Taika Waititi on ‘Next Goal Wins’ and His Quest to Quit Hollywood 

New Zealand director and actor Taika Waititi arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of Searchlight Pictures' "Next Goal Wins" at the AMC The Grove theater in Los Angeles, California, on November 14, 2023. (AFP)
New Zealand director and actor Taika Waititi arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of Searchlight Pictures' "Next Goal Wins" at the AMC The Grove theater in Los Angeles, California, on November 14, 2023. (AFP)
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Taika Waititi on ‘Next Goal Wins’ and His Quest to Quit Hollywood 

New Zealand director and actor Taika Waititi arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of Searchlight Pictures' "Next Goal Wins" at the AMC The Grove theater in Los Angeles, California, on November 14, 2023. (AFP)
New Zealand director and actor Taika Waititi arrives for the Los Angeles premiere of Searchlight Pictures' "Next Goal Wins" at the AMC The Grove theater in Los Angeles, California, on November 14, 2023. (AFP)

Sports movies typically culminate, after stirring locker-room speeches, in a dramatic bid for athletic glory. Taika Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins” concerns the quest of a historically bad national soccer team, the 2011 American Samoa men’s squad, in their struggle to qualify for the FIFA World Cup after an infamous 31-0 drubbing against Australia.

“Next Goal Wins,” inspired by a 2014 documentary of the same name, is a sports movie that delights in upending the conventions of sports movies. (Michael Fassbender plays the coach brought in to turn the team around.) For Waititi, it’s a typically deconstructionist approach that leans more into the charisma of its Polynesian cast (among them Oscar Kightly and Kaimana, as Jaiyah Saelua) than rah-rah win-or-lose dramatics.

“I think all my films are feel-good films, but I feel that more and more that’s becoming less normal and more of a risky thing to do,” Waititi says. “Which makes no real sense because you go to the movies to escape.”

The 48-year-old Māori filmmaker of 2019’s Oscar-winning “Jojo Rabbit” and 2022’s “Thor: Love and Thunder” met a reporter the morning after “Next Goal Wins” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. He was speaking while the writers and actors strikes were ongoing, which, for him, was a welcome hiatus after a whirlwind stretch of work, with plenty of projects (including a “Star Wars” film in development) still in the wings.

Waititi, himself, doesn’t know much about soccer and professes to know even less after making “Next Goal Wins,” which opens in theaters Friday. He’s also, as he said in the interview, less and less interested in Hollywood, a game he’s already tempted to walk away from.

AP: Are you a fan of any sports movies?

WAITITI: I don’t know. I don’t really watch that many sports movies. I’d say I like them but I can’t really remember many of them.

AP: Not “Any Given Sunday”? You quote from it in the film.

WAITITI: I just remember that being so long. So long and so many zoom shots. No, I like that film. I think “Cool Runnings” is probably the closest to this.

AP: Your last “Thor” movie took apart masculinity and superhero convention, and “Next Goal Wins” seems just as disinterested in sports movie traditions.

WAITITI: Yeah. Well, my second film (“Boy”) is a sort of deconstructed anti-feelgood family film. It’s just a comedy about child abuse. I guess “What We Do in the Shadows” is the same. Just trying to fight against what the normal filmmaking would be or what the normal idea of what that film should be. I’m interested in soccer but I’m not passionate about it. I don’t care about it like I care about stories about people, stories about family.

AP: Your films return often to the idea of family. You’ve said your notion of family isn’t defined by blood.

WAITITI: I have a big family but a couple friends are way closer to me than any of my family. For me, this idea of blood family being so important, it comes from when villages were tiny and people in Europe were obsessed with keeping the bloodline alive. I just don’t think it’s such an important thing anymore. Adoption is such a great thing because it’s not who you come from, it’s who raises you. You adopt a kid, they become a version of you because of the things you teach them and how you raise them.

AP: Along with “Reservation Dogs,” which you helped create, “Next Goal Wins” captures Indigenous people in a celebratory, less self-serious way than we often see in film.

WAITITI: For good reason, there needs to be respect. But I think Polynesian, Pasifika people, we’re very self-deprecating. We like to laugh at ourselves. If this was made by a Westerner or was a white-led film, it would be just too respectful and the kind of saccharine bulls-—. That’s the reason Native Americans have been misrepresented for so long in film. It’s not because it’s not an authentic portrayal of what they look like. They’re always portrayed as stoic, mysterious, quiet, wise characters who speak in sage advice passed down by ancestors. It’s like, what a boring existence if that’s the way you live. And it’s not the way we live. This is why I really believe films about cultures need be made by people from that culture or who have at least lived amongst that culture.

AP: What was it like assembling a cast of largely Indigenous actors for a production shot in Hawaii?

WAITITI: To be able to swim while you’re shooting and go to the beach before work and after work when the sun is going down and you’re losing light, go home, play with the kids, have dinner. I understand now why Adam Sandler did all those films in Hawaii. A lot of people like to torture themselves in filmmaking. They want to go and live in the snow and eat carcasses and live the experience. I don’t. I grew up super poor and I don’t want to do that again. I basically hate working and want to retire, but if I have to work, I’ll make it as pleasant as I can.

AP: But you work all the time.

WAITITI: Yeah, but do I? People say I work all the time. Only I know the truth. Listen, your name can be a lot of headlines about work that apparently you’re doing. Doesn’t mean you’re doing it. Having some press release about me being attached to a project, that’s someone else doing the work. It’s not me doing the work.

AP: Is this you saying you’re not doing a “Star Wars” film?

WAITITI: I’m not saying anything about anything. I’m not having any of these conversations because I’m not allowed to. I can’t wait for the strike to be over but, selfishly, this has probably been the best thing for me, in terms of me getting to take a break. I needed to be forced to stop working for a bit.

AP: How have you been spending your time?

WAITITI: Now and then I’ll think about ideas I might want to do. And then very quickly I get very tired just thinking about them and I fall asleep or find anything else in the world to do that’s not a job. This summer I was in Europe, enjoying the sun, back on beaches. It’s all I want to do for the rest of my life. Go to the beach. I grew up on beaches and then I worked for so long without getting a chance to go back to the beach until this film. This is probably what reminded me — just like Michael’s character learning there’s more to life than football — there’s more to life than film. There’s more to life than being in the entertainment industry. You think it’s going to be so cool — what a great life it’s going to be in show business. Hollywood is just sad people eating lukewarm food out of cardboard boxes in offices with windows looking on other offices.

AP: But you’ve started to think about whether you need to keep working?

WAITITI: Oh, I know I don’t. I’m already — my plan, basically, is to figure out how to quit. (Laughs) To figure out how can I comfortably stop doing anything. What I need to do is get a big piece of wood and some sandpaper and just sand it. Keep sanding it everyday until I die.



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
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Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.