Taika Waititi: mum inspired my Nazi comedy

It must have seemed especially bad and subversive to the young Waititi given that his mother is of Russian-Jewish descent (he sometimes works under her maiden name, Cohen), while his late father was Maori. He played a version of the latter in his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale Boy, wherein at one point he reveals a swastika he scribbled on the wall of his childhood bedroom, and admonishes his son: “Don’t get into the Nazi stuff.”

Nine years after that film, and 34 since Waititi’s secret doodling, the popular New Zealander has made an offbeat “anti-hate satire”, Jojo Rabbit, whose 10-year-old protagonist doesn’t just like swastikas, but is literally a Nazi.

When we’re introduced to Johannes Betzler (endearingly played by newcomer Roman Griffin Davis), he is nervously preparing to go off to camp on his first day as a junior member of the Hitler Youth. Luckily, his imaginary friend and confidante, Adolf, is on hand to give him a pep talk and inject vim into his Heil Hitlers.

Waititi has cast himself as the Fuhrer. Or rather, as a playful, childishly narcissistic version of the dictator, as might be conjured by a lonely, naïve child in need of a friendly father figure. Cajoling, buffoonish, fiery, needy and demanding, Waititi’s Hitler acts as a barometer of Jojo’s fanaticism, which becomes weaker as he gets to know — and fall for — Elsa (Leave No Trace’s Thomasin McKenzie), the Jewish girl that his loving mother (Scarlett Johansson), to his initial horror, has been hiding in a crawl space behind a wall in his dead sister’s room.

The seeds for the movie were planted when Waititi’s mother recommended Christine Leunen’s novel, Caging Skies. Reading it, he was struck by the idea “that there was a kid [Jojo] who, essentially, we should really dislike quite a lot, and his world is turned upside down by the discovery of, basically, a monster in the attic. It’s almost Let the Right One In,” he suggests, refering to the 2008 film about a bullied boy who befriends a mysterious girl who turns out to be a vampire, “but set during the war.”

He doubts whether many members of the Hitler Youth had actually met a Jew by 1945, when the film is set, and has fun in Jojo Rabbit desconstructing the absurdity of the propaganda that they were fed.

“Their idea of what a Jew was, was whatever they had garnered from the propaganda that they’d seen, the books that had been published about Jews, and the way that they were described as demons with tails and horns, jagged teeth.”

When Jojo asks Elsa, “Where do Jews live?”, she tells him, “Inside your head” — which could just as easily apply to antisemitic fantasists today as it does to an impressionable boy, brainwashed by Nazi idealogues.

Elsa takes tropes and creates a beautiful new mythology about Jews, reconfiguring them as wondrous sprite-like creatures rather than the ugly, corrupted beasts Jojo’s been conditioned to believe them to be. It feels empowering, so I ask Waititi if that’s also how it felt to him making the film.

“Yeah, it was empowering,” he says, adding that although he “didn’t grow up in an actively practising Jewish household”, it’s something he was always interested in. “But I’m half Maori,” he explains, “and that’s very much the predominant culture in New Zealand. So if you’re growing up half Jewish and half Maori, the Maori side is going to take over. So I grew up steeped in that.”

Waititi’s paternal grandfather fought against the Nazis, and this inspired the writer-director’s award-winning short film, Tama Tu, about a group of Maori soldiers in Italy. Jojo Rabbit, he says, “was a real chance, I guess, to explore my mother’s side of my family and the things I hadn’t really looked at in my other films.”

After his parents separated, when he was around five, Waititi was raised mainly by his mother, and he pays homage to her strength and love in the film through Johansson’s “solo-mother”, Rosie.

“My mother and her family’s story, still today, is fascinating to me, because they escaped the pogroms in Russia and then they ended up in England and eventually, somehow, through some mad turn of events, ended up in New Zealand, of all places. Even that story was a story of resilience and determination, so I basically come from two cultures who share those traits.”

Waititi recalls that when she talked to him about Leunen’s novel, it coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Bosnia conflict. He hadn’t actually taken much notice of the war when it was raging, because he was a teenager doing his own thing and “the war was over there, somewhere”. The book, however, prompted him to research what had happened. “What I discovered really shook me,” he says.

“The main thing I took away from it was, ‘Wow, I thought the biggest atrocities were in World War Two.’ I knew there were many, many wars after that, but the things that happened just in that particular war were absolutely atrocious.”

It made him think about how children had witnessed and been affected by the horror, which led to the thought that in World War Two, “children were also witnessing all these atrocities”. In his films Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, he’d looked at the world through the eyes of children, so with this realisation, he says, “I started feeling like, ‘Oh, that’s more in my wheelhouse where I try to look at the world of grown-ups from a kid’s point of view.’ Now I’ve become fascinated with how kids perceive war.”

Jojo Rabbit picks up the theme of children being disappointed by adults — men in particular — and the perils of hero worship that runs through Waititi’s work.

“I learned very early on that you can’t rely on grown-ups to give you guidance or to be reliable,” he says. “That might just be specific to how I grew up, but a lot of people I knew growing up with me had a very similar attitude towards grown-ups. When you look around you, all the signs point to adults being lunatics.

“That’s the thing that’s always interested me: the concept of children having to forge their own way by themselves because, from firsthand experience, I know that grown-ups have no idea what they’re doing in this world.”

Jojo becomes disillusioned with Hitler and literally boots him and his twisted ideas out of his life. Love and tolerance triumph, but I nevertheless wonder if Waititi had to have a conversation with himself before embarking on a comedy set in Nazi Germany. After all, Charlie Chaplin expressed regret about The Great Dictator in his memoir. Had he known about the camps, he wrote, “I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”

Waititi, who was raised on a diet of British comedies, including Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, Black Adder and Monty Python, insists he didn’t have any doubts because he didn’t set out to offend.

“I knew that I wasn’t going to push it into territory of shocking comedy, that wasn’t my aim. Also, I’m from New Zealand, so we’re just too polite to do that.”

There are some uncomfortable moments, he concedes, “because it’s a kid talking to Hitler. But I didn’t ever feel worried or concerned, because I knew my limits.”

Playing the Nazi leader himself allowed him to maintain control of the character, and he insists that even in the outtakes he never went too far. “It was important for me to show that this kid is torn between these two things, but I didn’t want to ever feel like, ‘Oh, now I’m just going to push it, just to, like, see what the audience thinks,’ because that’s not my style.”

Some may still baulk at the idea of a bitter-sweet and uplifting comedy set during the darkest period of the 20th century. Jojo Rabbit, though, is deadly serious at heart, with themes — antisemitism, radicalisation, extremism, demagogary — that couldn’t be more relevant. Expect it to be one of the year’s most divisive awards contenders.

Jojo Rabbit is released on January 1