Taika Waititi is pivoting from his usual comedic/melancholic/absurdist/sincere works in “What We Do in the Shadows”, “Hunt for the Wilderpeople”, Academy Award winning “Jojo Rabbit” and “Thor: Ragnarok” for Klara and The Sun.
An adaptation of Nobel winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, with Jenna Ortega starring as Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend purchased by a mother, played by Amy Adams, as a companion for her ailing daughter, Josie, played by Mia Tharia.
“I thought that this would be maybe the easiest film I’d ever make, because when I first read the book, I was like, I can make this film. It’s going to be easy—nothing happens,” Waititi told Vanity Fair.
Like Ishiguro’s previous works, Klara and the Sun is a quiet and introspective work about an artificial intelligence powered being comprehend what it means to be human. Waititi and co-writer Dahvi Waller eventually shaped it into a film about Klara’s bond with Josie and her belief that the sun might help heal the family.
“The more you read the book and the more you’re trying to delve into the relationships, the more you unlock, and the more complicated it gets,” Waititi said.
At first, Waititi aimed to inject the script with his usual humour.
“At first, when I was writing, I was like, ‘Make this a Taika film and full of dumb fucking robot humor,’” Waititi said. “And that didn’t really work when I was writing it. It took away from the book, and I’m like, ‘Why am I adapting this really amazing book and then trying to break away from it’?”
Indeed, this might pay off.
The film’s near-future world is not the usual gleaming sci-fi playground. Waititi and his team imagined a colorful, retro-leaning future in which some children are genetically engineered for academic advantage, and the internet has vanished from everyday life. His thinking was bleakly comic: humanity had, in his words, “fucked everything up,” and society had snapped backward rather than forward.
For Waititi, the film eventually came down to a question that feels less theoretical by the day as AI becomes more embedded in everyday life and human relationships. “I like questions like: Is love a program?” Waititi said. “Because if you’ve done enough therapy, they’ll tell you that you can program yourself to believe anything.”
“Klara And The Sun” opens in theaters on October 23. at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
