Taika Waititi Admits He Once Stole From 'The Hobbit' Set In 'The Dead Of Night'

“I had never talked to Peter Jackson about this. I don’t know if he knows," the “Thor: Love And Thunder” writer-director revealed.
Taika Waititi
Taika Waititi
Gareth Cattermole via Getty Images

Taika Waititi is coming clean about what he does in the shadows.

The “Thor: Love And Thunder” writer-director revealed on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Wednesday that one his movies borrows quite a bit from fellow New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson’s big-budget film “The Hobbit” — literally.

Waititi explained to Colbert that when he and Jemaine Clement were making their vampire mockumentary film, “What We Do In The Shadows,” in 2014, they did not have a Marvel-size budget.

“We didn’t have much money to do that film, and ‘The Hobbit’ had just wrapped,” Waititi explained. “And, so, our production designer — man, I don’t know if I should tell this. OK, but I will — our production designer, in the dead of night, took his crew to ‘The Hobbit’ studios and stole all of the dismantled, broken-down green screens and took all of the timber, and we built a house.”

So, basically this house you see in this trailer below is “built out of ‘The Hobbit’ green screen,” Waititi said.

“I had never talked to Peter Jackson about this,” Waititi added. “I don’t know if he knows. I like telling it at parties, that story. But I don’t know if he actually knows.”

“What We Do In The Shadows” went on to spur an FX series of the same name, which has been nominated for 10 Emmys.

Here’s just hoping Jackson has a good sense of humor about the whole thing and responds to the news like a true Hobbit.

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