Taika Waititi might be recognized as the most prominent and prominent New Zealand filmmaker today, but we must not forget that that honor once belonged to Peter Jackson, the acclaimed director of The Lord of the rings Y The Hobbit trilogies.

In a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote his next MCU blockbuster Thor: love and thunderWaititi admitted his production team stole green screens from Peter Jackson’s set The Hobbit for budgetary reasons. Apparently this happened before he could afford to buy them on his own, so the crew of What we do in the shadows it had to do with what they cut from Warner’s Middle-earth sets.

Colbert asked the director if he consulted his fellow filmmaker before taking on these big projects. Waititi said that she did it with Thor: Ragnarökbut his collaboration with Jackson actually dates back to the time he was working on What we do in the shadowswithout knowing it The Lord of the rings director himself.

“Also, when I did it, when we were doing The shadows. when Jermaine [Clement] and I were shooting that… we didn’t have a lot of money to make that movie. Y The Hobbit I just finished, so our production designer… man, I don’t know if I should say this, but I will. Our production designer, in the dead of night, took his team to The Hobbit studios and stole all the dismantled and broken green screens. And we took all the wood, and we built a house. What we do in the shadows is built of Hobbit green screen.”

Taika says that he never talked to Jackson about this. “I don’t know if he knows,” he joked. “I like to tell it at parties, that story, but I don’t know if he really knows it.”

In a way, you could say they were there and back before Jackson or his team could find out.