Click here to listen to the interview (11:55)

Taika Waititi returned to his actual hometown, and his actual childhood home, to make BOY. The story, set in 1984, is fictional, but when I talked to him on March 15, 2012, one of the things we talked about was the reality behind the ficition. It's not just the eponymous character's abiding devotion to ice pops, but also his worship of Michael Jackson for reasons that had more to do with just his music, and what it was like growing up the son of a Maori father and Jewish mother in a small town in New Zealand.