After the success of his short films Two Cars One Night and Tama Tu, Taika Waititi’s feature debut, Eagle vs. Shark, delivers an awkwardly funny tale of geek love. Coming to theaters in June, Miramax bought the film before it’s Sundance premiere, after seeing only a five-minute trailer! We had the chance to talk to Taika recently at SXSW about his artistic origins, making the film and the importance of gigantic feet.

How did you get your start as a filmmaker?

I suppose thoughout my life I’ve had an artistic upbringing and eduction. So my first love was always visual art and painting and drawing. I did that for a long time, right through my twenties.I still exhibit now and again and paint and do photography… On my father’s side I got that, he’s also a painter. My mother’s an English teacher, so I was always made to read a lot and write stories…

When I was at school I developed an interest in drama and theater. So I did the drama course at school and that lead through university so I did a degree in theater. [I] concentrated, for quite a few years, just on doing theater and acting. I was also doing a lot of comedy work on stage with friends and Jermaine Clement (who plays Jarrod in the film). Together we had a comedy duo for quite a few years. We did a few things in different festivals around the world, and back in New Zealand we developed our style of comedy… Also Jermaine has another comedy duo, like a folk music comedy duo called Flight of the Conchords and they’re doing really well at the moment…

I started concentrating a little bit more on acting but then I started getting interested in storytelling and in film and directing. Really I think, filmmaking just became conglomeration of all the things that I was interested in. Visually, musically, dramatically and narratively it was just the perfect medium for me.

So I set about writing a short script based on conversations I remember from when I was a kid, and the way we used to talk when we were children, just set in a really simple location. That turned out to be a film called Two Cars One Night, which was about a couple of kids who were waiting outside of a pub, in rural New Zealand, for their parents to come out. It was just about a boy and a girl who meet up and start talking. It’s a really simple film. I guess the difference between that short film and most other short films that get made, especially in New Zealand, it was a very simple story and it didn’t have a twist. In a way, it kind of didn’t even have a plot. It was more like just a slice of perhaps a bigger scene or even a bigger movie. So I think that people we not only attracted to that element, but also to the universality of the story of first love or interest in love. So that short film did very well festival-wise and then eventually it got nominated for an Oscar.

My next short Tama Tu also did really well in festivals. So I had a real natural progression from the short film world into the feature film world. And also it was probably made a lot easier because of the nomination and because of the success of the short films.

In a lot of ways it’s kind of hard to make your first feature film, especially in New Zealand because there’s not that much money that’s available to you. In a way I was fast tracked. So I was pretty lucky.

Doesn’t New Zealand have programs to help promote filmmaking in the country?

Yeah. Well the film commission in New Zealand is basically the only way you get money. A lot of people go into development with them with scripts and stuff and they do run workshops to try and nurture filmmakers… but for me, my education was really just the short films. Even this first feature was a big learning curve for me. I was lucky enough that the budget on this was low enough that I could experiment. I could try things, make mistakes and go back and fix them. So I had a lot of freedom on this film and I thought that was really good. I imagine as the budgets get bigger, that freedom will get less and less.

Did your shorts help you get outside funding as well?

Yeah, we got a little bit of private investment with Eagle vs. Shark and that was from someone that we had met through the short films. They had seen my short films and we had an ongoing dialogue. The short films really…opened up so many doors for us.

Was the story inspired by any events from your past?

A little bit. The whole idea for this came from wanting to work with Lauren (Lily in the film) who’s a great character actor. We got to talking about what kind of character she’d want to play in a film because we wanted to make a film together. We discovered Lily and then we tried to figure out what world she wanted to live in, and then ultimately who’d she fall in love with. Once we decided on the kind of person that she’d be involved with, the whole thing expanded from there pretty easily. Like it just became a romance, an awkward, uncomfortable anti-romantic comedy.

The awkward performances are really great! Like the bedroom love scene with Jarrod and Lily…

I really love all the comedy that comes from pain, the emotional and social pain of living day-to-day life. Yeah, we’ve all had those horrible sexual encounters where it’s just so awkward.

What do you think you did as a director to help with the actors’ awkward performances?

Well in a lot of ways Jermaine and Lauren ended up playing younger versions of themselves, like how they felt when they were teenagers. One of the things that helped was giving them clothes that were a little bit uncomfortable to wear. Jermaine had tight jeans on all the time… Also I made the cast wear shoes that were too big, so even if they didn’t feel awkward, they looked like they were clumsy because their feet were gigantic. It was like a world full of clowns.

The wardrobe was great too, some of the shirts Jarrod wears are pretty rediculous!

Nothing was really allowed to be cool. I guess some people would automatically think, “Wow actually that’s a pretty good style.” Pretty much all the design was… we paid a lot of attention to it. None of the actual brand names exist in real life. So the video game is completely made from scratch, the movie theater doesn’t exist, the meaty boys burger bar doesn’t exist, so we just made up everything. Also it helps to avoid a true setting or to be too specific to a place. So the thing that gives the story a little bit more of universality [is] if you don’t recognize these places. It’s kind of nice just to have something that you can disassociate yourself with and concentrate on the characters and the story.

But some of the locations are characters themselves. Like Jarrod’s room with the nun chucks and ninja stars on the wall or the Dinosaur head theater…

Yeah, that’s one of the dangers of just writing random things when you’re writing. Then some one goes and makes that. A couple of thousand dollars later, you’ve got this gigantic thing sticking out of the wall! Originally one of the working titles was Sad Animals because humans are the saddest animals in the world. So one of the themes of the film was this idea that we’re in a jungle filled with animals. They’re surrounded by these different animals everywhere. Like the dinosaur head, the film has got lots of animal murals, jungle scenes and in Lily’s room there’s a backdrop of horses… That was just a conscious thing to try and be symbolic but in a way that doesn’t knock you on the head.

Was there something you wanted to do set design-wise that you couldn’t because it cost too much?

Actually I was really surprised that we actually got to do pretty much everything that I had written. I was surprised we got to do a big dinosaur head. I thought, “Ok this is something I’ll have to change later.” The production team was so good at working with a tiny budget and creating everything that I asked for. It was totally amazing!

Did you go through a lot of rehearsals?

Yeah we did about two weeks of rehearsals. During that time, it was pretty stressful because I was also trying to do location stuff and all these other things while we were supposed to be rehearsing. So we got a really good friend of ours, Brita McVeigh, (she’s also a filmmaker and a brilliant actor’s director) came in and worked with Lauren and Jermaine on a few days. Jermaine also had never done any acting before really, so for him it was a bigger transition. He had only done stand up comedy style acting where he’s working with an audience and being a little bigger and the timing’s different, you know, it’s not subtle. So I think it was a bigger learning curve for him.

Did you do any improv stuff on set?

No. I really wanted to do some because they’re both really brilliant improvisers. But the budget and the time were so constrained that in the end we just had to stick with the script. Which is a shame, but I think it worked fine anyway. I think that their performances are so good that a lot of it can seem off the cuff…

When did the stop motion stuff come in?

That stuff came in towards the end of the script-writing phase. From the first draft, there were always different fantastical elements or animation bits in there. There was a dream sequence in there that we actually shot but it never made it into the film. I say this in a lot of the Q & A’s when I get asked (about the animation), I say it’s because I really love animation and I just wanted to put it in. Having such a low budget, you have so much creative freedom… That’s probably the only opportunity I’ll have to be that experimental with my films. You have to take those opportunities I think. If you have a vision, I mean why not? Because if I like an orange, I’m going to put it in my painting… there’s no other reason why.

What format did you shoot in?

That was 35mm.

Was that challenging to shoot stop motion with 35mm?

Yeah. Well actually the apple stuff was in a studio on digital but all the sleeping bag stuff was 35mm. That wasn’t those guys (Jermaine and Lauren), they were doubles…Because again, I wouldn’t have enough time to just take the actors away from a scene and put them in sleeping bags for five hours. So all those shots were done with a second unit, by the same guy who did the apples. Not all 35mm cameras you can do [stop motion] with. This one was an older camera. It was a big old camera from the 70’s or something.

What are your influences as a filmmaker?

I’ve got a lot of influences. I really love all types of films. Even big budget films. I love arty foreign films… But for this film, I’m sure a lot of people are going to draw comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite. I think that’s unavoidable. But the actual influences that we were thinking about, the films I was watching when I was writing this and trying to get a feel for it, were things like: Love Serenade it’s an Australian film which is really brilliant, The Castle which is a seminal Australian film (which is a huge film in New Zealand), Buffalo 66 and La Strada. It’s more those kind of films [that] were influences. Also… I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson, Todd Solondz and P.T. Anderson’s films. Anyone who’s got a different way of telling stories in a more human [way] and with a delicate filmmaking ability.

What do you think you might be doing if you weren’t making films?

If I weren’t doing film, I’d probably be doing a lot of visual art or acting or maybe doing some music or writing. Now and again I think, “Man this film thing has actually taken over my life and I don’t get to do any of the other things I really like doing.” and I get annoyed sometimes. Now and again I just think, “It would be great if I didn’t have to make another film. I could just go and do some of this other stuff I really want to do.” One of my problems is, I’ve got a terrible concentration problem where I start drifting… and it’s happened with all the things I’ve become interested in. I start drifting off and getting interested in other things. So who knows how long I’ll be able to do film for, but for now, it’s definitely what I’m into.

That seems like a typical creative person’s condition…

Yeah totally. You work in whatever different mediums suit whatever idea you have at the time.

Was there something that was particularly challenging with the feature? What did you learned with your first feature?

I think the biggest lesson I took from it was the importance of time and space. It’s invaluable. If you’re offered more time, in any of the stages of the film, then you should take it. Your script could always do with a little bit more time, shooting of course, you could always do with more time… and editing is just something that so important, just to take space and do some editing and then move away and give it some room to breathe and come back and watch it. I had a script that I wrote a year and a half ago and I came back and read it and it was like somebody else had written it. I was like, “Wow. I can totally see all the problems in the script!” But if you write something and you go straight into making it, you never recognize those issues. So it’s just good to give yourself time.

Would that be your advice to new filmmakers?

That’s my advice to anybody I reckon, yeah… time.