Though he is likely best known to United States audiences for his work on Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi is becoming a comic legend in his native New Zealand. Following the success of his 2007 romantic comedy Eagle vs Shark, Waititi had even more success with Boy, a nostalgic childhood comedy that has won pretty much every award in New Zealand. As the most celebrated and successful local film in New Zealand history, Boy has finally reached American audiences, opening in more and more theaters each week.

Set in 1984, Boy is about an 11-year-old boy named Boy (James Rolleston), who balances the responsibility of taking care of his peers while applying lingering childlike fantasies onto the real world. His obsessions with pop cultural trends of the time such as Michael Jackson‘s Thriller and E.T., coupled with his innocent stories about his estranged father Alamein (played by Waititi) being a war hero and his brother’s magical powers, make for some comical moments. Though Boy is initially delighted when his father randomly returns, it quickly becomes apparent that Alamein is as deluded about his own heroism as Boy is. While this situation would normally be a sad one, the absurdity of it all is very comical in Boy.

As the film opens in more U.S. cities today, Wititi takes a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about Boy‘s influences and success.

Boy deals a lot with how a child’s imagination is projected onto reality. As a result, many situations that might be sad and depressing become absurdly comical.

Yeah. One of the hardest things with this type of film is trying to find a balance between the drama and the comedy. New Zealand is known more for films that are darker in content. With a lot of the films we’ve made before, in a film like this one of the kids would be dead by the end. We always tend to hone in on the more depressing elements of kids looking after themselves and parent/child relationships.

I wanted to kind of move away from that and make an entertaining film that has light moments. And those light moments, I think, really shine out against the dark moments. The fantasy thing was very important to me with the three Boy characters: Boy, Rocky and the dad. They’re all trying to deal with what’s going on in their world surrounding the death of this woman and all of them are projecting fantasy onto reality to try and deal with what happened, to justify what happened, to cope with the feeling of abandonment or just to move away from the guilt. Rocky’s fantasies manifest in the drawings and the very simple ways he sees what’s going on in the real world. Boy is a little bit more advanced, so he has live-action cutaways and flashbacks, some of them are real, some are not, so it’s a blur. Alamein’s fantasies show themselves in the real world and the physical way he presents himself – changing his hair and his jacket, the way he looks, changing his name. He’s constantly trying to remove himself from who he really is, to absolve himself in some sort of way.

I like his throne with the antlers strategically placed directly behind his head so they appear to be coming out of his head.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like, “I’m going to be a king now.” It’s this lunatic loser way of elevating your status by surrounding yourself with very low status and weak people.

The story was inspired somewhat by your own childhood experiences and it was actually filmed in the house where you grew up.

Yeah. That was my house it was shot in and I went to that school, so I grew up with a lot of kids. There was a certain degree of freedom, in the ’80s especially, that you don’t see kids getting these days. These days people are organizing play dates for their kids and it’s very regimented and scripted: Wednesday, 2-4, you have a play date with Tommy. When I grew up it was like: Wednesday, bye bye, I don’t want to see  you until dark. It was a very different time and growing up there was a very cool upbringing, something I feel not many people really experience, especially not here. It’s a new thing to see on film.

There were gangs around us and there was dope and pot and stuff, but the actual conventions of the narrative were made up and draped against the backdrop of a very authentic setting.

Boy has a lot of responsibility amongst the other kids. Did he assume those responsibilities or were they assigned to him in some way? Was it a common thing in New Zealand at that time for one kid to assume leadership of a group of unsupervised kids?

Yeah, we used to look after each other. When I was probably, like, 6, my older cousin, who was probably 9 or 10, used to make my lunch for me in the mornings. All the kids would walk to school together and look after each other. Kids had a lot more responsibility for themselves. I think socially that makes you a little bit stronger because you learn how to deal with situations and you’re less scared of conflict.

You play Alamein, the father. Why did you choose to take on that role yourself?

I just thought he needed to be incredibly good looking.

I actually auditioned a lot of people and I did about six callbacks with actors that I wanted. The problem was, I was spending so much time trying to work with them to get this character right. I wanted to move away from how we are traditionally typecast in movies in New Zealand, which is like the Jake character in Once Were Warriors, who’s basically an alcoholic killer. There’s that kind of character, or there’s this sort of stoic warrior Dances with Wolves type of guy. There’s more to us than that. We have geeky, dorky guys who are essentially weaklings who pretend to be tough. You can have characters that have slightly more layers to them and that’s what I wanted. I wanted a degree of comedy in there as well.

For me the most important factor in the film is the kids. The film is nothing without them, so I couldn’t be on set spending all my energy with an adult trying to work through problems. It was just easier for me to play him because I knew exactly what I wanted because the character’s based on a lot of guys that I knew. It just made sense for me to do it. My background’s comedy. I’ve done a lot of acting in the past and I wanted a certain amount of humor within the role, as well as some dramatic stuff. And being able to work with the kids directly in the scene was a huge benefit. I was in the scene directing them to their faces instead of being a voice from across the set. In the end, it made the job easier.

You mentioned your comedy background, which is probably what you’re best known for to many American audiences from your work on Flight of the Conchords. But you also have a background in visual art. How would you say that experience informed you as a director?

That’s what I was doing the longest until I started making films in 2004. My thing was painting and illustration and I still do illustration because it’s something I can do while traveling, since I travel quite a lot.

Composition-wise, the way I try and make things look, the art direction of having certain colors and certain things that I wanted within a frame, it certainly helps. I’ve also done a lot of photography, so that also plays into it. Really, film became the perfect medium for me because it was a mixture of all the things I was doing anyway. It allows me to address them all and be satisfied all in one project.

Boy was very successful in New Zealand. Now that it’s been opening in different cities around the U.S., what have the reactions been like here?

Fantastic. The reviews have been insanely great and the audiences have been fantastic. Because we’re doing self distribution, we’re doing roll-outs of ten new cities a week. In the next month, we’re opening in, like, another 40 cities. It’s really cool that the audiences get to see it, but it takes longer since we don’t have the budget of something like John Carter driving it. So we’re putting more effort into it with Q&As and stuff like that, and having physical presence with the film.

Speaking of big budget films, you were also in Green Lantern. What was that experience like in comparison with working on your own film?

Yeah. I played the best friend of the Green Lantern, who is this computer geek with glasses and stuff. It was weird. It wasn’t as much fun. Boy was filmed in a cool environment because I was in my hometown and it felt like a family affair. With Green Lantern it was like going to a new city. The set had hundreds and hundreds of people where our crew was, like, 40. There’s a certain disconnect within that kind of filmmaking. Not many people know each other. It was obviously fun to do the acting part of it, but at the end of the day I think anyone could have done that role. I’d rather do something a little more fun and a little more meaningful to me.

Boy. Written and directed by Taika Waititi. Starring James Rolleston, Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu and Taika Waititi. Not rated. www.boythefilm.com.