Taika Waititi

Taika David Cohen, working as Taika Waititi, came out of Wellington with a comic sensibility that had no obvious equivalent in American film: deadpan, slightly amateurish on purpose, and prone to switching into genuine grief without changing the shot. Eagle vs Shark and Boy established it, Hunt for the Wilderpeople refined it, and What We Do in the Shadows, which he co-directed and starred in as Viago, turned it into an exportable format that has since produced a television series and a whole school of imitators.

The specific skill is tonal collision. He will let a scene be silly for a long time and then let the silliness stop while the camera keeps rolling, so the audience is still laughing when the sad thing arrives. Boy does this repeatedly. Jojo Rabbit is the most aggressive version, a comedy about a child in the Hitler Youth with Waititi himself playing the boy's imaginary friend, and it won him an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Marvel hired him for Thor: Ragnarok and let him rewrite the tone of a franchise that was not working, which is the rarest thing a studio ever does. It worked, he became a figure of enormous industry gravity, and Time named him one of its hundred most influential people in 2022. Thor: Love and Thunder ran the same jokes with less discipline, and the drop-off is worth being honest about. Alongside all of that he has kept a busy acting career as Korg, IG-11 in The Mandalorian, Antwan in Free Guy and the Ratcatcher in The Suicide Squad, and has produced television including Reservation Dogs and Our Flag Means Death.