Q & A: 'Eagle Vs. Shark's' Taika Waititi and Loren Horsley
TW: He played the character of Jarrod when we were at the labs, so he helped me especially figure out a lot of what Jarrod was about — how the character should be played and the tone of the scenes.
How was the stop-motion animation incorporated into the film?
TW: I don't know what the inspiration for it was, but I just really love animation. I did think this would be my only opportunity to put this into a film where the budget was low enough that I had creative freedom to do that without having to go through a lot of stress.
LH: And there's such a beautiful handmade quality to it, you can really feel the human in it. It's an art form that's really beautiful and [is] vulnerable and delicate like the characters.
TW: It's also a little bit awkward. Stop motion is so kind of…
LH: Jaggedy.
TW: Yeah, it's not quite right, which is the same as the entire film and all the characters. They kind of stumble and they're a bit awkward.
There are some great props in the film. In one scene, Lily runs around on a human-sized mouse wheel. Where were you able to find that?
TW: Those mouse wheels used to be pretty popular when we were kids and all of the city councils banned them because they were pretty dangerous. We wrote the mouse wheel into the script and then realized that there weren't any anywhere, and so the production designer actually found a guy who was making some.
LH: Kind of a black-market mouse wheel. (laughs)
TW: He was remodeling the mouse wheel and making it safer, and so he had designed this mouse wheel and he hadn't tested it. He was about to sell them to the city council, and so it was a good opportunity for us to test it out.
LH: (laughs) But it was put in a playground and it was cornered off and all of the kids wanted to play with it and they weren't allowed to.
Director Taiki Waititi (center) with Loren Horsley and Jemaine Clement on the set of Eagle Vs. Shark.
Photo credit: Matt Grace/Courtesy of Miramax Films.
|
|
TW: The other kids came and watched — no one was allowed to jump on it. And all the other production design stuff — none of the stuff is specific to New Zealand or anywhere else. We made up the names of everything like [the fast food restaurant where Lily works] Meaty Boy and the video game [Lily and Jarrod play]. Everything's completely made from scratch just so that we didn't have to do any licensing rights, but also so that it wasn't specific to a certain place. It could be anywhere.
Lily and Jarrod meet playing an incredibly realistic Mortal Kombat–esque video game. How was that created?
LH: The same guys that did the animation did that, and those guys are being all the characters, so it's all of those guys in it.
TW: Yeah, those are friends of ours in the actual game.
LH: They had a lot of fun making that. Like boys' heaven. (laughs)
|
