Taika Waititi: Bringing Football to the Big Screen

Our latest guest on the Footballco Business Podcast is Oscar-winning director, Taika Waititi. Waititi joined us to talk about his new film, Next Goal Wins which tells the story of the infamously terrible American Samoa national football team and what happened after their historic 31-0 defeat to Australia. The story became a documentary in 2014 and has been given the Waititi treatment with Next Goal Wins.

The podcast is available to listen in full, wherever you get your podcasts and we've included three highlights from the show below.

If you enjoyed this episode and Taika's insight into how to translate football stories to film, look back in our archive, where you can find our interview with Asif Kapadia, the man behind the 2019 documentary, Diego Maradona.

Shooting Football

Football stories, real and fictional have been the subject of films for as long as we've loved football. However, the depiction of what happens on the pitch has often been found to be lacking. Looking back, Taika described them as often just being shots following a ball and some feet hitting it. The football itself rarely looked like football, either because actors can rarely play football and footballers are rarely good at acting. Performance aside, there's then the case of how to shoot a staged football match.

While Next Goal Wins is more than a film about football, it's a story about family, grief and loss, it does feature a very important match which Taika was determined to make look realistic.

We managed to get in some cameramen who usually film sports events. They're football photographers and football cameramen. And so they came in and we managed to use them for the big game at the end. I like to think watching that game that at least it does feel exciting to me, even though they're supposed to be not very good players. But the main thing is there's a narrative in that game and we're able to follow that, to follow the sort of the back and forth between the teams and that was a really important thing to get right and make sure that you understood what was happening in the game. And also to make it fun. Like if you make it fun and have higher stakes and have like moments where you're like, 'oh my God, is it gonna go in?', But also some really stupid moments in there too, like this Rambo character doing the using the force to predict where he's gonna kick the ball.

Taika x PDC World Darts Championship

Next Goal Wins is Taika's first 'sport' film, but as any fan will tell you, there are plenty of other stories in football waiting to be told, or perhaps re-told. Could Taika see himself doing another sports film?

I never ever thought I would ever make a sports film. So this was the only one I've ever really thought of or considered but I do wonder if there are any more sports films, a very obscure sport probably, wouldn't be a very popular sport if I was gonna do another one, Darts Championships!

I'm not massively happy about how New Zealand came across in Invictus, but we'll let that go, because that film did need some villains. Even though we all know we were poisoned. It feels like it should be more spy movie. It was like following people going there to give the All Blacks food poisoning. So they'd lose the Cup. I was at that game, actually, it was brilliant. Even though we lost, it was a brilliant game and a brilliant tournament, great competition. And at the end, hey, rugby won.

Finding the Comedy

For anyone familiar with Taika Waititi's work, the tone of Next Goal Wins won't come as a surprise. This is a man who made Hitler a comedic character in his film JoJo Rabbit. But while Taika likes to find comedy in his films, sport and especially football films tend to focus on the serious side of the game. Does football take itself too seriously? Taika is in no doubt.

It absolutely does. And I think for me, the best part of sport is it has the ability to bring people together from different backgrounds and different walks of life. And the fact that this thing that people come to, and it's not really sport for me, it's real drama. It's real theater. You don't know what the outcome is gonna be. You go and see this thing and there are highs and lows, it follows like a three-act structure...But I do think we do take it too seriously. My main sport is rugby, which I love. I'm from a rugby-mad nation. I take it pretty seriously when I go and watch the games, the World Cup games. That was like life or death for me. But I think the differences with rugby, I think with rugby audiences,, they don't take it as seriously as some football crowds.

To listen to Taika's' interview in full, listen to the latest Footballco Business Podcast.

Next Goal Wins is in cinemas in the UK from December 29.