Taika Waititi‘s resume before Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t suggest he would ever be put on the path to helm a multi-million dollar franchise as part of a multi-billion dollar universe in Hollywood. The New Zealand director was famous for his quirky comedies like HBO’s Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. He brought a lot of his signature dry humor to Ragnarok with great acclaim, then a whiplash in reception would seem to happen when the consensus was that he brought too much of it for the follow-up Thor: Love and Thunder.

Entertainment Weekly recently sat down with Waititi for a retrospective of his career and he would reflect on the initial reaction that he was going to ruin the Thor franchise. Waititi remembered, “That really propelled me into the nerdosphere, if you will. I was living a really lovely, peaceful life, and as soon as I did this, well boy, did the nerds come for me. They said, ‘This guy’s gonna ruin this. He’s gonna ruin Thor!’” He, then, took a job at the least well-received entry at the time, Thor: The Dark World, “It’s like, ‘What, you mean again?’ And they were like, ‘He’s gonna ruin this for everyone, Thor’s so cool!’ And I said to them on Twitter — before I left Twitter — I said, ‘You don’t know what you want until I give it to you.’”

While Waititi wouldn’t go into depth about what he thought about Love and Thunder, he did run down a list of the things from that entry that he was fond of, “Look how jacked Chris got. One of my favorite things about this is that I so love Natalie [Portman]. Also, Christian Bale. I mean, it’s Christian Bale. Also, Guns N’ Roses, a lot of the songs. I did meet Axl Rose once, actually. He had a lot of stories to tell, which I will not share.”

Last year, Taika would get candid about his real reasoning for joining the MCU as he hadn’t aspired to become a big Hollywood director, but he needed the money. He explained, “You know what? I had no interest in doing one of those films. It wasn’t on my plan for my career as an auteur. But I was poor and I’d just had a second child, and I thought, ‘You know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children.’” Waititi added, “And Thor, let’s face it — it was probably the least popular franchise. I never read Thor comics as a kid. That was the comic I’d pick up and be like ‘Ugh.’ And then I did some research on it, and I read one Thor comic or 18 pages, or however long they are.” However, he did find it to be a valuable experience, “But I love Marvel, I love working with them. I love Chris [Hemsworth]. We’re in an open relationship and it’s like, if they want to see other people I’m happy for that. I’d still get back into bed with them one day.”

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