When Taika Waititi first read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, after picking it up at an airport, he thought he had a clear vision of how he could easily adapt it into a movie. The premise seems simple enough: In a not-too-distant future, a mother buys a solar-powered robot to be her daughter’s friend. “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 tells Vanity Fair.
With his signature deadpan humor, Waititi is referencing the book’s beautifully meditative quality. Told from the perspective of an android, Ishiguro’s novel explores loneliness, love, humanity, and spirituality—which, as Waititi soon discovered, made the adaptation endeavor much more challenging than expected. In the end, he says, it was one of the hardest things to adapt. “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,” he says.
Waititi and cowriter Dahvi Waller were able to weave together an uplifting, warm story starring Jenna Ortega as Klara, the Artificial Friend who is adopted by a woman (Amy Adams) as a companion for her daughter Josie (Mia Tharia). Klara soon becomes focused on getting the sun to help the struggling family.
When the Columbia Pictures project hits theaters on October 23, audiences will get to see a different side of Waititi as a filmmaker and Ortega as an actor. For Waititi, the film has lots of comedic parts while retaining the pensive beauty of the original text. “This one probably may even be my most dramatic film,” Waititi says. “At first, when I was writing, I was like, ‘Make this a Taika film and full of dumb fucking robot humor.’ 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?’”
