NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 17: Writer, director and producer Taika Waititi on stage during The Academy ... [+]
Audacious, thrilling, heartfelt, controversial, these are the adjectives being used to describe Taika Waititi’s new WWII feature, Jojo Rabbit. The story of a young boy (Roman Griffin Davis), his friendship with an imaginary Hitler (Waititi himself) and the end of the war is an intense mix of social satire, humor, and intensity that the director has been developing for several years. Nearly everyone during the film’s recent press day for its technical crew mentions that Waititi brought it up regularly over the years with his regular crew that he’s worked on numerous other projects with.
Production designer Ra Vincent and editor Tom Eagles first heard about the movie in 2014 when the two worked together on the vampire horror parody, What We Do in the Shadows. Eagles was both “astounded and perplexed” by the film’s audacity upon hearing the initial pitch. For visual effects supervisor Jason Chen, who heard about the story during a dinner while working with Waititi on Thor: Ragnarok he was behind the story from the onset, but upon reading the script and feeling the “punch” of the narrative’s message enticed him further. The knowledge of the film’s controversy was also apparent to the group from the beginning, as Waititi’s regular hair and makeup specialist Dannelle Satherly says, “I knew it was going to be controversial.” And it is this controversy that possibly kept Jojo Rabbit hidden.
Initially, Vincent explains, Jojo Rabbit was planned to be a small-scale, “rigid” shoot in Waititi’s home country of New Zealand. But due to numerous factors the project was shelved while the director went on to work with Marvel and create his FX television series based on What We Do in the Shadows. After the success of Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi was able to return to the project he’d been dreaming of, attracting Fox Searchlight. “All of a sudden we had enough money to make the movie we wanted to,” says Vincent.
Jojo Rabbit is Old Home Week for Waititi, working with a regular group of tech people that he knows and trusts. Everyone interviewed brings up the director’s hands-on approach to everything, from how the cinematography will look to the costumes and hair and makeup, yet that never negates their own individual styles. “[Taika] enjoys the filmmaking process...if Taika didn’t have to direct, he’d be involved in production design or he’d like to hold the camera,” Vincent says. As Chen lays out, Waititi knows everything about the various facets of filmmaking, and while he wears many hats on a production (here he acts as director, screenwriter, and actor), that never dilutes the knowledge he has. For Chen, who started working in VFX at just 18 on the movie Avatar, it’s rare to find a director who knows about every department and understand how to make everything work.
And what Waititi wanted to work was the juxtaposition of humor, timelessness, and naturalism. “He doesn’t like to overstate things,” Satherly says, “He has a really finely tuned aesthetic” and while that can mean breaking the rules of what’s expected of a WWII movie, Waititi understood when to remain grounded. Case in point, the time period. Satherly and Vincent both explain that there was a fine line to what everyone wanted the film to look like that, at times, could be anachronistic. The audience might notice cars being driven or parked in the film in spite of the fact that gasoline was limited in Germany.
Vincent explains that this bit of historical fudging was needed to provide kinetic energy. Satherly approached the hair and makeup on Rebel Wilson’s character with a nod towards the tight rolled curls of the ‘40s but softened to provide a more natural palette. Satherly deliberately did Waititi’s hair and makeup as it allowed the two to discuss just how his imaginary Hitler would look. The duo decided on two key points for the character’s image: his hair and his mustache. “He was a roughly tuned version of Hitler,” according to Satherly because he is Jojo’s conception of him and not the literal man. So Waititi, a Maori man, had his skin lightened slightly and wore blue contacts because Jojo would have internalized Nazi propaganda. Everything was done with the deliberate awareness that this would be how the little boy sees things, not necessarily the world as it is.
Because Waititi didn’t want this to be another WWII movie he often went in directions that seemed unexpected but were rooted in reality. Chen explains that Waititi wanted the characters dressed in bright colors because “they [the German people] thought they were going to die the next day, so they thought if they were going to go out they’d want to be wearing their Sunday finest at all times.” Other realities were recontextualized into terms a modern audience would understand. The crew watched Hitler Youth documentaries and much of the film’s opening sequences, where Jojo attends a Nazi Youth camp and is taught about fighting and artillery, according to Chen, were directly lifted from those. And for Eagles, much of the presentation of Hitler as a demi-god were presented as akin to Beatlemania in the 1960s.
With far more tools at their disposal than they originally anticipated, each technical element within Jojo Rabbit is elongated to help propel the counterbalance between humor and history. Several of the locations in Prague and the Czech Republic were part of Germany during the war itself that leant a Baroque quality to things. Vincent and Waititi then crafted a backstory for Rosie and her husband, that they had renovated a cottage in the 1930s, filling it with sophisticated Art Deco pieces stylized in conjunction with Jojo’s child-like innocence (several of the hand-drawn photos in Jojo’s room are Griffin Davis’ own handiwork). The production design worked alongside the visual effects. As Chen lays out, because only certain parts of the streets could be closed off at any one time, Clear Angle Studios, a company that specializes in scanning large 3D environments copied and expanded on many of the streets scenes which aided in making the areas look larger and more war-torn.
And when it comes to favorite things each department head has something. For Satherly, she fell in love with the look created for Sam Rockwell’s Nazi commander, Colonel Klenzendorf. Described by Rockwell himself as a celebratory style, Satherly and Waititi worked with the actor to create a last-stand outfit that wasn’t necessarily drag but was in the same vein. What they fell upon was an “oily, rubbed in” look that shows the character letting go of his shackles and telling the world who he is.
Chen loves the moment between Jojo and Elsa (Thomasin Mackenzie), the Jewish girl hiding in his house, as the two sit on the roof overlooking the city. “It's a truly romantic shot...The way we integrated the piece of glass above their head for the specific shot where it's textured glass and it almost looks like there are sparks flying above their head. But in reality, what they're looking at is a bombing raid.” For Chen it’s the “definitive shot” to illustrate the movie’s mix of heart and serious drama.
Eagles returns us to the humor of the movie in talking about his favorite moment, though it’s one that didn’t make it into the finished product. “There was a wonderful scene with Rachel House, who's a Taika regular, playing an American propaganda officer re-brainwashing the kids out of Nazism and into something else.” The scene, he says, worked great in isolation took away from Jojo and Elsa’s relationship. No matter what, Jojo Rabbit remains committed to its characters, their messiness and the love they have for each other, a factor shared by its crew.
Jojo Rabbit is in theaters now
