Taika Waititi tells us why he wanted to make an 'uplifting, underdog sports film'

The new soccer film Next Goal Wins came about, in part, due to filmmaker Taika Waititi's homesickness for the Pacific.

Next Goal Wins tells the story of the American Samoa national soccer team — long considered one of the weakest national sides in the world — and their attempt to qualify for the 2014 World Cup, under the coaching of Dutch-born American Thomas Rongen.

When Waititi first started thinking about the project, he'd spent several years based out of the the United States working on big budget projects, and this felt like an opportunity to reconnect with his roots, both as a Pacific Islander (he's of mixed Maori and Russian Jewish heritage) and as a filmmaker.

"The idea of seeing Polynesian Pacific Islanders on screen really drew me in," he tells Q host Tom Power in a recent interview. "I'd been away making [Thor: Ragnarok] and Jojo Rabbit. I'd been away from the Pacific for about six years, and I felt homesick. I wanted to be around my people again. This was an opportunity to do that, and also to go back to making a small film in my style, which is like a 25-day shoot — very fast, very small crew, and very intimate."

This isn't the first time this story has been told on film. It was also the subject of a 2014 documentary, also called Next Goal Wins, which is where Waititi first heard the story.

"I never thought I'd ever want to make a sports film," he says. "But I watched that and I thought, 'That's got all the elements that you want in a great, uplifting, underdog sports film.'"

WATCH | Official trailer for Next Goal Wins:

Waititi adds that Next Goal Wins takes a group of people who are often portrayed as stoic or mystical and instead shows them as they really are. It's something the film has in common with Reservation Dogs, FX's dramedy about four Indigenous teens living on a rural reserve in Oklahoma, which was executive produced by Waititi.

"Allowing them to be boring characters, allowing them to be someone who doesn't have the answers; who doesn't know how to track the bad guy; someone who is not connected to nature; doesn't know how to fish — those are more interesting to me," he says.

"Those are so true. So many of us live in the cities now.… Even with Reservation Dogs, when you say 'Native American' to someone, the image in their head is definitely not those kids…. It's just about exposing people to more versions of ourselves."

The film also portrays Pacific Islander attitudes towards issues of gender identity. Jaiyah Saelua, who was a centre back on that American Samoa team, is fa'afafine. Fa'afafine — also called fakaleiti in Tongan and whakawāhine in Maori — is a third gender identity that exists in many Polynesian cultures. It consists of people who were assigned male at birth, but perform traditionally female gender roles and are often, to varying degrees, feminine in their gender presentation.

"It's something I really wanted to show to the world — this part of our cultures that have been accepted for a very, very long time and historically, has been a very normal and sacred part of our cultures," he says. "What I love is that thousands of years ago, someone was like, I identify like this and this is how I feel, and some [other] people were like 'That's cool. You do what you want. We need to go fishing if we want to eat. There's more important things to think about than … what someone else wants to do with their body.'"

WATCH | Taika Waititi's interview with Tom Power:

The full interview with Taika Waititi is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Taika Waititi produced by Lise Hosein.

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