NEW YORK - Taika Waititi, an up-and-coming New Zealand filmmaker who is fascinated by outcasts, has made a new movie about geek love. He has likened it to ''a head with no body that is trying to lick something just out of reach,'' which seems an apt metaphor even if you don't entirely know what it means. Geeks unite!

Are we not all outsiders? Isn't life itself a grand quest to lick something just out of reach? During lunch recently in Times Square, Waititi and his longtime girlfriend, Loren Horsley, who plays the central dork of ''Eagle vs Shark,'' discuss their attraction to losers and underdogs.

''Most people in their lives do feel like they are outsiders at some point,'' Waititi says. Horsley says she became so subsumed by the shy and self-conscious role of Lily that she had trouble coming out of character. ''I had kind of a crisis about what confidence was and what truth was,'' she says.

Horsley is an actress whose roles have been mostly in television, and mostly of the ''bubbly, blond, chatty'' variety. Waititi, who is part Maori, is an artist, actor, screenwriter and director. His short film ''Two Cars, One Night,'' about children waiting for their parents outside a bar, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005.

When Waititi was accepted into the Sundance Institute's screenwriters and directors labs for the summer of 2005, the couple decided to revive and refine a lonely, insecure character Horsley had portrayed in a play some years before. In ''Eagle vs Shark,'' Horsley's character is a cashier at a burger joint who wears ill-fitting pants and sneakers as big as boats. She falls in love with a funny-looking clerk from a video game store who makes ugly candles, and she follows him on his quest to exact revenge on a bully who used to beat him up in school.

Unlike in most ugly-duckling films, Lily is never transformed into a swan. Rather, it's the audience that undergoes a transformation, coming to see her not as a pitiable creature but as strangely, quietly centered. We come to respect the geek.

One day when Waititi was at the Sundance lab working on the film, Horsley decided to do one of those weird actor things that you hear about sometimes. She decided to go into a real-life situation in character. She put on her costume and brushed out her blond curls till they resembled, as she puts it, an ''Afghan dog's coat.

'' She affected a slumpy posture and sideways smile and went as Lily to get her eyelashes tinted at a salon in Salt Lake City. ''They were just unbelievably rude, just so rude,'' Horsley says. ''It was absolutely a sense of being invisible.

'' During filming in New Zealand, Waititi says, he rarely saw his girlfriend out of character. ''I never saw Loren for two months, in a way,'' he says. In the place of his strong, confident girlfriend was an awkward creature in an ugly wig, someone he came to regard, with affection, as a ''weird little sister.

'' When shooting ended, the character of Lily even thanked him for giving her the job. Then the character of Lily left to go to wardrobe, to take off her wig for the last time and to be an outcast no more. And he actually missed her.

Return to Top NEW YORK - Taika Waititi, an up-and-coming New Zealand filmmaker who is fascinated by outcasts, has made a new movie about geek love.