Thanks to Waititi’s dogged geniality, the 84 days of principal photography for “Thor: Ragnarok” were, according to basically everyone, pretty fun. He opened the shoot with a ceremony featuring ritual dances and greetings from the local Aboriginal tribe, the Bundjalung people, as well as a Maori celebrant. “A set should be like a family, except that you all actually like each other,” Waititi said. “We just play music all day, we dance, we talk.” At times it seemed Waititi — dancing, blasting disco — was putting on a one-man show with unflagging enthusiasm. Waititi’s favorite gag, according to his star, Chris Hemsworth, was to “forget” his set mike was on and then to perform complaints about his leading actor, midtake, for everyone to hear: “Ah, we should’ve got the other Chris. Chris Pine, Chris Pratt, anything but Hemsworth.” Then there’d be a muffled scrabbling, and Waititi would say, “Oh, crap — sorry, guys, sorry.”

Cornel Ozies, an Australian Aboriginal filmmaker who was one of eight native people Waititi invited to shadow him on the “Ragnarok” shoot, characterizes Waititi’s on-set style as specifically indigenous: “If you talk about his Maori heritage, it’s big families. When you have big families, you’re going to have a lot of clashes,” adding, “you pick up the skill set of being a mediator.” For Waititi, the choice to maintain this disposition, which he calls “Happy Taika,” underlies his entire directorial philosophy. “I’ve been on a lot of film sets,” he said, “and I’ve always promised myself I wouldn’t create a set where people dread coming to work.” He made a face like a kid tasting something sour. “Shooting a movie should be fun! It’s not a real job. It can be hard, but at the end of the day we’re dressing up and playing pretend.”

Waititi found that a production this size lessened the responsibility he had to take on, making the job of a director a simpler one. On his earlier films, Waititi often felt he had to do everything. “When it’s low-budget,” he said, “every job you take is one you don’t have to pay someone else to do.” Here there were hundreds of crew members around, which encouraged Waititi to delegate. On those other films too, he knew that any decision he made about lighting, sets, even performances was “basically baked in forever.” On “Thor,” where digital artists waited to paint over every frame, that pressure was lessened. “In some ways,” Waititi observed, “this makes you feel a little lazier. You’re like” — he waved his hand dismissively — “ ‘Ah, I’m sure it’ll be fine later.’ ”

On a set where every action shot was previsualized and every stunt was choreographed, it wasn’t always easy to direct instinctively, as Waititi was used to doing. “Sometimes,” he acknowledged, “it’s just too late to say, ‘Oh, man, wouldn’t it be cool if like a thousand robots came in and Thor fell off a cliff?’ ” But he still found ways to play. One day, while doing the motion-capture for Korg, Waititi rushed into a battle sequence wielding a big prop hammer, then flipped the hammer around and started pretending to shoot it like a gun. “O.K., CGI,” he declared, “I want you to turn that hammer into a gun hammer.” In the finished movie, that dumb idea is a delightful reality.

Pretending at this scale is a lot easier for an indie director, of course, when he’s working inside a system expressly designed to have megamovie training wheels. Waititi was surrounded, the Marvel executive producer Brad Winderbaum noted, with experienced, talented technicians. Once the shoot was over, he had a year of postproduction to hone the story and several weeks of scheduled reshoots to fix anything that went wrong the first time around. “He’s never going to feel out at sea, wondering how he’s going to achieve this,” Winderbaum said, and then with a shrug offered a fittingly superhuman claim of omnipotence: “We know how to achieve everything.”

If Waititi, with his sense of frenetic rhythm, were to depict the long process of navigating security on Disney’s Hollywood lot and finding him in the “Thor: Ragnarok” postproduction suite, it would all zip past in a four-second montage of opening doors. The broad stone gate on Alameda Avenue, mouse ears embedded at the top of its arch, as the barricade swings into the air. The gentle fwoomp of the entrance to the Frank G. Wells building releasing the building’s air-conditioned atmosphere. A publicist’s waving her key card at the security console at a glass door in Marvel Studios headquarters, surveilled by a life-size Iron Man. The laminated sign Scotch-taped to an otherwise-anonymous wooden door as it opens: CREATURE REPORT.