A wacky space adventure on the Aussie set of Thor: Ragnarok with Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi
ON the Aussie set of Thor: Ragnarok with Chris Hemsworth, you’ll learn it’s not just the Marvel superhero’s hair-do that’s had a makeover.
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It’s a late October afternoon at Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast, and on a green-screen soundstage, director Taika Waititi is shouting instructions to his leading man.
“Cooler. Tougher. More macho. Less s---!” he tells Chris Hemsworth, who is acting out one half of a gladiator battle between Thor and Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok, the Marvel superhero’s first solo outing since 2013.
Having sat out Captain America: Civil War (a slight spoofed in the duo’s “Team Thor” shorts), and with his previous headline movies considered the most ho-hum in the MCU, Ragnarok is a pivotal moment for the God of Thunder.
And the sequence filming today is a pivotal moment in Ragnarok.
After Asgard is attacked by Hela, the Goddess of Death (Cate Blanchett), Thor is marooned on the planet of Sakaar, where a colourful despot known as the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) takes him prisoner, forcing him to fight for his supper.
Thor is suddenly reunited with his old buddy (also MIA since Avengers: Age of Ultron) in an arena, fans baying for their big green hero to pummel the new contender. “We know each other! He’s a friend from work,” Thor exclaims, before being whacked so hard he leaves a Thor-shaped indent in the arena wall.
With Mark Ruffalo having finished his motion-capture sequences some weeks ago and returned to the US, the part of the Hulk on this day is being played by a green fist on the end of a crutch.
On the other end of that crutch, lying beneath the camera and occasionally jabbing the fist at Hemsworth, is Waititi.
It’s a ridiculous sight, which has Hemsworth less battling fists than he is battling to keep a straight face.
“Oh, a lot of the time I don’t,” he admits during a break between bouts. “I mean, just grab a look at those takes and I am smiling through them — I’m trying to use it because I couldn’t hold it back.”
It’s also a perfect hint as to what superhero fans will be in for when Thor: Ragnarok reaches cinemas next month. It’s not just the Asgardian’s hair that’s had a makeover, but his entire outlook.
Because if there’s one thing everyone agreed on going into Ragnarok, it was that something had to change.
The Marvel honchos, who consider each of their movies a genre piece — the heist movie, the espionage film, the techno thriller — file Ragnarok under “wacky space race adventure” or “buddy movie through the cosmos”.
At least that’s how on-ground producer Brad Winderbaum describes it, sitting in a trailer just across the way.
He gives credit for “this whole new avenue” chiefly to Waititi, the filmmaker behind quirky Kiwi gems Boy, What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt For the Wilderpeople.
“The thing Taika brought to the table was a driving energy that is prevalent in the Thor comic books, but that we never have captured on screen before,” says Winderbaum. “If we do our jobs right, this film won’t just fit into the Marvel cinematic canon, which is known for multiple genres and multiple tones all living together, but into the Taika Waititi canon.
“It’s this all-out, balls-to-the-wall, epic space adventure that just grabs you by your collar and yanks you on this journey and doesn’t let go.”
Back in the studio, Hemsworth is too polite to bash his previous headline outings — 2011’s Thor and 2013’s The Dark World. But he will say their more Shakespearean approach had left the character in a “pretty limited” corner.
In his earliest conversations with Waititi, humour loomed as the key to change.
“As soon as we got on the phone, we started talking about things we both disliked about what I’d done before — ‘I get sick of this tone’ or ‘I get sick of this theme’,” Hemsworth recalls. “We were laughing going, ‘Good, well any time we feel it’s heading in that direction, let’s just do the opposite’.”
“I knew that Chris was funny and I don’t think they’ve exploited that enough. Not only in the Thor or Avengers films but in any of the films he’s been in,” says Waititi, who has made himself comfortable on set by bringing in a chaise lounge and biscuit tin — “for elevenses”.
“My approach was destroying, in a way, the characters and how they’d been built previously and rebirthing them more in line with how I feel like a film like this should be made. My idea of what a hero in a movie is comes a more from ’80s stars like Bruce Willis or Indiana Jones, even Kurt Russell in his prime. I wanted Thor to become more like those heroes who were not only great at action but also really funny, lots of jokes.
“I wanted to make Thor the most interesting character in the film. That was my main pitch, really. There’s no point calling the movie Thor if he’s not the coolest thing in it.”
A few soundstages over, production designer Dan Hennah is watching one of his creations, the palace of the Grandmaster, being pulled down.
A veteran of Peter Jackson’s ventures into Middle-earth, Hennah says Ragnarok “is a world away from Hobbiton”.
But it’s not a world unfamiliar to the Kiwi. As a kid, all his pocket money went on comic books, where the psychedelic ’60s drawings of Thor co-creator Jack Kirby loomed large.
“When I was at school, sneaking my Marvel comics in and getting a caning every time I got caught, that was Jack Kirby,” says Hennah.
The late Marvel artist’s influence can be seen all over these sets. The Grandmaster’s palace walls are white today, but in action were lit up like a lava lamp. The Grandmaster’s version of Air Force One — which our heroes will use to escape Sakaar — is decked out in retro orange and white, the shagpile carpet and mirrored ceiling giving it an Austin Powers meets Star Wars vibe.
And Hennah’s favourite set, Sakaar, might be described as the Turkish bazaar of planets.
“It is a planet at the end of the universe,” explains Hennah. “For a couple of thousands of years wormholes have been dropping space debris onto this planet. That’s what all that stuff lying around is. And there’s a group of people called Scrappers who collect space junk and bring it into the city, where it gets bought by the Grandmaster and smelted then repurposed.”
It is through one of these wormholes that Thor is sucked. When the Scrappers collect him, the Grandmaster repurposes him as a gladiator. But not before giving him a good clean up.
How does Thor feel about his blonde locks being lopped off?
“Chris feels pretty happy about it because it’s an hour less I’ve gotta spend in make-up every morning,” Hemsworth laughs. “Thor is in a gladiatorial prison here and this is part of the cleansing process, I guess, so he doesn’t have any choice.
“We have some fun with that in the movie.”
Ragnarok won’t just reshape Thor’s world, but that of his mates: the movie will serve as a bridge into Avengers: Infinity War (due in May).
Winderbaum likens it to the way Captain America: Winter Soldier “teed up” Avengers: Age of Ultron, but isn’t giving too much away.
“What I can say,” Winderbaum grins, “is after this film, things will never be the same; they’ve irreparably changed because of the events of Ragnarok. There’s no going back.”
THOR: RAGNAROK OPENS OCTOBER 26
Originally published as A wacky space adventure on the Aussie set of Thor: Ragnarok with Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi
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