Taika Waititi, ‘Thor’ director, steps away from big budget films

Taika Waititi, the acclaimed director behind Thor: Ragnarok and Jojo Rabbit, has revealed that he is feeling "a bit fatigued" by big studio movies and is looking to pursue smaller, more personal projects.

At the Los Angeles premiere of his new film Next Goal Wins on Tuesday, Waititi spoke with The Hollywood Reporter on the trend of fans growing weary of superhero entertainment in the wake of Marvel's recent spate of underwhelming releases, “I don’t know. I’m a bit fatigued by working on those big films, studio films, which is why I’ve come back to do smaller films like this; my next film will be a smaller one.”

The Thor director noted, however, that “there’s always a place for them and they’re always inspirational. As a little kid, those are the things I loved, going to see these big movies set in outer space to take a great escape from where we are. So I hope they continue.”

Waititi's current concentration is on Next Goal Wins, a film that tells the tale of the infamously bad American Samoa football team and how Coach Thomas Rongen, a down-on-his-luck guy played by Michael Fassbender, tries to turn the team around.

“I really wanted to see Pacific Islanders on screen, I want to see indigenous people on screen,” said Waititi, who wrote, directed and produced the project. “Hollywood still has a ways to go with diversity and how they deal with that without it being tokenism, so I think the key to that is allowing native people to tell native stories.”

“All of my films are underdog stories really,” added the filmmaker of wanting to focus on a losing team.

“Listen, no one wants to go see a film about winners who keep winning, that’s boring. You’ve got to start somewhere and go somewhere, so it’s about change.”