Taika Waititi Wants Hollywood to Stop Asking POC About Diversity Problem: ‘You F*cking Broke It, You Fix It’
"All of us want to be working and not having to come and do fucking panels and speeches in the middle of our day."
Taika Waititi wants to “decolonize” racial representation onscreen in an authentic way.
The “Our Flag Means Death” creator reflected on the sometimes misguided push for diversity in Hollywood during The Hollywood Reporter’s Raising Our Voices luncheon.
“Stop asking us what to do, how to fix things, all right? I’m so tired of this,” Waititi said. “I’m so tired of the diversity conversation, the inclusivity conversation, all the conversations. All of us want to be working and not having to come and do fucking panels and speeches in the middle of our day.”
The “Next Goal Wins” director continued, “What’s happening is we’re mistaking that for we have to include a person from every single race, and every single background, and every single part of the human experience in every show or everything that we make. That’s not reality, and it’s not authentic. I never grew up with a group of friends where there was someone who represented every ethnic group in my group of friends. I don’t know who the hell grew up like that.”
Waititi, who created the Indigenous series “Reservation Dogs,” added, “You wonder why there is no Indigenous stuff out there. This is the shit you’ve got us doing. Making us come and talk about the problem and tell you how to fix it. You fucking broke it — you fix it.”
The “JoJo Rabbit” writer compared the cycle to “coming into your house, stealing all of your shit, and burning your house down and then saying, ‘OK, we need to talk about this.'”
He replied, “You build the fucking house. You burnt it down. I’ll come back, and hopefully, you’ll get it right, and if you don’t get it right, we’ll try again.”
Waititi emphasized the need to be “decolonizing the screen” and more fully empower creators of color.
“I don’t want to see one token Polynesian character in your show. What I want to see is a fully Polynesian-controlled, Polynesian story that’s written by and show run by” a Polynesian person, Waititi said. “When we make our things, don’t give us a white showrunner to tell us the rules and tell us how to do things. Let us figure it out, and let us figure out the structure of the story in our own way from our own experience. By decolonizing the screen, what I mean is just don’t make it so white.”