Quotes from Taika Waititi

Short film: you can be poetic and you don't have to answer anything. You can make whatever you want. You have creative freedom with short film.

Actors are terrible at overthinking things before they turn up to work, and they decide on a way they're going to do it, and then it's hard to break them out of it.

I'm in all my films, I can't help it. I just jam myself in there if there's a space.

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

My world is not spectacle and explosion. It's two people talking.

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.

There are lots of parts of filmmaking that I don't like. At the end of the day, especially on features, the film turns into a commodity. You have to play this entirely new game I'm very uncomfortable with.

I actually keep having this one recurring dream where I'm a little number standing in a line of other numbers that look identical to me. Then there are more and more of these numbers that follow me, again and again and again. It's more of a nightmare.

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 like laughing at people unless they're in a privileged position or if they're in authority. If it's poor people or people who live on the outskirts or on the margins, or the underdog, I'd rather be laughing with them.

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.

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

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 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.

I was depressed about the roles that were on offer, so I had to make my own stories.

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.

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

I've loved vampires since I was a kid, or loved a lot of the vampire movies that I saw. Anything with sharp teeth, really. I remember you could get those fake vampire teeth, and I remember just keeping them in all the time.

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

When I play characters, I like playing people who just comment on stuff, stand around and talk.

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

There are 100,000 versions of Jeff Goldblum.

I hate the modern day the kids live in. I don't think it's very cool. Everyone's interconnected.

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