His first short film, Two Cars, One Night , was nominated for an Oscar. His first feature, Eagle vs Shark , was lauded at the Sundance Film Festival and has won a clutch of other awards. But the director Taika Cohen (his first name is pronounced “Tie-ka”) is uncertain he even wants to be a film-maker.

The 31-year-old New Zealander has no shortage of other talents. As a comedian in the Humourbeasts, performing alongside Jermaine Clement, star of Eagle vs Shark , he’s well known “in certain circles”. He’s a painter and illustrator, a photographer and a sometime fashion designer (“I’m really into sewing, there’s something very meditative and hands-on about it”). Perhaps not surprisingly given his striking looks, he has a burgeoning career as an actor.

Cohen (he also known as Taika Waititi, he uses both his parents’ surnames) talks about his movie-making with ambivalence — almost like something that crept up and hi-jacked his life. “I’ve never really had a ‘career’. Now film-making is kind of like my job. It’s bizarre. I’ve only been doing it for four years.”

It was, he says, the Oscar nomination that sealed his fate. “I probably got more encouragement to continue making films than I would have given myself after that. I was keen to move on, but there’s a certain pressure after something like that. You suddenly feel you owe it to somebody to keep making film.” He adds, a little wistfully, “Who knows how long I’ll make films for? I want to keep painting, but I have no time. Film has taken over my entire life. It’s not like the other things I was interested in, which I could do in a couple of weeks or a month.”

But if Cohen bowed to expectations by pursuing film-making as a career, he was never going to make the movie that people expected. Two Cars, One Night is the story of two Maori children waiting, in separate cars, in the car park of the pub where their parents are drinking. It was set in what Cohen describes as “my tribal area, which is where the name Waititi comes from. So I used that surname to get all the favours from my family.” He then made another short about Maori soldiers in Second World War Europe. But Cohen didn’t want his film career to be defined by his ethnicity. He says, “I was scared that I was going to become the ‘go-to’ guy for stories of indigenous people. So I got rid of that, and made something totally different.”

Eagle vs Shark could be called an off-beat romantic comedy, except the romance is crushed whenever it flickers to life. And the term comedy, says Cohen, might lead people to expect that it will be funny all the time, when it’s toe-curlingly awkward as often as comical.

The film brings together a lovelorn nerdette, Lily, with the object of her unrequited crush, Jarrod, a gauche öber-geek from the local electronics store. Lily (Loren Horsley) is so mild-mannered and passive you almost want to slap her, while slapping is too good for Jarrod. But somehow, despite the utter uselessness of the two protagonists, you find yourself caring whether these two crazy kids will make a go of it.

Cohen says that he has always been more interested in outsider characters, but in most films that character is male. “It just struck me that you never see a protagonist who is a misfit like this who is a woman. Giulietta Masina perfected those roles and nobody really did it after then.” The difference is, however, even as the luckless prostitute in Nights of Cabiria , Masina never fell for such a charmless lunk as Jarrod.

“He’s basically all the worst traits of men, turned into one person. He’s deeply flawed. He’s such an abrasive character that it can be hard to connect with him. But I’m far more interested in these characters — they represent us more honestly than someone who’s a nice, well-balanced guy.” The challenge, says Cohen, was always going to be making him sympathetic. Whether he has succeeded is debatable, but while it’s hard to warm to him, Jarrod is undeniably funny.

Cohen’s diverse artistic background and connections mean that he had a wealth of talent to draw upon in his native Wellington. “There’s a really tight-knit creative community; I grew up with all of these people. You can basically access anything you want. All the music was done by my friends; the animation is all done by other friends who own an animation company in Wellington. It was a big community project.”

But while Cohen insists that he intends to stay in New Zealand to make films and has already turned down several American projects, he acknowledges the contribution that attending the prestigious Sundance Lab made to his film-making. The Lab, a script development project allied with the festival, was crucial to finding the tone of the film, Cohen explains. It also helped him to decide which of the two feature film scripts he had ready would be the first to roll.

Eagle vs Shark won out, but for his next project Cohen will return to his roots with a film loosely based on Two Cars, One Night . Even so, Cohen is not keen on making too many plans for the future.

One thing, however, is certain. “I am going to rebel. I’m not going to do film for ever, I’m going to stop one day and then do something completely different.”

Eagle vs Shark is released on August 17

Click here to see the trailer for Eagle vs Shark

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