Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, is a thoughtful, quiet meditation on humanity and its relationship to technology. It’s told from the perspective of Klara, an “Artificial Friend” robot for a sick child named Josie. Ishiguro’s previous works, including The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, have been the basis for successful film adaptations in the past, so it wasn’t a surprise when Sony picked up the film rights before the book was even published. Taika Waititi joined the project as director and co-writer in 2023.
From the outside, Waititi seemed like a bit of an odd fit for the material—it’s not especially funny, and certainly not in the off-kilter way that has become Waititi’s signature. In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Waititi says he wasn’t worried about that at first. “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 said.
However, he quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be as easy as he thought. Waititi told VF, “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?'”
As a result, Waititi said, Klara and the Sun might be his most dramatic film yet. Ultimately, that change in tone was freeing. “Sometimes I think you get caught up in, like, ‘Oh, people want the same tone as this other thing from eight years ago,’ and it’s nice to not have to cater to that so much or cater to your own expectations of what you think you want to do,” he said.
Klara and the Sun releases in theaters on October 23, 2026. It stars Jenna Ortega as Klara, Mia Tharia as Josie, and Amy Adams as Josie’s mother, Chrissie.
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