Taika Waititi drew inspiration from ‘Big Trouble in Little China’ when creating ‘Thor: Ragnarok’.
The 44-year-old filmmaker has credited the 1986 movie – in which Kurt Russell plays a grumpy, reluctant hero – with inspiring him to rework the character of Thor in the 2017 superhero movie, because he wanted to match the same "tone" of having the heroic character "fail a lot".
He explained: "[Thor] just wants to get home. All this stuff is going on, even with Hulk … he’s willing to leave people but also he’s trying to keep everyone together. He’s trying to be charismatic, and he’s trying to be a hero. He fails a lot, and tonally, that’s something from ‘Big Trouble’ that I carried with me into ‘Ragnarok’."
Taika also heaped praise on the 1980 movie ‘Flash Gordon’, and even said he was inspired by Led Zeppelin’s 1970 hit ‘Immigrant Song’, which he believes is "basically about Thor".
Speaking during an appearance on the Russo brothers’ stay-at-home YouTube series ‘Pizza Film School’, he said: "I wanted to capture a road trip of people who had no business hanging out with each other.
"And I put all that to ‘Immigrant Song’. That song is basically about Thor. Just knowing the tone, knowing that it had to be playful and over the top … that this is unapologetically a space opera, and I’m going to pump this with colour and life and energy and humour, and cool music.
"And the way I feel about that film is like if you’d ask a bunch of 10 year olds what they want in that movie; we basically said yes to every idea. On paper, it doesn’t make any sense. But with Thor, I think it makes perfect sense."
The filmmaker is set to return to helm and write the next Thor instalment, ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’, which has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
And Taika recently said he’s been grateful for the setback, as he now has more time to create the perfect script.
He said: "There are a few positive things I can take away. One of them is that a lot of these films, and films in general, are rushed or you don’t have as much time as you’d want to have on the script and things like that.
"We’re still writing ‘Love and Thunder’ and I think it’s good to just keep writing and then you know, we’ll have a really, really good script.
"And with writing, especially, you should use as much of that time as possible to get your story right, because you never really get it later on.
"Film is an industry where you’re always complaining about not having enough time.
"I think, right now, we’ve given ourselves a huge amount of time to work on all sorts of things so we may as well use it."