Taika Waititi wants Hollywood to stop asking POC about diversity issue: ‘You’re fucking broke, fix it’
Taika Waititi wants to “decolonize” racial representation on screen in an authentic way.
The creator of ‘Our Flag Means Death’ reflected on the sometimes misguided push for diversity in Hollywood during The Hollywood Reporter is raising its voice lunch.
“Stop asking us what we have to do, how to fix things, okay? I’m so tired of this,” Waititi said. “I’m so tired of the diversity conversation, the inclusiveness conversation, all the conversation. We all want to work and not have to come and do fucking panels and talks in the middle of our day.
The ‘Next Goal Wins’ director continued, ‘What’s happening is that we’re doing it wrong because we have to include a person of every single race, every single background, and every single part of the human experience in every show or everything we do. This is not reality and it is not authentic. I have never grown up with a group of friends where there was someone representing every ethnicity in my group of friends. I don’t know who the hell grew up like this.
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Waititi, who created the Indigenous series “Reservation Dogs,” added: “You wonder why there aren’t Indigenous things out there. This is the shit you make us do. By 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 likened the cycle to “going into your house, stealing all your shit and burning down your house and then saying, ‘OK, we need to talk about this.'”
He replied: “You build the fucking house. You burned it. I’ll be back and hopefully you’ll make it right, and if you don’t make it right, we’ll try again.
Waititi stressed the need to “decolonize the screen” and empower creators of color more.
“I don’t want to see a token Polynesian character in your show. What I want to see is a Polynesian story that is completely controlled by Polynesians, written and run by a Polynesian show, Waititi said. “When we make our own stuff, don’t give us a white showrunner to tell us the rules and tell us how to do things. Let’s figure it out and find out the structure of the story in our own way from our own experience. To decolonize the screen, what I mean is just don’t make it so white.”