New Zealand Film Couple Is Drawn to the Lives of Outsiders
By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
NEW YORK -- Taika Waititi, an up-and-coming New Zealand filmmaker who is fascinated by outcasts, has made a new movie about geek love. He has likened it to "a head with no body that is trying to lick something just out of reach," which seems an apt metaphor even if you don't entirely know what it means.
Geeks unite! Are we not all outsiders? Isn't life itself a grand quest to lick something just out of reach?
During lunch recently at the Blue Fin restaurant in Times Square, Waititi and his longtime girlfriend, Loren Horsley, who plays the central dork of "Eagle vs Shark," discuss their attraction to losers and underdogs. They're both attractive and poised, but in their defense, that may just be a hardship of the industry.
Loneliness, insecurity: "If you're doing an autopsy, it's like the kind of essential human muscle and blood and bone stuff?" Horsley says, upending her statement into a question, the way teenage girls do.
"Most people in their lives do feel like they are outsiders at some point," Waititi says.
Horsley says she became so subsumed by the shy and self-conscious role of Lily in her boyfriend's film that she had trouble coming out of character.
"I had kind of a crisis about what confidence was and what truth was," she says.
Waititi, 31, and Horsley, 29, have been together for eight years, and they live in a group house in Wellington, New Zealand, along with Horsley's sister and two other friends. (They've also shared digs with friend Jemaine Clement, Horsley's "Eagle vs Shark" co-star, who debuted this week on the new HBO series, "Flight of the Conchords." It's a big season for Kiwi entertainment.)
Horsley is an actress whose roles back home have been mostly in television, and mostly of the "bubbly, blond, chatty" variety. Waititi, who is part Maori, is an artist, actor, screenwriter and director. His short film "Two Cars, One Night," about children waiting for their parents outside a bar, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. At one point in his career he made a pilot for a film about outcast vampires.
Never thought about the loneliness of being a vampire? Waititi and Horsley did.
"All their friends keep dying," Horsley says.
Lunching with Waititi and Horsley is itself like being a head with no body that's trying to lick something just out of reach. Horsley talks about the essential mystery of human nature and Waititi answers questions with jokes. (Religion? "I'm a commie!") He likens America to a "mothership" of aliens whose "grand plan is to take over the world with their little McDonald's brain stations." The restaurant is noisy, and the Kiwi accents are unfamiliar. There are several moments of confusion, as when Horsley explains her reverence for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
"You feel like the beast of humanity is right there in that place," she says.
"The what?"
"The very beast of humanity."
Waititi tells about the Academy Awards ceremony, when his name was read and the camera zoomed in on his face, Waititi pretended to nap. Horsley feigned nudging him awake.
The good people of New Zealand were apparently horrified.
"At home there were people, like, writing to the newspaper, saying, 'He shamed New Zealand, blah-blah-blah-blah,' " Waititi says. "And a) Who knows that we're from New Zealand? Like, nobody in the world knew who this guy was who pretended to be asleep. And b) Who gives a [bleep] anyway? It's just the Oscars."
"Taika loves gags," Horsley says.
When Waititi was accepted into the Sundance Institute's screenwriters and directors labs for the summer of 2005, the couple decided to revive and refine a lonely, insecure character Horsley had portrayed in a play some years before. In "Eagle vs Shark," which opens in Washington Friday, Horsley's character is a cashier at a burger joint who wears ill-fitting pants and sneakers as big as boats. She falls in love with a funny-looking clerk from a video game store who makes ugly candles, and she follows him on his quest to exact revenge on a bully who used to beat him up in school.
Unlike in most ugly-duckling films, Lily is never transformed into a swan. Rather, it's the audience that undergoes a transformation, coming to see her not as a pitiable creature but as strangely, quietly centered. We come to respect the geek. She knows exactly what she wants, and it's the guy who makes ugly candles.
One day when Waititi was at the Sundance lab working on the film, Horsley decided to do one of those weird actor things that you hear about sometimes. She decided to go into a real-life situation in character.
She put on her costume and brushed out her blond curls till they resembled, as she puts it, an "Afghan dog's coat." She affected a slumpy posture and sideways smile and went as Lily to get her eyelashes tinted at a salon in Salt Lake City.
"They were just unbelievably rude, just so rude," Horsley says. "It was absolutely a sense of being invisible."
Horsley and Waititi finish their vegetable rolls and head out into the sunshine to check out a huge video screen on 44th and Broadway that's briefly advertising a trailer for their film. They're joined by Waititi's friend and by Horsley's mom, Erin Taylor. Waititi borrows his friend's movie camera and films his girlfriend watching herself play someone else on a big screen.
"Surreal, huh?" Horsley says.
"Surreal, completely," her mom says.
Waititi puts down his camera for a moment. He says that during filming in New Zealand, he rarely saw his girlfriend when she wasn't in character.
"I never saw Loren for two months, in a way," he says.
In the place of his strong, confident girlfriend was an awkward creature in an ugly wig, someone he came to regard, with affection, as a "weird little sister." He addressed her as Lily often between shoots.
When shooting ended, the character of Lily even thanked him for giving her the job.
"Thank you for the opportunity," Waititi says in a meek voice, channeling his girlfriend channeling her character.
Then the character of Lily left to go to wardrobe, to take off her wig for the last time and to be an outcast no more.
And he actually missed her.
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