Over in New Zealand, Peter Jackson is working hard on what’s likely to be one of the most expensive productions in his country’s history, but it doesn’t cost a gajillion dollars to make a fun movie as seen by Boy, the second feature from New Zealand’s Taika Waititi, director of Eagle vs. Shark, which became the country’s top grossing movie last May having grossed just $7 million.
It’s about an 11-year-old kid known as Boy from the country’s indigenous Maori tribe, played by first-time actor James Rolleston, living in a house full of kids with no grown-up supervision, until his long-absent father Alamein, played by Waititi himself, shows up with a couple members of his gang trying to find robbery loot they buried before being sent to jail.
Waititi’s very first short film Two Cars, One Night earned the multi-talented New Zealander an Oscar nomination, while his 2007 feature Eagle vs. Shark helped bring Jemaine Clement to attention in the States around the same time as his HBO musical-comedy show “Flight of the Conchords” with Brett McKenzie (who just won an Oscar this past weekend for his song from The Muppets.)
Before we get to the interview, we have an exclusive clip from the movie showing Waititi in action, a musical-fantasy sequence seen from Boy’s point of view:
