- Taika Waititi criticized Hollywood for relying on underrepresented voices to "fix" diversity.
- "Stop asking us what to do, how to fix things," Waititi said on Friday at a THR luncheon.
Producer and director Taika Waititi blasted the white power structure in Hollywood for its failure to fix the industry's diversity issues.
Speaking at The Hollywood Reporter's Raising our Voices luncheon on Friday, Waititi called out the industry for looking to underrepresented communities to "fix" the problem of representation.
"Stop asking us what to do, how to fix things, all right? I'm so tired of this," Waititi said. "I'm so tired of the diversity conversation, the inclusivity conversation, all the conversations. All of us want to be working and not having to come and do fucking panels and speeches in the middle of our day."
Waititi, who is Maori and Jewish, said while it's good that the issue is being discussed, it's not enough to simply ask how to fix the problem, but that white decision-makers in Hollywood need to come with their own solutions and ready to give up control to those underrepresented voices.
"You wonder why there is no indigenous stuff out there," Waititi said. "This is the shit you've got us doing. Making us come and talk about the problem and tell you how to fix it. You fucking broke it — you fix it."
Waititi joked that what's currently happening is akin to someone "coming into your house, stealing all of your shit, and burning your house down and then saying, 'OK, we need to talk about this.'"
Instead, Waititi suggested: "You build the fucking house. You burnt it down. I'll come back, and hopefully, you'll get it right, and if you don't get it right, we'll try again."
The "Thor: Ragnarok" director also said that he felt most films and TV shows get diversity wrong.
"What's happening is we're mistaking that for we have to include a person from every single race, and every single background, and every single part of the human experience in every show or everything that we make," he said. "That's not reality, and it's not authentic. I never grew up with a group of friends where there was someone who represented every ethnic group in my group of friends. I don't know who the hell grew up like that."
Instead, he believes that Hollywood needs to work on decolonizing the screen, a term his mentor Merata Mita had coined.
"I don't want to see one token Polynesian character in your show. What I want to see is a fully Polynesian-controlled, Polynesian story that's written by and show run by" a Polynesian person, he said. "When we make our things, don't give us a white showrunner to tell us the rules and tell us how to do things. Let us figure it out, and let us figure out the structure of the story in our own way from our own experience. By decolonizing the screen, what I mean is just don't make it so white."