Taika Waititi, who became a household name after he restructured the Marvel character Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, and gave the 2017 threequel, Thor: Ragnarok, a colorful and comedic theme, which worked massively in favor of the studios.
A year prior to that, Waititi worked with Jurassic Park’s (1993) Dr. Alan Grant — Sam Neill in the film, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. The film had Neill play a short-tempered uncle to Deadpool 2 actor, Julian Dennison.
Fresh out of Peaky Blinders after having his villain character, Chester Campbell, killed at the end of season 2, Neill felt gratitude toward Waititi for revamping his image with the film.
In a 2016 appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Neill talked about the film and got to the part where he felt he needed to compare the mass effect of his “psychopathic” Peaky Blinders character with how Waititi turned his image around.
Sam Neill Thanked Taika Waititi For Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Graham Norton started the conversation about how Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople had a depressing synopsis but mentioned how the film was joyous at the core.
Sam Neill mentioned the story a little bit, which followed a troubled Ricky Baker, played by Dennison, and how he runs away into the wild, only to be found by Neill’s Hector Faulkner, his uncle. The film, as he noted, changed his fellow New Zealanders’ mindset about him.
“People are nicer to me in New Zealand, as a result of this. I think the last time they saw me was a psychopath in Peaky Blinders.”
Taika Waititi, in order to shoot this film, took the cast to New Zealand’s rural areas where Neill joked that it was a “road movie, except there’s no roads.”
Taika Waititi Saved Sam Neill With Thor: Ragnarok
Neill, after working with Steven Spielberg in the critically acclaimed Jurassic Park was skipped by the reboot starring Chris Pratt. Though he starred in the threequel, Jurassic World Dominion, Neill wasn’t invited by Universal Pictures to reprise his role. Waititi offered him a bit in Ragnarok wherein he acted as Odin in a play sequence.
Neill, concerning his absence from the Jurassic World reboot, said to Slash Film –
“I think the problem is that no one knows where Alan Grant is anymore. He’s retired from paleontology. He’s sick to death of dinosaurs and running.”
Neill was again found working with Waititi in last year’s Thor: Love and Thunder as Odin’s stage artist.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is streaming on Netflix.
Source: YouTube, Slash Film
