The director of the critically acclaimed film "Boy" spoke to The Tufts Daily about using film instead of digital cameras and growing up in the 1980s.
The Tufts Daily: "Boy" takes place in the '80s, which is when you were growing up, correct?
TaikaWaititi: It's not autobiographical. It's a fictional narrative set against a very authentic and autobiographical background. That's my hometown and that's exactly what it looked like in the '80s when I was growing up, that's what kids were wearing, that was the music we listened to. That's my school. They say write what you know, so I tried to write the setting of what I know. But it's a movie, so it's got to be entertaining, you've got to make this character do crazy things. I also included some of the more conventional things, the money and the drugs, this and that. It is all set in the '80s, which is the greatest decade of all time.
TD: Did you have a pet goat?
TW: No, I had a pet calf. They grow up fast so it wasn't a pet for long. I grew up on a farm and did farm stuff when I was a kid. There were two TV channels in the '80s, you had to send a kid on the roof and people are yelling, "Hold it there, hold it!" I remember when the first VCR came to town. It was like the most amazing thing ever. To go to the movies was a two-hour drive away, but people would drive through town and bring a film print of some obscure movie and set it up on a s---ty projector.
TD: Were the child actors hard to work with?
TW: The kid who played Rocky was seven years old. I don't know if you know any seven year-olds, but they get distracted. If you ever hear of a six-year-old who is an amazing actor, those people are freaks. The amazing thing about Rocky is that what you see on the screen is him. Because he was wandering off, looking into the camera, throwing stuff at the camera, often I'd be operating the camera and I'd be like, "Look at my hand, look at my hand, look over here." But then on film he steals every scene. You're like: "This kid's an amazing actor, he's so deep and he's got something going on here." But in reality, he's not quite like that. He was amazing. But that's the thing about cinema. When you watch the movie that's the thing you don't realize. There's someone holding Brad Pitt's a-- in place or something.
TD: What coming-of-age related films or films in general influenced this work?
TW: "The 400 Blows" (1959) affected it, the beginning of the film was inspired by "Jules and Jim" (1962) and "The Graduate" (1967) was somehow an influence in there. It has a French New Wave feel, like when there was lots of information before the title card.
TD: There were some great imaginative detours in your film...
TW: That came from wanting each character and all the boys to have fantasies. I did all the animations. I wanted Rocky's character to have a more innocent and simple fantasy. He was always drawing, so it made sense. [The one in "Boy"] is slightly more advanced. He is really imagining things in real life through live action cutaways. His fantasies are manifested in the real world.
TD: There was an incredibly light tone to the film, but really heavy topics. Does it get tough keeping things light?
TW: It's difficult finding the balance. We'd shoot different versions, both serious and comic and see what it was like in the edit. Is it too depressing now? Life is drama; it's always up and down all the time. So that for me is a real film, the up and down and finding the lightness to that darkness. I edited it for six months.
TD: The whole slow town image was very real...
TW: We had no cell phones; we'd only check our email twice a week. Everything kind of dropped away because of that. People freaked out, the crew was like, "What do you mean no cell phones!" The nearest city was three hours away; nearest police was 45 minutes away. You accept you are there, and after a few weeks the crew loved it. It made a really chill shooting environment.
