'Next Goal Wins': Taiki Waititi on sports comedy's central trans role, 'Cool Runnings' influence

Taika Waititi readily admits that Cool Runnings influenced his new underdog sports comedy, Next Goal Wins.

“That was a big touchstone,” the writer-director-actor (Thor: Ragnarok, Jojo Rabbit) tells Yahoo Entertainment in a new interview. “It was Cool Runnings and many other sports films. Miracle is another good one, which I had only discovered [recently]. My whole life I’ve loved films about underdogs. All my films are about underdogs, and people living in the margins. Apart from Thor probably... but no, superheroes are on the margins, too.”

Whereas in the 1993 hit Cool Runnings, the subject was the Jamaican bobsled team’s unlikely quest to crash the 1988 Winter Olympics, the stakes to Next Goal Wins are gloriously lower. Based on the 2014 documentary of the same name, the comedy follows the infamously bad American Samoan football (soccer) team’s pursuit of the 2014 FIFA World Cup — or maybe just scoring a goal. (In the worst thumping in the sport’s history, the team lost 31-0 to Australia in 2001.)

Waititi, who is of New Zealand-Māori descent, says he loved telling a true story, and was especially attracted to the idea of “seeing Pacific Islanders on screen and us being able to tell a really uplifting story where we can also share some of our ways of life.”

At the center of that story is Jaiyah Saelua, a fa’afafine player (or person who identifies as having a third gender or non-binary role in Samoan and American Samoan culture), who became the first transgender person to compete in a World Cup game. The film focuses on the burgeoning familial relationship between Saelua (played by Kaimana) and Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender) — the Dutch-American former player who begrudgingly agrees to coach the seemingly hopeless team.

“I was extremely excited [about Next Goal Wins], but also nervous,” says Saelua, who joined Waititi for our interview. “I understood that the Hollywood audience is going to be a big one, and that made me really nervous. It meant that my story would be amplified, but it also meant that my fa’afafine identity and the story of my team and of the Samoan people is going to be portrayed.”

Waititi says exploring the bond between Saelua and Rogen created the film’s emotional core — and required a bit of creative license. “In the documentary, that’s not part of it,” the filmmaker explains. “It wasn’t a real part of the real story, but for me, just when making this or in adapting anything, I always have to give myself permission to turn it into my own thing, turn it into my own version of event.

“Even with Jojo Rabbit, it’s very, very different from the book. I just added a lot of things to make it my own. And same with this. I felt like the real heartbeat of the film was Jaiyah and Thomas's relationship. There’s a parallel with Thomas’s backstory, and which pays off later. ... But the more that he hangs out with Jaiyah, you can sort see where this father-daughter dynamic starts to come into play. And it’s also, again, showing the aspect of fa’afafine in the film and bringing that to the world was also very important to us.”

Next Goal Wins is now playing.