Filmmaker Taika Waititi has spent much of his career blending comedy, melancholy, absurdity, and sincerity, from “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” to “Jojo Rabbit” and “Thor: Ragnarok.” But his next film sounds like a genuine pivot. Vanity Fair has unveiled a first look at “Klara And The Sun,” Waititi’s adaptation of 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.
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“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.
Of course, that is exactly why the material is tricky. Ishiguro’s novel is quiet, interior, and strange, a story about an artificial being trying to understand devotion, illness, loneliness, and faith through human behavior. 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.
Waititi is still bringing humor to the film, but he described it as a real tonal departure from his comedic pictures. “This one probably may even be my most dramatic film,” he said.
That shift did not happen automatically. Waititi said he initially tried to bend the material toward his more familiar comic voice before realizing that was the wrong way into Ishiguro’s book.
“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’?”
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, the debut feels like a good bet, given Waititi’s films have premiered there before. In the meantime, check out the first look images below.
