felt like there needed to be some sort of resolution to that. We didn’t really figure out where we were going to go after the argument. That became something where we really enjoyed, just on the day, deciding to have these guys apologize to each other on the bed, and suddenly turn this into a Sundance film. Just two characters sitting there staring out in the same direction, and talking. I found it particularly funny because it’s something I’ve never seen in a superhero movie. It’s just a fresh take on this entire genre.

Photo: Disney / Marvel Studios

What did the studio present to you as non-negotiable? This film needs to hit so many marks to set up the next series of movies. What did they present to you as narrative points you couldn’t play with?

To be honest, nothing. When I first came in, they said, “Anything goes, you can do whatever you want. If something happens, you push it too far in some direction, we’ll be there to tell you to reign it in.” If I said, “Aw, let’s kill this character!”, under normal circumstances maybe they’d be fine with that, but sometimes they’d be like, “No no, we need that character for the next Avengers film.” So they would keep an eye on things in respect to all the other films they’re making, and the broader. Marvel Cinematic Universe. And then I would just try and push it as far as I could, in regards to trying to make as much of a Taika movie as possible.

What about the design? You started with some of the elements coming in from previous movies. Where did you most want to put your own visual stamp on the movie?

Kind of everywhere, really. We really went for this Jack Kirby-inspired look, especially on Sakaar. I’ve always loved his art, and Marvel had always wanted to embrace his art in something. This film became the place where that finally came to fruition, and I’m very happy about that. This film is so bold and colorful and vivid and bright. It’s a celebration of comic books. I think in this day and age, when cinema’s so dark and sad, and such a reminder of how dark and sad the world is, it’s so nice to have a ray of light, and a movie that makes you smile. I think the design is a big part of that.

One sequence that is really dark and sad is the Fall of the Valkyries sequence. That has such a visually distinctive look. What went into planning and shooting that sequence?

It’s all built around the lighting setup my friends invented, people I went to high school with in New Zealand. They live in New York, and they made this thing called Satellite. Basically, the concept there — this has never been done on film before. It was about a hundred strobe lights, strung together, and they all fire off within about a second of each other, all in sequence. You shoot a subject with a Phantom camera, which is shooting at 1200 frames per second. The effect you get — instead of the bullet-time camera rig, where you’ve got 50 cameras in a circle, in this case the cameras stay still, but the light is traveling around, and the shoot has these big long shadows everywhere. So you get this light wrapping around your subject in a way that’s very surreal and dreamlike, and doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s something you can never really see in real life. And so it’s something that’s very specific in its use and its look, but it’s something I’m very proud of, because it’s the first time in cinema that’s been done.

Photo: Disney / Marvel Studios

There are some other especially adventurous shots in the film, like the one in the throne room, where the camera flies over the characters’ heads, dives behind them, and flips over up under the floor. What went into putting that shot together?

That shot was actually designed by our storyboard artist, Todd Harris. That was his idea right from the start. We fell in love with that shot, so for nine months before we started shooting the film, we knew we were going to try and make it. We had a big mirrored floor, and a Technocrane, which was programmable. So we did a few different passes with them walking along at the same pace, and then we painted out the camera image in the mirrored floor, the reflection. It was basically them walking on a long, mirrored catwalk. It’s one continuous shot. So when you see Jeff Goldblum floating down in the reflection, that is the reflection. So the camera’s looking down. It’s been following the guys, but then it goes right down to the floor and films the reflection instead. And just because of the quality of the camera and of the mirror we’re shooting on, it just managed to work. 

What other things in the film do you look back on as particularly ambitious, technologically?

There are some great fights in the film that are filmed quite traditionally. That’s not a huge technological feat in itself, but I like how simple they are, how simple the coverage is. We’re so far into filmmaking — everyone’s trying to impress each other with the most crazy camera moves, unknown to man, that we forget sometimes an audience just wants the camera to be very simple. So a lot of fights in the film are just super-simple and very traditional. In fact, some of the camera work is very traditional. And this stuff makes me very happy. We embraced it, because sometimes I just get tired of seeing cameras do moves that are actually impossible to do with cameras.

Photo: Disney / Marvel Studios

The main characters here all evolve somewhat from previous versions of themselves. Was that a theme you wanted to draw out, about how they’re all caught in moments of interesting personal change?

Yeah, and really, that’s what Ragnarok is about — the death of the old world and the rebirth of the new. And I think that applies to this film, because we’re destroying what’s been made in the previous films, and then rebirthing it, but also with the characters. We gave these actors the opportunity to reboot their characters. And I think they appreciated that, because they’ve become so familiar with what they’ve been doing over the years. For them, it was almost like playing completely new characters now.

I just wanted people to see a maturing of these characters, who were interesting in the past, but have become so much more rounded and human. With Thor in particular, and Valkyrie, and Banner, I think the way they’re portrayed in this film is so much more relatable now. It’s very hard to relate to superheroes. But when you humanize them, and give them human problems and things we can relate to, we enjoy being on the journey with them a lot more.