The Hollywood Reporter’s Raising Our Voices event earlier this week welcomed Taika Waititi as the keynote speaker to discuss Hollywood's big issue with diversity. In Taika's typical hilarious and sarcastic manner, the award-winning Māori filmmaker delivered some seriously strong points on how we’re getting it wrong.
Taika immediately defuses the tension in the room with his witty opening line: “As you can tell, there’s a writer’s strike on so I didn’t write s**t.”
Watch a trailer for one of Taika's films Thor: Love And Thunder. Post continues after video.
Taika began by explaining how he’d asked AI the following question: ‘Hello. Can you please explain to me how Hollywood is failing to address and remedy the issue of diversity and inclusivity in film and television?” The AI bot gave him a lengthy response touching on the following points; tokenism, performative activism, stereotyping and whitewashing.
In expert timing, Taika says, “If AI can do that in eight seconds and it gets it, what’s taking so long?” A question that filled the room in applause. It’s as simple as that, the filmmaker then explains how we need to be considering different ways of "decolonising the screen".
What does that mean? Well, the filmmaker says: “Don’t put a Polynesian in your ‘thing’ just because you feel you need to. By decolonising the screen, what I mean is just don’t make it so white.”
Relatively simple, right?
Taika also has no issue with placing the responsibilities back on those who claim to be ignorant. He says: “Stop asking us what to do, how to fix things, alright? I’m so tired of this stuff; the diversity conversation, the inclusivity conversation, all the conversations.”
In an attempt to draw simple parallels to the situation, Taika turned to metaphor to prove his point.
The filmmaker started explaining his idea by saying, “It’s like someone coming into your house, stealing all your s**t, and burning your house down, and then saying, ‘OK, we need to have a talk about this'."
"Now you’re gonna rebuild your house, and what can we give you to rebuild your house that we burned down? You build the f**king house! You burned it down.”
What's Taika's main point in all of this? The filmmaker is saying, that although we acknowledge we all want to do better at better "diversifying our screens", representation of minorities is often done in a way that displays a very real lack of progress. Often casting a person of colour can come across as just ‘ticking a box’ – a tokenistic act that negates proper representation.
“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.”
“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.”
It's clear that the film industry has a fair way to go at tackling diversity, but thank god we have the likes of Taika calling out the realities and raising the bar.
Image: Getty.
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