Director of Marvel's Thor: Love and Thunder Taika Waititi might wish he had the superpower to remove the foot from his mouth after taking some serious heat on Twitter for controversial remarks he made about a revered Oscar-winning Hollywood legend.
In a cover story interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the multi-hyphenate writer-director-producer-actor Waititi, who won an Oscar himself for Jojo Rabbit, said “People are so obsessed with likes or leaving behind a legacy, being remembered. Here’s the thing: No one’s going to remember us. What’s the name of the director of Casablanca? Arguably one of the greatest films of all time. No one knows his name. How the f— do I expect to be remembered? So who cares? Let’s just live, make some movies. They’ll be obsolete and irrelevant in 15 or 20 years. And so will I, and then I’ll die and someone else can do it. This whole idea of chasing, chasing, chasing this life. It’s like, do we have to actually work this hard? Maybe not.”
Waititi seemed to be trying to make a point about the fleeting nature of fame, but ended up irking cinephiles for not professing to know the name of Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca, one of the most famous films of all time.
Movie lovers far and wide took to Twitter shortly after the article was posted to condemn Waititi for the comment.
A tweet from an account called BogartEstate, unverified but potentially connected to the estate of Humphrey Bogart (the star of Casablanca), responded with some shade-throwing of its own: “We would like to reassure @TaikaWaititi that many film lovers remember the brilliant Michael Curtiz. And while we may not remember every Thor movie, we will not forget Jojo Rabbit.”
Another commenter noted “the f—ing gall to compare yourself to Michael Curtiz, the most solid and competent of Hollywood journeymen, but also to completely dismiss him in the same sentence.”
Waititi did get some sympathy though, with one user commenting “All the people pretending they knew off the top of their heads who Michael Curtiz was just to hate on an Oscar-winning filmmaker they only know from one of the two MCU movies he directed…”
Regardless of what he was trying to say, Taika Waititi might want to take a page from Thor and show some respect for the Hollywood gods that came before him in future interviews.
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