The Art of Creativity | Taika Waititi | TEDxDoha

are you ready for Taika Waititi all the way from New Zealand Tiger Wahine please thank you oh thank you very much my name is Taika Waititi and she said it's very nice to be here and time starts now basically I'm just was a quick run-through of what I'm going to talk about tonight and first off I'll just introduce myself so there will be the first thing we're out so my height I mean Taika Waititi and so that is that done now I'd like to just break the ice maybe start off with a joke this joke I'm just going to put it out there just involves me telling you that I've just flown in to do her and as a result my arms are tired so what happened with that joke is when I actually had flown in to Doha bodacious on an aeroplane and reality and what I've done there with the joke is I've taken it further than I said that my arms are tired suggesting that I've flown like a bird to Doha so that's this the backstory of the joke cool it's going pretty well so Who am I well I kind of don't really know that myself often I I come from New Zealand and I come from these two people who met in the early 70s the woman is Robin she's of Russian Jewish heritage and she was a schoolteacher and the guy next to her is his name is tiger and he is a farmer and an artist and they met in a few drinks later and they gave birth to a beautiful Asian daughter called tiger and and so I come from this sort of like a very mixed background and as a result of a voice of head trouble kind of funny just deciding really who I was or what I wanted to do and like I had lots of influences through my life through both sides of my family I come from like one side only comes from the country and I went to school out there with the population of the school was 28 kids and it's still 28 kids and then then I was also at school in the city and see the oh so that's freaked out by that and and that that's me with my mum and I don't know who the kid is next to me but so so I always a lot of influences and stuff when I didn't great-aunt and I think that's kind of moved through into my creative life where I haven't really been able to decide exactly one of what I wanted to do I've always been into painting and art and drama and all these different things so and it's pretty much been my life there's my grandmother on the back of the motorbike and this is my other grandmother so you know both girls on wheels and so so TEDx asked me to speak and I had a little freaked out because you know usually the people that talk here have like invented a brain or something you know or like they've you know that lady had a stroke and she could like suddenly see through walls and and became Rain Man so yeah I made a movie yeah a good movie but that yes you you're wasting my time by clapping okay so you know it's a stand out I once thought I would have had to like invent movies you know to like be the first film maker ever so I had a freakout I don't know what to talk about you know I started you know I think of what have I got to say and then I you know and now I started making notes you know vigorously making notes about you know what I was going to say like here and you know important ideas that were coming out of my brain onto the page and then you know and I'm finally gonna like reveal this information about myself and I really I just really had no idea what to do or what to say so about having no idea and no ideas and now I thought well maybe it's about that maybe it is ideas that I mean obviously Ted stayed exchanging of ideas and perspectives I mean all I've got guys is creativity that's it that's my job you know at the moment I happen to be a filmmaker but it's not my job it's just my job is to express myself and to share my ideas and my point of view it happens to be that I'm using filmmaking right now but you know throughout the years I've done lots of different things I started off my background is painting and visual art I'm just going to zoom through all this stuff but um you know so and it's varied from like the kind of like the serious and slightly sort of tongue-in-cheek and and kind of sometimes political but you know always fun you know if I can try and make it fun in that's thing that for me is what being creative is about being is having fun and looking at life through like a sort of the lens of a child really this is a game I play with the newspaper on the sports page called where the Indians and and they're everywhere in this picture and so yeah so I've just you know I've just tried to kind of just keep generating stuff this is a lot of illustration work I did for a while this is really eating into my time I did a lot of performance and stand-up and then you know moving there acting and photography and try to go at fashion for a little bit you know try my hand at animation as well and and basically yeah just I wanted to do everything you know so I wanted to like try every single thing I come from like a background where people said I know you have to have one job and stick with it well I don't believe that I think that in this day and age you know you people have things that they want to express and you know you need to have a wide range of tools and you know filmmaking painting acting poetry all that stuff they're all tools so I found that film happened to be an amalgam of all the things I was interested in and so I explored therefore the last sort of six seven years and and I think I've done quite well out of that the yeah and it's commented now with this movie boy which is gone on to become the most successful local film in New Zealand ever but success I think for me as I've it's a very strange thing and I probably have different ideas of what success is to most other people all right what is it is it important I have no idea move on I mean you know it can it can it do this these things can't save the employment no they can't unless it's made of food can it bring about world peace only if is actual world peace so you know it's all about perspective for me and I I'm here basically to share how I see things if you can take one little piece of inspiration from there and apply it to what you want to do you know if I don't know how many people here are actually actively creative then you know if you can take something a spark or an idea from anything I show you today then you know then me coming here and staying at the Four Seasons as with it so you know I am attracted to the outsider okay that's a lot of the theme in my work is exploring this idea of people who don't belong and you know I'm always inspired by the outsider artists these were paintings by my father who's an outsider artist even though he wouldn't even know what that meant if you were to say you're an outsider artist and you know just I love the naive I love people who who can see things through the you know like I say the lens of did that the start with an innocent viewpoint I think you know so you know this is my dad his perspective he just paints things around the landscape that he that they're surrounds him he lives on a hill and he just paints the same thing all the time and I love it with really inspiring to me restores on my favorite artists you know they said he couldn't paint you know if you can put paint on a brush and apply to something you can paint you know what he couldn't do was paint in the style of every one of the day this guy is incredible and I find that his stuff is actually really fun I you know like I don't have no idea what he was really trying to say but you know for me like this here is incredible painting I have no idea what's going on with these guys and you know when you take the ball away I mean then it really just becomes kind of weird I mean you know that's got here I don't know what he's up to back there and I mean it's just kind of weird but you know I love looking at the stuff a lot you know just kind of generates that inspiration the stuff for me this is a picture of in my mind a horse eating a giant hot dog bun guess where I see this is a you know this a actually has dialogue where this is a lion come just talk to his friend saying hey Geoffrey uh can I borrow your guitar and this here is called the writer and the muse and you know they assuming that lady is the muse again you know it's you know whatever inspires you within the obvious she inspires them so it's about perspective you know and on that note this here is my interpretation of what clouds see when they daydream and such a point of view you know I've been obsessed with things over the years I've collected lots of things from sewing machines to cameras to stamps and hustling you know some of my early obsessions were people like Freddie Mercury and this guy Michael Jackson and I took this obsession probably deep into my adult years and I'm not sure if it was a healthy thing to do but it was for me you know it was just a natural thing you know so I loved the guy when I was about 11 or 12 I got obsessed with the Sistine Chapel with the Creation of Adam and I started drawing it obsessively and I just couldn't stop and and so I just like kept going and kept going and and just tried to like draw it and it would I wouldn't have been my friend if I was a kid you know so so I just sort of got obsessed with this sort of stuff and again yeah this is sort of things that I look back on I am NOT embarrassed about so I actually I just really love at the come sort of thing myself as a separate person nowadays and I think man what a weird kid and they're you know I changed that and all kind of come to head with this masterpiece called fawn trying to get his flute back off weird kid so yeah and then obviously as there's an old lady going for a walk on a sword with Robocop so Robocop is another thing I became obsessed with over the years and I would just draw him again and again and again and again nothing I got obsessed with when my mum survived breast cancer was cancer and I started getting really paranoid that I was going to get it now so I think oh if I keep thinking about that that's going to make it happen and I had to stop thinking about it and and it just sort of quite keep overwhelming my mind and and so like I decided like if I just did this of wearing like that that to do a hair that would get rid of it and like so far so good and there incidentally this is a cancer cell and I'm interesting Lee enough it's very similar to this picture which is a picture of a nuclear bomb exploding milliseconds after the detonation so things that I find that a cool TransAm samurai swords obviously girls and tassels on jackets testicles on jackets things that aren't cool we all know if cancer nuclear bombs and I'll call and Nazis so guilt elite I sort of have the skill you know my mother's side of family comes you know that way back there Russian Jews and I started when I was quite young maybe about 12 I start getting obsessed with drawing swastikas I couldn't help it and I still feel guilty about it and so every time I drew one on a notebook or something I would instantly feel guilty and I'd have to change it into Windows and so I would just do this even all over my notebooks and so I couldn't no more I stopped trying to tried to stop doing another swastika and so um yeah so just like windows and houses all over my books and stuff because I thought are someone's going to find out about the windows and try to disguise all the windows as houses and it just became again it became an obsession I just put stop and and then this will lead to the sub session was like hitman like why like Charlie Chaplin looks like Hitler and and what isn't about their mustache that you can make anything look like Hitler and so and I just you know I that's how to trying to like doing that with things and I found that it works frequently enough it works on everything and and it's not my fault you know it's just like it's just someone put that idea out there he did it he put the I agree did the mistake made the mustache famous and so I so these are things that yeah I don't even I don't know what the point of me saying these things to go you know but I think hopefully something and there's some sort of exchange he and you'll take something away joke another joke knock-knock cabbage just a big cabbage just a giant cabbage that someone's wedged up against the front door you open it and you can't get out of your house because of a giant cabbage you've got to eat your way through the cabbage to get out to freedom just putting it out there so I came out this idea I'm also obsessed with rugby rugby is my favorite game and babies I love babies they're my favorite of the tiny humans so I can win this game we combine both things and it's a game called rug baby and yeah I think this just a fantastic way of you know to get mean more involved in and their children and so obviously is most famous rugby player Journal of me and some inventions I've made up this I really love guitar and but I don't love having long fingernails so I come up the idea of an emery board guitar neck so that when you're playing it shortens your nails awesome thing another thing I hate is when you're tied in the wind blows into your eye so I came up with the button-down tie my invention copyright and where's the remote control here it is on the convenient remote control watch other inventions variations on that the remote control remote control and also the cellphone watch more variations on the watch and finally I'm going to one day and then watch watch just as to watch another watch on top so I think failure is a brilliant thing it teaches you a lot of stuff and and all you know and you you end up coming up with better ideas often when you you when you fail at things and you know I think what's really great also was learning to embrace bad experiences bad creative experiences and you know watch bad movies you know read bad books and but because all that stuff sometimes it teaches you what not to do and so you know I commit in one bad experience I had was I played a stripper on a TV show once and you know I remember sitting around in the green room in my g-string thinking why am I doing this I'm just helping someone else to realize their dream and so what I ended up doing was I started writing my own scripts and stuff went in the screen in my g-string and then a few months later I made a short film and their net went on to go to the Oscars about a year later but I lost so obviously it was a complete waste time but you know it's it was me at the Oscars asleep and so success is sort of wanting to leave this talk on my idea of success is not money it's not you know it's not not getting a lot of money I think if that's your idea of success then that's great but it's um I think it's not really why we're here I think we're here to communicate and to share ideas and stuff and I think that is successful back home in New Zealand we have the saying 10 up with okay the semiotics saying 10 up where's how you say hello and what it literally means as there you are okay if you're saying to a group of people down a photo there you guys are okay so fact that we're here that we're even on earth in the first place I think that success in itself so congratulations everyone I'm being here and I wish you all the best in your creative life and and I mean Oh Cheers Kaldur

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 2,046,804

Rating: 4.9308677 out of 5

Keywords: ted, TEDx, ted talk, tedx talks, Taika, tedx, tedx talk, ted talks, ted x

Id: pL71KhNmnls

Length: 18min 21sec (1101 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 04 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/Gramku]

I liked him in What We Do in the Shadows.

[u/wenbilson]

He has a wonderful sense of humour. I could listen to him all day :)

[u/evolvedtwig]

I was thinking, maybe... I just should bring a broom down here for you if you wanted to sweep up some of the skeletons.

[u/Work-Safe-Reddit4450]

"You know, sometimes in life it seems like there's no way out. Like a sheep trapped in a maze designed by wolves. If you're ever in that situation, there are doors...two doors to choose from."

"Through the first door, ah that's easy to get through, and on the other side waiting for you is all the nummiest treats you can imagine: Fanta, Doritos, burger rings.....Coke Zero."

"Bit disyouknowwhat, there's another door. Not the burger ring door, not the Fanta door. Another door that's harder to get through. Guess what's on the other side?"

"Anyone want to take a guess?"

"vegetables?"

"No, no not vegetables."

"Jesus?"

"You would think Jesus. I thought Jesus the first time I came across that door. It's not Jesus. It's another door. And guess what's on the other side of that door?"

"Jesus"

"Jesus, yeah Jesus. He's tricky like that, Jesus."

I love that movie. Such a hilarious combination of humor and action.

[u/unhingedlizard]

Hey i live in new zealand and we think he is a weirdo. A wonderful weirdo

[u/hiendat89]

He is the best thing in Thor Ragnarok. I laughed my ass of whenever Korg talked.

[u/littlefilms]

Just realised this is the same dude in what we do in the shadows, such a hilarious actor!

[u/labria86]

If anyone hasn't seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople, please do so asap

[u/Me4Prez]

Wtf happened to OP and some of the commenters? I don't get it... I'm so confused...