Taika Waititi reflects on nerds worrying he'd 'ruin' Thor: 'What, you mean again?'

Taika Waititi doesn't think he could have made Thor's reputation any worse when he joined the franchise.

The Jojo Rabbit filmmaker reflected on some of his most prominent projects in a new video interview with Entertainment Weekly, and discussed his memories of directing Thor: Ragnarok in 2017. 

"That really propelled me into the nerdosphere, if you will," he remembered of the film. "I was living a really lovely, peaceful life, and as soon as I did this, well boy, did the nerds come for me. They said, 'This guy's gonna ruin this. He's gonna ruin Thor!'"

Waititi didn't think the movie could have done much damage to the god of thunder's standing among fans, as 2013's Thor: The Dark World was widely regarded among fans as one of the least successful Marvel Cinematic Universe films. "It's like, 'What, you mean again?'" he recalled. "And they were like, 'He's gonna ruin this for everyone, Thor's so cool!' And I said to them on Twitter — before I left Twitter — I said, 'You don't know what you want until I give it to you.'"

Waititi had previously said that he didn't envision himself making a Marvel movie when he became a filmmaker. "I had no interest in doing one of those films,” Waititi said on SmartLess last year. "It wasn’t on my plan for my career as an auteur. But I was poor and I’d just had a second child, and I thought, ‘You know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children.'"

Later in the EW video, the filmmaker thinks that he won geeky audiences over again with his work on The Mandalorian. "Speaking of angry nerds, Star Wars, Mandalorian," Waititi said of the series, which he directed one episode of and voiced the droid assassin IG-11. "This is what brought the nerds back. They were like, 'Okay, you get a pass on this one.'" 

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Waititi said that working on a Star Wars project brought out his inner child. "My favorite memory of this was turning up to set and getting to direct 75 stormtroopers," he said. "And the little boy inside me, who I've kept locked away, he just tried to leap out, and be, 'Yay, this is my dream come true!' 'All right, shut up, kid,' and I locked him back, I pushed him back down."

The Hunt for the Wilderpeople director didn't have much to say about his subsequent Thor movie, 2022's Love and Thunder. "Look how jacked Chris got," he said, pointing at the poster. "One of my favorite things about this is that I so love Natalie [Portman]. Also, Christian Bale. I mean, it's Christian Bale. Also, Guns N' Roses, a lot of the songs. I did meet Axl Rose once, actually. He had a lot of stories to tell, which I will not share."

Watch the full interview with Waititi above.