Taika Waititi has a tremendous amount going on at the moment. The writer/director/actor will next be seen in director Shawn Levy’s Free Guy, where he blessedly got a break from the writing and directing duties to simply co-star in the film with Ryan Reynolds and Jodie Comer. Waititi plays the film’s villain, a loathsome tech bro named Antoine. Not that acting isn’t work, of course, but when you consider what else Waititi has going on, you’d be excused for thinking it must have felt like a break.
Waititi just wrapped filming on Thor: Love and Thunder, his follow-up to the film that made him a bonafide directing star, 2018’s Thor: Ragnarok. This has allowed him to start focusing on another little project, his Star Wars film. Speaking with Wired, Waititi was able to dish just a bit about where that project’s at and what he’s feeling thus far.
“It’s still in the ‘EXT. SPACE’ stage,” he tells Wired, a reference to a script just being started. “But we’ve got a story. I’m really excited by it because it feels very me.” When Wired asked how he was able to marry his tone and style—irreverence, wit, endless shenanigans—to the more earnest Star Wars universe, Waititi wasn’t concerned. “I tend to go down that little sincerity alleyway in my films,” he said. “I like to fool the viewer into thinking ‘ha it’s this’ and then them going, ‘Damn it, you made me feel something!’”
Feeling something sounds like it was also on his mind when he was crafting Thor: Love and Thunder, which he has said is the craziest film he’s ever done. Not only has Waititi promised that Love and Thunder is going to be insane, but it’ll also do something no one was counting on. “What I wanted to do from the beginning was to ask: ‘What are people expecting the least from this franchise?’” he told Wired, “Oh, I know – a full-blown love story!”