Jemaine Clement and Loren Horsley in Eagle Vs. Shark. • Read more about the 2007 SXSW Festival. • Read Premiere's review of Eagle Vs. Shark. Photo credit: Matt Grace/Courtesy of Miramax Films.

Although Eagle Vs. Shark may sound like the title for a kung fu epic, the only thing epic about this little New Zealand comedy is the size of its heart. Arriving in U.S. theaters on June 15, former stand-up comedian Taika Waititi's feature directorial debut recounts the wonderfully sweet and strange romance of Lily, a lonely fast food employee, and Jarrod, a geeky introvert whose singular goal in life is to settle the score with the bully from his old high school. The film is full of inventive characters, strangely poignant stop-motion animation that tells the love story through rotting apple cores, and plenty of laughs.

Premiere had the chance to speak to the film's director, Taika Waititi, and the film's star, Loren Horsley, at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March about the experience of fine tuning the film at the Sundance labs, finding some of the film's unusual props, and the film's influences.

How did this film come together?
Taika Waititi: Loren and I really wanted to work together and we basically started talking about what kind of character she wanted to play in a film and that character of Lily started developing there, really. Once we had found her character, we created the world that she lived in and eventually the person who she would be romantically involved with and then the story just bloomed from there.

Loren Horsley: It happened really quickly. Sundance wanted Taika to go to the feature film lab with another script, which he didn't want to take because it was full of children. So he said, "Can I write another script?" So he wrote this one up really quickly from the story we had done together and before you know it, we were at Sundance workshopping this film.

What was the Sundance Lab experience like?
LH: It's like the best experience of your life ever. They have, like, 12 different advisers. They have directing advisers, acting advisers, cinematographers, editors, and musicians come and talk with you. So for a month, you're up in this mountain resort and people are just giving you feedback all the time.

TW: And it's an ongoing support as well. When you're shooting, you get to talk to lots of the advisers and ask for advice. And then when it came to editing, you can send rough cuts of the film to different editing advisers and they give you feedback.

LH: They gave us more money to finish doing a bit more editing and they're very generous.