How Taika Waititi Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

INTRODUCTION

If there’s one word that sums up Taika Waititi’s approach to directing it’s tone. His movies are entertaining, uplifting and lean into an unforced comedic tone with a large focus on the writing, casting and performances of the actors.

With a career in film that has involved years of work in commercials, music videos and TV series, in this video I’ll take a look at just three feature films that he has directed at three increasing budget levels to analyse the techniques that he uses to make them.    

HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE - $2.5 MILLION

His love for comedy began early when he formed a duo with Jermaine Clement - who he’d later work with on other projects. He also started making short films. One of them, Two Cars, One Night earned him an Academy Award nomination. 

Around this time he read Wild Pork and Watercress and decided he would try to write a screenplay adaptation of the book.

“I wrote the first draft of this in 2005. I hadn’t made any other features before then and I found it really difficult adapting the book because I’d never adapted anything and I  thought you needed to be super true to the material. Basically lift everything from the book and put it into a movie. I put that to the side to concentrate on some other stuff and went off and made three other features. Then coming back to the material I realised, ‘Oh you don’t have to do that at all, you can just do whatever you want’. You put it through your filter, you know.”  

This idea of putting a screenplay or an idea through his own filter is a consistent feature of his work: whether he’s writing his own original idea, working with a screenwriting collaborator or bringing a massive blockbuster script to the screen. But we’ll get to that later. 

He takes a screenplay and applies his filter for comedy and adventure to arrive at an end product which has his recognisable authorship. This filter comes from a combination of the writing process, his approach to directing actors, and how he and his creative team visually tell the story.  

“I chose the tone that I wanted as well. I decided I was going to make a comedy that was like an adventure film. I sort of chose stylistically and tonally what I wanted to do and then took the parts of the book that I felt would work in the film I wanted to make and then made up the rest.”

With the final screenplay in place and a budget of approximately $2.5 million, half of which came from the New Zealand Film Commision, he moved to the next step in the process - which is of particular importance to a director who has a large appreciation for performance - casting the actors.

This involved casting and directing a child actor to play the role of Ricky Baker. Directing children can be a challenge. Acting, of course, takes years of practice in manipulating your emotions in a controlled way. 

The level of control and consistency required is difficult for most children. However,if you find the right child that is able to lock into the character, their performance may have a purity to it that might surpass their adult counterparts as it is more natural and less constructed. 

“What the trick is when you are auditioning you search for the kid that resembles the character the most in personality. So, you never try and get a kid to pretend they are someone else. You choose the Ricky Baker’s of the world and find the one that is closest to what you want in the film. And then all they have to do is remember the lines.”

With the cast in place and enough funding to shoot for a brief 25 days, Waititi brought Australian cinematographer Lachlan Milne onto the project to shoot the film. 

They decided on a single camera approach for most of the movie and rented an Arri Alexa XT with, based on some behind the scenes pictures, what looks like Cooke S4s and an Angenieux 12:1 zoom. 

For the car chase scene, which they shot over a couple of days, they used five different cameras to get enough coverage on the relatively low budget: three Alexa XTs which shot the on the ground footage and two Red Epics, with the Angenieux 24-290mm mounted on a Shotover on a helicopter. 

To prepare, the DP used a DSLR camera to shoot different angles of a model car which could then be cut into a sort of animatic or storyboard so that they had a list of the shots they needed to get on the day.

Since most scenes take place outdoors, lighting continuity was always going to be tricky. Milne always tried to orientate day exteriors so that the actors were backlit by the sun. 

He also leaned into a natural sunlight look and didn’t use any diffusion scrims over the actors to soften the light. He didn’t want perfectly soft light that would be too pretty. 

Also, placing scrims overhead limits the movement of the actors and how wide the shot can be. The frame needs to be fairly fixed otherwise the legs of the stands will start getting into the shot.

The director wanted to draw on the visual style of films from the mid 80s, such as films by Peter Weir, which didn’t have visual effects and didn’t use fancy gear like Technocranes to move the camera. Therefore they used the 24-290mm zoom to punch into shots rather than using the more expensive, impractical and slicker camera motion.

Something about the slow zooms also effectively built up tension in scenes and, when combined with other wider shots, helped land some of the comedic gags. Another way he accentuates comedy is with the music and sound, and lingering on wider shots and not cutting too quickly.

Overall, he used the relatively low two and a half million dollar budget to produce a bigger looking movie which mainly had contained scenes with one large chase scene set piece, with a large focus on casting and performances, almost no CG work, and an experienced crew which moved quickly with a single camera to pull off the entire movie on a tight five week schedule.   

JOJO RABBIT - $14 MILLION

“There was no real pitching process for this. So I didn’t go to studios and say ‘Hey, this is my idea for a film’. I realised early on it’s a really hard film to pitch. No one really wants to hear a pitch like this, so I’m going to write a script that’s really good and I’m going to let that be the pitch.”

A screenplay looking at World War Two through the eyes of a young boy in the Hitler Youth, where an imaginary friend version of Hitler plays a supporting role, is certainly a bit of an odd pitch. 

But, after sending the completed script around, Searchlight took an interest in the project and agreed to make the film on one condition, that Waititi play Hitler. Like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit was also an adaptation from a novel, Caging Skies.

His screenplay and vision for the film took a different approach to how most World War Two films are presented and once again drew from his own tonal sensibilities towards comedic entertainment that is uplifting.

“We can’t get complacent and keep making the same style, the same tonal style of film: it’s drama, it’s depressing…everything is desaturated and browns and greys. Crazy idea, we can also maybe create something that is colourful and bright and has humour in it. I knew the tone really early on.”

With a budget of $14 million from Fox Searchlight and TSG Entertainment they tried to find a base for production that would give them the locations they needed and the most bang for their buck.

Initially, the plan was to shoot in Germany, however since their laws meant that child actors could only work for around three hours per day, and the movie was filled with child actors, this would have almost doubled the amount of shooting days they needed.

Eventually they decided on the Czeq Republic which had buildings that came ready made to look like they belonged in the World War Two era, a reliable film industry and labour laws which allowed them to schedule the shoot into 40 days of filming.

From the budget $800,000 was given to the art department, which may sound like a lot, but is actually very low to purchase all the army equipment and create the sets for a period film. So, having town locations which were already almost good to go helped create the period world on the low budget.

Mihai Mălaimare Jr. was brought on board as the cinematographer on the film. Prior to shooting, the director and the DP collaborated to devise the format that was right for the project.

“We were both really attracted to 1.33, but the audience is not as used to that aspect ratio anymore. We were trying to work out how it would work for us framing wise and realising how much more top and bottom it would reveal in that aspect ratio. That was the only thing that made us try the 1.85:1. One thing that Taika really responded to and I wanted to try for so long was anamorphic 1.85.” - ​​Mihai Mălaimare Jr.

To get this squarer aspect ratio with anamorphic lenses he used an unusual technique. Hawk 1.3x anamorphic lenses are designed to be shot with a 16:9 size sensor and get a 2.40:1 aspect ratio. However, if you shoot these lenses with a 4:3 sensor size, de-squeeze them 1.3x and then crop just a tad you can get a 1.85:1 aspect ratio that maintains an anamorphic look. Shooting the 1.3x V-Lites on a 4:3 sensor on an Alexa XT gave him the best of both worlds: the squarer aspect ratio along with anamorphic falloff, without needing to do much cropping.

To portray a brighter version of reality, through the eyes of a child, they used a bright colour palette with lots of vibrant greens, blues, yellows and of course reds. They also used more whimsical slow motion and central, front-on, symmetrical compositions, which placed characters in the middle of the frame and used natural framing devices on the set such as doors, picture frames, tables or tiling for balance.

Much of the tonal balance was adjusted in the edit. Whereas some directors may despise test screenings - showing a cut of the film to an audience prior to release - Waititi likes to use them in order to gauge the effectiveness of the pacing of different versions of the edit.

“It was more the tonal balance. So I test my films all the time with audiences. So you get feedback. What do you think of this? Were you bored here? Were you overstimulated here? Was it too funny here? Was it too sad here? And then just finding a balance.”

Jojo Rabbit was produced on a higher $14 million budget that accommodated for more shoot days, a war set piece, lots of extras, some star performers, and period correct production design.

THOR: RAGNAROK - $180 MILLION

“I have a theory that there are periods when the economy is suffering and people and people don’t have a lot of money to spend, they don’t want to go and see films about how tough life is for people. I think the reason that a lot of those dramatic films are not doing well is because people want an escape, which is why a lot of the superhero films are doing really well.”

This movie involved a step up from a fairly regular budget to what I guess you could best call a Marvel budget.

To get the job Waititi pitched his idea of the film, which involved creating a ‘sizzle reel’ - basically a montage that he cut to Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin using footage from other films. The studio were also enthused by his idea to bring a vitality to the movie and his trademark brand of humour to the characters.

Working on a MCU movie means that the director basically has whatever technical resources they can dream of, have as much time as they need (in this case 85 shoot days, or a full two years when including pre and post production) and can use the massive budget to hire pretty much whatever actors they want.

However it also means that most of the look of the film will be constructed after shooting with CGI and to a large degree will be controlled by the studio. You know, the desaturated, GC-laden feeling all Marvel movies have. 

What falls on the director therefore is not so much creating the aesthetic style, but rather managing the project and creating the overall tone by using performances and storytelling.

To wring more of a comedically authentic tone from the script, he worked with the actors to achieve a more natural delivery of lines.

“The thing about a lot of studio films and Hollywood films especially is that when you hear a joke in these films you get the feeling that the joke was written about a year before they shot it and then a couple of people in the board room were like, ‘and then he’s gonna say….’ and they’re like ‘that’s gonna be amazing when we shoot that in a year.”

Instead they worked with a script that had suggested dialogue and jokes. Once him and the actors were on set they could then work with that material until they found what delivery worked naturally. Not being so tightly constrained to the original shooting script. 

The film was shot by Javier Aguirresarobe, who has a long career working on a range of both low and high budget movies. About 95% of the shoot was done with bluescreens. 

This meant that the DP lit the actors as a way to suggest to the post production supervisor where, with what intensity, quality and colour temperature they imagine the light to be. CGI is then used to construct the rest of the world and the light that is in it. Motion capture suits were used to capture the movement of computer generated characters.

The film was largely shot on the large format Alexa 65 with Arri Prime 65 and Zeiss Vintage 765 lenses. The Phantom Flex 4K was also used for shots which needed slow motion.

Thor: Ragnarok therefore used its enormous budget to hire a cast of famous actors, fund a very lengthy 85 shooting days with all the gear they could imagine, loads of action scenes, and effectively pay for two years of production time that included expensive CGI work in almost every shot in the entire movie, all the while Waititi maintained his grasp of a perfect comedic, adventure tone.