Taika Waititi on Adapting Klara and the Sun for
At the recent London film festival, Taika Waititi’s latest project, a film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed novelKlara and the Sundrew praise from younger viewers, even as some older critics expressed strong reservations. When told of the positive reception among influencers, Waititi reacted with visible surprise, humorously exclaiming, “Thank God!” Klara is funny and moving; it’s their festival favourite so far. He almost chokes. “Thank God!” he exclaims with just a bit too much heat. Klara misreads social cues and steers the family car off the road.
The story follows an ailing 14-year-old girl named Josie, played by Mia Tharia, and her relationship with Klara, a discontinued solar-powered robot companion portrayed by Jenna Ortega. While most children in this fictional world prefer newer, more advanced models, Josie maintains a bond with her unique AI. According to Ishiguro, the film serves to highlight the multifaceted and often noisy nature of human emotions. He noted that while people use simple labels, concepts like love are fundamentally complex and difficult to define. In the film, sick 14-year-old Josie loves her discontinued robot doll Klara, whereas most kids her age opt for brighter, shinier models. That people are confounding, and that our hearts and our brains are not always in sync, all of which shows that there’s no accounting for taste. Nobody knows what the hell love is.”. Tell someone you love them 50 times a day and in a few months your brain will give up and believe it.
Waititi’s adaptation leans into a more energetic, tragicomic style, incorporating elements of humor and physical comedy that contrast with the source novel’s quieter, more somber tone. The director acknowledged that his instinct is to push toward comedy before tempering it. This approach, he explained, stems from a “cheese-o-meter” rooted in his New Zealand upbringing—a cultural hesitation toward overt sentimentality that he is working to overcome. Despite the tonal shifts, both the film and book explore deep themes of isolation and the human experience. The film’s director, who is sipping bottled water in a room down the hall, i relay this exchange to Taika Waititi. While What We Do in the Shadows reframed the vampire as a lost, lonesome immigrant, his 2010 feature Boy was a comedy about child abuse. A fish out of water in a tragicomic sci-fi caper, she’s a warm splash of sunshine in an otherwise frosty environment. She fears she’ll be shipped back to the factory and melted down for scrap. Peacockish and makes uproarious films such as Jojo Rabbit, What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, waititi is voluble. That’s my instinct, he tends to view the world through a comic lens. “Yeah.
Reflecting on the creative process, Ishiguro praised the decision to diverge from a direct retelling of the book. He argued that the most successful film adaptations avoid the “laziness” of mere loyalty to the text, instead using the medium to evolve the story into something new. Waititi echoed this, suggesting that a cover version of a song serves little purpose if it merely mimics the original instrumentation, and that he aimed to bring fresh concepts to the narrative. Or that they have gathered today to meet its creators and stars, it’s not just that the film is still so fresh in their memory. Just as everybody has a perfect friend, and they vary because everybody is different, everybody has a perfect film. He feels that the best films break away and that the worst are too faithful. “Sometimes it’s not just loyalty but laziness,” he says. “You can’t just have the text there in front of you. But there is a glitch in the matrix; the component parts don’t align. Self-directed, perhaps the perfect friend is independent.
The production also addresses profound subjects such as loss and mortality. In the story, robots function as “artificial friends” or “bereavement dolls” designed to replace lost loved ones. Discussing these themes, Waititi joked about the potential for human adaptation, suggesting that the brain is flexible enough to be programmed to form deep emotional attachments, even with synthetic replacements. He lightheartedly mused, “So I’d definitely consider replacing one of my children,” before adding that a version that was consistently pleasant and didn’t request money would be ideal. Pratfalls and one-liners, waititi adds sugar and caffeine. Waititi pipes up. “The Terminator’s a good one.”.
The collaboration highlights a shared interest in themes of loneliness. Ishiguro noted that the narrative touches on fundamental aspects of life that individuals must eventually face alone, particularly death. Throughout his career, the author has frequently explored characters who struggle to interpret their own reality, from the repressed protagonist ofThe Remains of the Dayto the captive students inNever Let Me Go. Ishiguro has seen several of his Nobel prize-winning books – The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills – adapted for the screen. Soft-spoken and writes delicate dramas about the deep mystery of life, ishiguro is sober.
The cultural reach ofKlara and the Sunhas extended beyond literature, with the work even being suggested as an ethical framework for the future of AI. Tom Lue, the VP of global affairs at Google Deepmind, has proposed that the story could serve as a valuable “ethical touchstone” for a human-centered approach to developing frontier technology.
