Taika Waititi made a Brawl Stars short film, but he admits the game "freaked me out at first"

“I've always been into games,” Taika Waititi told me over a transatlantic Zoom call about his latest unexpected project — he’s made a promotional film for an immensely popular mobile game, Brawl Stars.

On his relationship with gaming, Waititi added: “It's a great escape for me. And I've always been into that, you know, ever since I was a kid. And a couple of years ago, my brother in law introduced me to Brawl Stars.”

The Thor: Ragnarok director decided to check out Brawl Stars for himself. And he admits: “It freaked me out at first, because it's so chaotic.

“And I was like, ‘Oh my God, there's too many things to try and understand. My brain cannot figure out, like, what's this button?’ You know, there's always something happening.

“And in the end, I just realised you just give up trying to understand. You accept the chaos and you accept that there's something different happening. You're like, ‘What's that button? I don't know. And it's okay’.

“Part of me is trying to be in control all the time, and like, relinquishing that control, you know, in that space starts to feel kind of weirdly safe.”

This experience reminds Waititi of another time in his life. He says: “I used to be obsessed with chess and, playing online chess, and that those were some dark times where I'd get up at like 2am to go and play some kid across the world and get beaten, and just get sort of stressed out and and I had to teach myself, ‘It's okay, it's just a game, and it's okay to lose as well’.

“And so, when I sort of started giving over to that, then I really enjoyed it a lot more. So that's the space I'm in really with the game, it’s like, I just sort of go in, and I play around, and I get my butt kicked and then I leave.

“And then I had the opportunity, because Don, my brother in law, was doing some work with Supercell, to talk to them about it, and I wanted to do something that was maybe outside of film, and to explore, you know, what the world of games, the game space, was.

“And we got to talking. Over about a year, we sort of went back and forth from them, and about what we might potentially be able to do together. And then they said, ‘Look, we're coming up with this new character. Would you do a film about it?’ And yeah, I jumped in.”

That new character is Najia, a puzzle expert that is tied to a pyramid quest. She’s the 101st brawler to be introduced to the game, and you can watch Waititi’s short film about her above. So, what was the process like of making this?

As Waititi remembers it, “Well, they gave me a rundown of what the character was, and who she was, that she didn't talk much, the way that she operates, and that she was in the pyramid quest. And so I took that and just started writing.

“But I kind of wrote a few versions of, like, kind of guessing what I thought would be a great way to [introduce her], but they were all within the pyramid and within that space. And just slightly putting in the fact that she sometimes would help people, would guide. But also could, you know, had tricks, and sometimes she was just mysterious.

“And so, I went back and forth with them a little bit. And then we settled on this one story with Colt, and that she was helping to get him out of there. And then that little backstory thing at the end, something that I thought it’d be cool just to see, like, a series of flashbacks of what her life was like, and how she came to get there.

“And the original version I did of that [flashback segment] was about three times longer, and it was like some really long flashbacks with some childhood trauma stuff, just to find out why she wanted to be alone in this space.

“But no, we just wanted to keep it mysterious and short, and just to sort of hint at the fact that she was into puzzles her entire life, and that she was finally in a place that made sense to her.”

Looking ahead, Waititi would love to work again with Supercell and explore opportunities to continue telling stories in the gaming world.

“I would love to explore doing some longer form things,” he told us. “And again, I think what's great about how we've worked together is that it's been creatively very free. And it's like, because the world of the stories and the lore and the characters and all of that stuff falls outside of the playing of the game, it's very open creatively, I feel.

“And so you can, kind of, really just allow yourself… there's no real big limitations on it. So I would like to explore whether or not there's other longer things you can do, and, you know, I don't know what that will entail, but it'd be cool to keep talking about it.”

So, with that in mind, don’t be surprised if Waititi ends up directing a Brawl Stars movie for Supercell at some point in the future! Certainly, it feels like the game has a big enough audience to support a transition to the big screen.

And are there any other games Waititi would like to take a crack at creatively? “I don't want to jinx it,” he said.

Also, what does Waititi make of the comparison between the current boom in production for video game adaptations and the previous boom in comic book characters being thrust into cinemas?

“With my brief stint in the comic book world, there's a lot of protection over that for those properties and, you know, and the source material. And, yeah, I don't know how similar that would be in the space.

“But it's definitely feels like, yeah, there's more and more [games] being adapted. And I guess it feels like it's maybe a slightly more exciting [space] than [comic book adaptations] at the moment, because there are so many other worlds that now have opened up in terms of those adaptations.”

And with a Star Wars movie in the works, as well as an adaptation of hit book Klara and the Sun, it certainly looks like Waititi has a lot of irons in the fire right now.

“One of those irons is trying to figure out how to take more holidays,” the director joked. “Yeah, it's one of the hardest projects I've ever been involved in.”

Naija, the 101st brawler, is available in Brawl Stars now.

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