Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth’s Kids Helped Create ‘Thor’s Monsters
Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi’s latest Thor installment would be nothing without their children, since they had inspired the creative direction in which the monsters look in Love and Thunder.
According to writer/director/Korg, the fourth stand-alone Thor movie not only features cameos by several cast members’ kids, but a “cool and weird” set of shadow monsters inspired by their hand-drawn designs.
“Here’s a fun fact, I haven’t talked about this at all,” Waititi teased. “This is a world exclusive for you, People magazine. The monsters in the film were originally based on drawings that all of our kids did. I was typing the script and my daughter kind of leaned over and she was like, ‘What’s an oil monster?’ That’s like the first thing I could come up with [when] I was writing. I said, ‘I have no idea. I just wrote oil monster, whatever that means.’ And she goes, ‘What do you think that looks like? Do you think it’s spiky?’ And then she draws this like snakey thing.”
Hemsworth added, “And then Taika said to me, ‘Tell your kids to do some drawings,’ and they did some drawings.”
Hemsworth shares daughter India, 10, and twin sons Tristan and Sasha, 8, with his wife, Elsa Pataky. Waititi has daughters Te Kāinga o te Hinekāhu, 10, and Matewa Kiritapu, 6, with ex Chelsea Wistanley.
After their kids drew for Waititi, he then gave the drawings directly to the visual development artists working on the VFX for the film. “They turned them into these fully rendered, wild monsters,” he said. “In some of the kids [drawings], they were super colorful. So we toned those down. But yeah, that’s why the monsters are so weird and look so cool. That’s why the monsters look like they were created by kids.”
Thor: Love and Thunder is out in theaters this Friday, July 8.
'Thor: Love and Thunder’ Red Carpet Gallery
