Taika Waititi

Taika Waititi (born 1975) is a New Zealand director, writer, and actor of Māori and Jewish descent who broke out with the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, revitalized Marvel with Thor: Ragnarok, and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit (2019).

Both sides of the AI letterhead

In March 2025, Waititi joined more than 400 filmmakers, actors, and musicians who signed an open letter to the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, opposing OpenAI’s and Google’s bids to have training on copyrighted work blessed as fair use without permission or pay. The signatories — including Ben Stiller and Cate Blanchett — argued AI companies should negotiate for the material they consume.

Three months later, at the June 2025 Cannes Lions festival, Waititi sat down with Ido Cohen of LTX Studio — the AI video platform from Lightricks — for a headline conversation about AI and storytelling. Far from sounding the alarm, he praised the tools’ speed at generating ideas, said he was not scared for his job, and told the audience nobody else should be scared either, so long as the artist stays at the center of the process. The panel also dwelt on the parts of creativity AI cannot shortcut: the discomfort of the blank page, imposter syndrome, and time away from the script.

The two positions are less contradictory than they look: the letter was about who gets paid for training data, the panel about what the tools can do. But few A-list directors have straddled the line so visibly, and Waititi has drawn fire from artists who consider any platform shared with an AI company a betrayal.